[iandavis]

I just had the joy of uninstalling V1. I can't believe this was released as a final product. When you use it in Lightwave it does nothing but crash. I also kept losing the maxwell textures whenever I saved any LW objects.. I thought perhaps I could use studio... so I launced studio.. but from LW studio launches with invisible buttons.

So launching studio directly restores the missing buttons, but the textures still fail. I dragged new textures to my geometry, but it replaced ALL the textures, and I was unable to select the geometry to add new textures. I would need to go back to lightwave, break my model apart and reimport it into lightwave.

I'm sorry, but for 2 years of waiting... I believe this is the most unfinished poorly designed product I have EVER used.

I'll be using the beta until LW9 comes out, then most likely abandon maxwell altogether. IMO it's really crap.

Ian.

[Voidmonster]

I'm just not having those problems. It works fine for me.

I had the invisible buttons happen once in Studio, but it hasn't done it since. But really, I hardly ever use Studio because the LW plugin works perfectly for me.

[iandavis]

your lucky, but frankly I just don't have the time to mess with software this buggy. It worked fine until it didn't... and it happens enough to make it unreliable for professional use. I have used the beta literally for years... THAT is a decent product. V1 is bloatware. Sorry, but all anyone ever asked for was a stable and simple plugin. Next Limit sold me a license with the promise of a lightwave plugin! and they have not delivered. It's a very clunky piece of software now. I'm not at all impressed. It really angers me that now I have to purchase Fprime to get what I was promised 2 years ago.

[markps]

I'll keep saying this... the plugin never worked with Lightwave. Lightwave uses n-point polygons and M~R plugin has always been broken supporting only triangles... WHO MODELS IN TRIANGLES? I guess nobody...

[adl]

Hi all,
as you can see to this thread

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=15428

I have the same problems with lw plug-in.
I think that in the past months we are worked often with simple scenes to test MR (small objects and not a lot of textures). Now that we are testing MT with big project the plug-in don't works good...

ADL
www.imagonet.it

[Peter_K]

Well I also found the lightwave plug-in not to work satisfying at all. I keep getting all kind of errors.. Yesterday I got a window saying "material not found" when I exported my scene, and it just didn't want to go away. I re-tried the scene with another material, but the same problem, so I never succeded in exporting it. I cant get the "no physical sky" to work either. It always is enabled, when I try to render something.. I also have trouble with loading .lwo files into studio. Two days ago, I tried to load in sever objects, but after the second object was loaded into studio, it kept replacing that object as soon as I tried to load another object into the scene..

Well, there is too many things going on and I don't have time/energy to sit and write bug reports right now since Im busy with other stuff, but I hope someone else have time. Im mostly frustrated with the network render stuff at the moment anyway, and I won´t touch maxwell again until it gets some attention...

/Regards Peter K

[iandavis]

markps,

sorry, I assumed most everyone recognized that I've been on this forum since it's creation back around may 2005. the triangle thing isn't something new to me. But you know... I had been in the habit of using subD in LW since lightwave triangulates and maxwell beta works perfectly with this. I never considered that perhaps studio would NOT work with LW subd geometry.

Last night I had about 20 different problems cumulating in the textures vanishing... never to return... but I wonder if it's a subd issue.

thanks for stating the obvious. Sometimes it helps.

anyone else have experience with this?

[mtripoli]

I use LW as well... I was upset as well about the plugin status. As you say, the icons are not in Studio if launched within LW. YOu have to save the MXS file and open that in Studio.

Victor answered one of my posts that in the material settings in LW that you could "right click" in the preview window and get the emitter setting. Damned if I can find it or get it to work.

I also have problems in Studio itself. "Drag and drop" of materials onto an object doesn't work... the only way I can do it is to drag the new material from the pane on the right to the object. I haven't even tried an object with multiple surfaces...

I don't get how to control emitters AT ALL from with LW or Studio. Others seem to be cranking things out, and I can't get a simple scene to work.

I'm willing to keep working with this, but it is getting more and more frustrating...

[iandavis]

I'm not one to give up generally. It's just that this has been going on for soooooo long. This morning after I read Markps comment (thanks btw) I decided to reinstall V1 and try the model triangulated by modeler BEFORE bringing it into layout.. so a SubD-free scene. didn't help. Looks like THAT isn't the problem.

however it seems the problem is something more odd. It seems maxwell doesn't like to render if the textures are stored on a mapped drive. once I created a directory on the local drive.. moved the models and MXMs there reapplied... now it's working.

so WARNING... do not with LW try to use a network drive.

