[mki]

I made in Maxwell Studio a scene with lights and matertials. It was a lot of work to setup this scene and texture all objects. The rendering was fine, but now I need to make from this scene an animation. Maxwell Studio doesn't offer animation functions, so I have to go back to 3D Studio Max. But in 3DS I lose all the made work in Maxwell Studio. My idea is to export only the camera-sequence from 3DS and merge it with the final scene from Maxwell Studio. But i don't want to make this manually 1500 times to get an animation sequence with 25 frames for only one minute. I think for such a workflow its better to use the scripting functionalities or has anyone a good idea how to make a animtion from a finished maxwell studio scene?

Where can I find a usefull documentation for scripting in maxwell? Or has somebody allready done such a script?

[raduc]

You can add an MXS reference from your max scene that points to the mxs file you modified.
This way you can make the camera animation in max and keep the modifications you made from studio.

[mki]

Thank you. Materials are fine in 3DS. But...

I misunderstood the meaning of "Create a Maxwell Referenced MXS" beceause I want to import a MXS as a reference and not to create another MXS. But there are some further problems. First the referenced MXS doesn't import the environmental options. And in 3DS I don't get the physical sky with sun work togethher with an image based environment. I set the same options in 3DS as in Maxwell Studio but the rendering result is not the same. In 3DS I don't get shadows from sun.

The next problem is, that I will use more computers over the network to render the animation. When I export the MXS-sequence and start rendering one of these MXS-files, I got the error that there are no light sources in the scene (emitters, sky, IBL). The render will be black. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

[Mihai]

I misunderstood the meaning of "Create a Maxwell Referenced MXS" beceause I want to import a MXS as a reference and not to create another MXS. But there are some further problems.

So did you figure out how to import an MXS Reference file, because you are discussin the further problems below? The logic is:

- Import a complete MXS scene into 3ds as an MXS Reference file.
- do your camera animation in 3ds
- export a series of MXS of each frame of your animation, and these MXS files will be very light, because effectively they only contain a camera. The full MXS file of your scene will instead be referenced in each of these frames of your animation.

First the referenced MXS doesn't import the environmental options.

It's not supposed to, and this would make a lot of angry users if each MXS ref file you imported, override the current settings in 3ds.

And in 3DS I don't get the physical sky with sun work togethher with an image based environment.

This is not possible in Studio either, ie, have shadows from the sun, while also using IBL, unless you set one of the IBL channels to use the Physical sky instead of the IBL map, and you can do this in 3ds as well in the render options of Maxwell.

When I export the MXS-sequence and start rendering one of these MXS-files, I got the error that there are no light sources in the scene (emitters, sky, IBL).

It seems you haven't really activated the IBL or Sky options from the Maxwell render options in 3ds.

[mki]

The usability, the user experice and the documentation are realy bad. The docu is not helpful. I lost so many time to figure out the mystery how Maxwell, 3DS and network rendering work together, beceause there is no docu. But I still can't get it running properly. Now I always get the error message: "Warning: Invalid path extension (in method setPath)".

Help?!?

[Mihai]

The networking docs are here:
http://support.nextlimit.com/display/mx ... +Rendering

There really isn't a different setup for network rendering for each of the 14 plugins we have. The procedure for setting up a network render is the same, so please read those pages and then come back and say which parts still remain a mystery.

Where are you getting that error message? It seems something more related to using the Max plugin itself and not network rendering. Please post that question in the 3dsMax forum in that case.

Why do you say there is no documentation? It's all there at the link I posted above. Any questions you have, ask away, but it seems these are the first questions you are asking.

To understand better how MXS referenced files work:
http://support.nextlimit.com/display/mx ... +MXS+files

You also have a search function in the docs.