[Tyrone Marshall]

The plugin is released. I will answer questions here related to the new plugin as best I can to help those that want to know more or need some help with this release of the cinemaxwell plugin.

I will also update the bug list section and work on getting some tutorials out. Be patient, this release is big!

You can give a lot of thanks to Next Limit, the development team and testers! Enjoy!

ref: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=20202

Feature highlights!

Multi-material

Default material applied to nonselected polygons, no need for polygon selection tag!
Materials not selected with a material selection tag should get as a default the first maxwell material tag in the order or a specified default material.

Render Selected View, Render Active View
Support of Cinema 4D Noise Procedurals
Cinema 4D Sun System Support
Maxwell Render Object
Greatly expanded tags!
Instancing support
MXM material preview in side Cinema4d!
More and more!

Click to download the Cinemaxwell plug-in manual ---> GET IT NOW!

Here are some test!




Results:

In a test of one object with 20 polygons with four polygons per basic maxwell material tags the result was a positive confirmation. Four polygons were devoted to each basic material tag with varying distinguished qualities consisting of custom, diffuse, metal, dielectric and plastic maxwell materials.





10 tests performed to test object manger control of Maxwell Render plug in for Cinema 4D Release 10.



Skymap tag support for HDR (Includes HDR and MXI image compatibility) image rendering!

[Tyrone Marshall]

The skinny of full details:

ref: http://www.maxwellrender.com./

Check the news section and the cinema 4D section for original print!


Big thanks to Next Limit, Development Team and Testers!!!!

# There are five commands under Plugins-> Maxwell:

* - Render Active View
* - Render the view selected as Render View
* - Save MXS
* - Add Render Settings object

You can put these commands wherever you want in your customized layout.


> RENDER SETTINGS OBJECT

# There is a new object designed to hold the scene render settings permanently
# When first created, it copies its default settings from the Maxwell Render options dialog
# There can be more than one render settings object, but only the first one in the
hierarchy that has its deformation/generator tick set to "active" will be used


> ASSIGNING MATERIALS


If there is only one material assigned to an object, whether it is a MaxwellClassic tag or a MXM tag with a Cinema4D material tag, there is no need to assign the C4D texture tag to the Texture Tag slot of the Maxwell tag. It is assumed automatically that the texture tag belongs to the Maxwell tag.

The order in which tags appear in the tag list is important. If there are two global materials applied to an object, the second material is discarded (as opposed to Cinema4D, which discards the first).

If an object has only a global material, an object hanging from it will inherit that material. If there is also a partial material, it won't be passed to the child.


> MULTIPLE TAGS OF THE SAME TYPE

# Multiple Maxwell material tags of the same type can be added to a single object, so you can have several partial materials of the same type.


> NATIVE CINEMA4d MATERIALS


CineMaxwell now supports, up to a certain basic level, native Cinema4D Materials.

The channels supported are:
# Color Channel: mapped to Reflectance 0º. Uses textures and/or simple colors.
# Luminance Channel: maps into an emitter. Uses only simple colors. The intensity is controlled with the Brightness slider from 0 to 10000 lux.If you want to get mxi textures to drive an emitter, use a Maxwell emitter tag instead with a mxi texture.
# Diffusion channel: maps to Roughness in Maxwell. Uses textures and real values (from the Brightness slider).
# Transparency channel: maps to transmittance color of the bsdf. Uses textures and simple colors. The Refraction parameter maps to Nd. Abbe is set to 160. If no diffusion channel is used with this channel, Roughness is set to 0.
# Bump channel: maps to bump. Uses textures scaled with Strength value.
# Alpha channel: used to drive the weightmap of the Basic material layer. Uses only textures.


> SUPPORT OF PROCEDURAL TEXTURES OF CINEMA4D

When using native C4D materials, there is a basic support of procedural textures which can be mixed with the channel's color. This mix is saved to a file as a bitmap and applied like a normal texture to the resulting Maxwell material in the desired channel. This works for MaxwellClassic tags and when using native Cinema4D materials alone. The resulting bitmaps have a customizable size, which can be found in the Engine tab of the Cinemaxwell dialog. Some procedurals "behave" better than others, that is, the saved texture looks more like what is shown in
the Cinema4D viewport than to what would be shown in a Cinema4D render. Obviously, the sampling size also has its effect on the quality of the result. Beware of umlauts, accents, carets and other strange characters in object names, they don't translate into good texture names and can cause procedural textures not to work (because they are not saved).


> MXM PREVIEW

There is a preview of mxm materials in the attributes manager of mxm tags. If the mxm material file has a preview bitmap embedded, it will be shown in the A.M. of the mxm tag.


> MAXWELL SKYMAP TAG


This tag only controls the intensity of the sky environment map, which must be an mxi file. This mxi texture file is assigned to a Cinema4D material tag which is applied to the Sky object and linked to the Skymap tag in its Texture Tag field. The mapping of channels of this tag to Maxwell is as follows:
# Color channel: background
# Luminance channel: illumination
# Transparency channel: refraction
# Reflection channel: reflection

There can be up to four Skymap tags, each with a texture in a different channel, so each has different intensity.