EDIT: It's official. As soon as I moved the HDRs to my local drive.. they started working too. anyone else having issues with using mapped network drives?

sigh.

[silba]

I just had the joy of uninstalling V1. I can't believe this was released as a final product. When you use it in Lightwave it does nothing but crash. I also kept losing the maxwell textures whenever I saved any LW objects.. I thought perhaps I could use studio... so I launced studio.. but from LW studio launches with invisible buttons.

So launching studio directly restores the missing buttons, but the textures still fail. I dragged new textures to my geometry, but it replaced ALL the textures, and I was unable to select the geometry to add new textures. I would need to go back to lightwave, break my model apart and reimport it into lightwave.

I'm sorry, but for 2 years of waiting... I believe this is the most unfinished poorly designed product I have EVER used.

I'll be using the beta until LW9 comes out, then most likely abandon maxwell altogether. IMO it's really crap.

Ian.

I am not having any problems with textures in LW, well apart from the roundabout methods needed to get them on to surfaces. In MS if you drag and drop textures it will replace all the surfaces on the object, it is better to right click on the surface in the meterials list window and "select triangles associated with this meterial", this will select the surface only and then you can drag and drop the texture. Now if we were able to use the "apply meterial" at the individual surface level it would make surfacing much more easier.

[iandavis]

Ok, I finally got a render working. I still have numerous problems with textures and such... but I had very similar problems with both the alpha and the beta. The RCs were pretty much unusable. So by comparison, this product IS more refined and more powerful.

I do still believe there are a lot of clumsy issues and bugs to work out. I'm hoping that within the next few months a lot of these quirky and extremely annoying issues will be addressed. I'd REALLY like to use this thing to render.

so, for anyone struggling... one thing I have learned the hard way.. keep all of your textures local. The models (in LW) seem ok on a remote drive. Also, it appears subD objects are ok too. The remote volume thing needs to be fixed. A lot of people use servers and to need to move hundreds of MB of textures around every time is a real pain in the butt

thanks for everyone's help.

[Mihai]

It would be a lot easier and more efficient when reporting bugs to be as precise as possible, make a short, exact step by step description of what you're doing so that others can repeat the process. If possible, upload the scene.

Otherwise we get a mix of user error, current limitations, and finally the real bugs.

[victor]

Definitively the best way to improve anything is an exact description of a bug or workflow problem. The best improvements come from very specific petitions or description of problems.

Long texts full of "it doesn't work at all", "this is crap", "my god it's full of bugs..." etc. without valuable information will not produce a developer reaction usually or will be very slow. Developers will see other people using the plugin, so they will keep waiting useful info.

Developers need to reproduce a bug and fix it. Workflow or design problems can be more difficult, but can be also detailed technically.

This is essential.

[iandavis]

Victor and Mihai,

of course you are right. Now that I've calmed down a bit and have some success getting renders out of the LW v1 plugin I will be outlining in detail exactly what failed for me and how. Suggestions in this thread helped me get the image 'out the door'. Once I've completed the job I'm working on now I'll post a bunch of info containing specifics.

for now, some quick things:

- In the material editor, it would be nice if it didn't forget your preview settings for each new material. I have to keep changing the quality and the method of generating a preview. Also, the location of my personal stash of MXM files shows up in the browser, but the program supplied ones dont. If I navigate to find them... it forgets mine and I have to navigate back. I would be nice if it kept track of a longer history so I didn't have to navigate constantly back and forth OR store my own MXM textures in the program folder.

- I have been unable to get a render if any textures including HDRs are located on a windows mapped drive.

- Studio consitantly launches without it's main buttons if I launch it from Lightwave.

More later.

thanks Victor for the bug request.

[juan]

- In the material editor, it would be nice if it didn't forget your preview settings for each new material. I have to keep changing the quality and the method of generating a preview.

You can set the preview options inside Studio preferences, this options are persistent and will work also working with the standalone editor.

- I have been unable to get a render if any textures including HDRs are located on a windows mapped drive.

which is the error you get? is the mxs invalid, or even it is not generated? We would need more info to know if there is a bug.

- Studio consitantly launches without it's main buttons if I launch it from Lightwave.

It was a hard bug related to the way windows apps launch external process, fortunately it is already fixed, you will see it working in the next add-on.

Thank you very much for your reports.

Juan