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1. There is button for viewport texture. When I select a texture that is already assigned as reflectance map, nothing happens in Layout. What can I do in order to see the material in Layout.

2. Will there be a manual for the new plugin?

Thanks.

You need to assign a texture on the "color" attribute of the surface. You don't need to load an image map into it or anything, just press the "T" button and press "use texture" in the resulting dialog. The plug-in will then connect the texture you selected in the "viewport texture" dropdown to the color attribute so it will be visible in the viewport (you will need to press "refresh texture" if you're adding the color texture after you've created the Maxwell shader).

Unfortunately we can't create the color texture automatically because of a limitation in the Lightwave SDK. This is a hack (as you know, procedurals and plug-in materials usually can't be previewed in the viewport) but it's as close as we can get.

I don't have an answer about the manual yet.

Thanks for the quick response. I will try that.

Unfortunately your trick does not work. Everytime I want to select a viewport texture, LightWave crashes. I did it right the way you explained.
I have used a very simple scene, just a flat box with a ball on top.

The second thing I have noticed is that the plugin (the material shader) needs about 20 sec to load. Is that ok?

Thanks in advance.

Which version of LW is that?

The slow loading is probably due to the automatic update check. You can turn it off by using the MaxwellPluginOptions command.

It is version 9.2, the latest one.

The preview hack was originally implemented and tested in Lightwave 8 (where it still works). There have been changes in Lightwave 9 that cause the same code to crash, we'll try to release a fixed version soon.

Thanks for looking into this.