[sunmade]

thanls for the effort!!
Great resource.

[zoetropeuk]

The plug-in is definitely a BIG improvement, well done. When will get animation capabilities though

One question I have though is use of the Skymap tag. I'm not sure I understand when you say the that the HDRs have to been an MXI. I've tried it with my standard HDRs and it seems to work fine with the HDR applied to the various chanels in the C4D material.

Matt

[Tyrone Marshall]

The plug-in is definitely a BIG improvement, well done. When will get animation capabilities though

One question I have though is use of the Skymap tag. I'm not sure I understand when you say the that the HDRs have to been an MXI. I've tried it with my standard HDRs and it seems to work fine with the HDR applied to the various chanels in the C4D material.

Matt

Thanks Matt,

I mentioned that as the proper method, but direct HDRI files are possible.

[yves]

*very* positive improvement!
thanks alot for the effort.

greets
yves

[dyarza]

Thanks Tyrone,

The new plugin is a big improvement, I can use M~R now!!

[Tyrone Marshall]

*very* positive improvement!
thanks alot for the effort.

greets
yves

You can thank very heavily to the plugin development team!

[Eric Lagman]

Tyrone,

Can you explain how previewing textures in the viewport works compared to the old plugin when using maxwell classic or custom mxm tags. It seems like I still have to put my texture on a c4d material, and put it on my object along with the maxwell tag to see how the texture is mapped in the viewport. I hope I am going something wrong otherwise I will still have to double tag everything to adjust textures. I realize I can do this with just a cinema material, but that only gives me a one layer bdsf right. I am just trying to make sure I am not screwing up here. How do you go about using custom mxm and MW classic tags when using multilayer materials that require textures?

[Rochr]

Haven´t downloaded the plug yet but if these things work on 8.5, there has definitely been some improvements, especially in support for C4D materials. Never thought i´ld say this...

Although i´m curious if NL have done something about memory and image resolution issues? Have anyone here actually rendered out a proper scene(not simply a sphere or a few primitives) in resolutions 5000x4000 or above, or is it still impossible without a Blue Gene?

And what exactly is the difference between "Render Selected View" and "Render Active View"? Can you render out a selected camera view?

Btw, i assume we have to re-tag all the 1.1 scenes with new tags?

[Tyrone Marshall]

Haven´t downloaded the plug yet but if these things work on 8.5, there has definitely been some improvements, especially in support for C4D materials. Never thought i´ld say this...

Although i´m curious if NL have done something about memory and image resolution issues? Have anyone here actually rendered out a proper scene(not simply a sphere or a few primitives) in resolutions 5000x4000 or above, or is it still impossible without a Blue Gene?

And what exactly is the difference between "Render Selected View" and "Render Active View"? Can you render out a selected camera view?

Btw, i assume we have to re-tag all the 1.1 scenes with new tags?

I have render out print resolution images from maxwell render without problem.

The Render SV and Render AV are two new features that should make you jump and down as this was one of the things you were wishing for.

Render SV- renders the selected viewport that you have selected in Cinema 4D. You can basically choose any camera view that you want and then set it as the render view from cinema 4d and this will always render regardless of which viewport you have active.

Render AV - renders whatever viewport you have active within Cinema 4D - you know the one with the highlight border around the viewport.

[lllab]

thanks Tyron for your help here too from me!
cheers
stefan

[Dexel]

Yes. Big thanks to development team, and to you, Tyrone.

Render AV would be cool indeed. Shall this apply to ortho views too?
(It does not here.. top / front / side viewports render as tele lens portion of the latest perspective view)
No it cannot I suppose. Not physically correct, is it?

S

[Rochr]

Render SV[/b]- renders the selected viewport that you have selected in Cinema 4D. You can basically choose any camera view that you want and then set it as the render view from cinema 4d and this will always render regardless of which viewport you have active.

Render AV - renders whatever viewport you have active within Cinema 4D - you know the one with the highlight border around the viewport.

I´m sorry Tyrone, but this wasn´t my wish. I wanted the camera selection in the Maxwell tab back.
I kinda hoped this one here wouldn´t be the case you´ve just described. It´s almost as bad as what we´ve had before.

Granted, you can easily set up multiple cameras, but when working with delicate modeling in large and/or crowded environments and you need the 4-pan view, the only way to keep working in an efficient way is to use the old selected view for the camera and use the same view to switch between cameras.
Since Cinema is resetting the views when you jump between a camera and, for example, top view, it´s the only workable solution.


Unfortunatly i can´t try the new plug for some time, but i´ll give it a shot as soon as i can. If the rest works as promised i can live without the camera issue. It´s not that big of a problem.

Btw, how large were your renders? The absolute maximum i´ve been able to render out here have barely been sufficient for an decent A3 print.

[Eric Lagman]

My question got skipped When using custom mxm we still have to double tag with custom mxm and cinema material with the texture on it also then drag that to the texture path in the custom mxm right? Im not trying to complain just to know if I am missing something here? It seems only one layer maxwell materials will work with just tagging an object once.