[pschuyler]

Greetings,

I don't post frequently on this forum. I was happy when I heard about Maxwell 1.6 and all the updated plugins. I figured it was finally time to sit down and really make something of Maxwell. Unfortunately when I render a simple model linked from Revit via the standard Revit>3dsMAX workflow, Maxwell delivers wild unpredictable geometry errors that the Mental Ray renderer does not. Here is a description of my process and setup. I would be happy to post images, but uh...I can't (does anyone know any free sites I can link to for that?).

-Revit 2008
-3dsMax 2008
-Files exported from Revit via DWG v2007 (ACIS), then linked into 3dsMAX via the File Link Manager. For those who do not know...this is the default recommended Autodesk workflow for rendering all Revit models.

1. Without any materials applied and a basic daylight system rendering with Mental Ray & Final Gather I get a decent result. It looks fine, basic material assignments are intact and geometry is correct, it just needs improved materials and lighting.

2. If I take the same exact file and switch to the Maxwell renderer (V1.6 with the latest 3dsMAX plugin), Maxwell cannot recognize the materials and delivers lots and lots of error messages (-- Unknown property: "classID" in undefined). I then get a rendering that has lots of serious geometry problems and there are no materials visible, just the mesh colors themselves. So I figure it must be a matter of applying 100% Maxwell materials. As a side note that needs to be fixed for us architects. It would be great to add Maxwell materials when I get the time, but an automatic conversion of materials is essential or Maxwell is useless as a renderer (because it requires manually reassigning all architectural materials--way too time consuming).

3. If I then select all objects and apply a single simple opaque Maxwell material (from the Wizard) I get another horrific result, with the same massive geometry errors (although nice lighting and fidelity;-)).

Next Limit needs to spend some real time on beta-testing the workflow of Revit users. This is the very first model I've tried on the latest and greatest versions of everything, using all the default methods, nothing unusual. I think Next limit will discover that a giant percentage of architectural models in the future will originate from Revit, and obviously something basic here just isn't working.

I've had Maxwell for well over a year now and I guess we are just not there yet for Revit users to deliver basic renderings.

-Paul Schuyler

[Bogdan Coroi]

Hi.

Translating Architectural materials to Maxwell materials is on the todo list for quite some time now, but there were always more important stuff to take care of. Right now, object's wireframe color is used as a base material if the exporter can't translate the material.
The geometry errors might be valid errors from Maxwell point of view, since it can render only triangles and we all know that Autocad/Revit based objects may contain other primitives than triangles coupled with insane modifiers after importing to 3dsmax. Mental Ray can handle them because mental ray was integrated in 3dsmax by Autodesk, so it's an in house implementation. :)

However, we'll try to make a smooth Revit transition for the next update if possible and I would be more than happy if you could share a production scene or a simplified one which contains a lot of geometry errors/warnings. Of course everything will be confidential. bogdan.coroi@gmail.com

Related to posting images, www.imageshack.us can help.

Thank you.

[pschuyler]

Bogdan,

Hey thanks for the fast reply. I have uploaded an image that shows the artifacts, and its here: http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/7561 ... ellpj8.jpg

In fairness to Next Limit, I know that Autodesk makes it very hard for 3rd party software to sych up with their products, especially when we are talking about the Revit>3dsMAX route. They've obviously designed their products for the purpose of market leveraging, so us architects have little other choice than to buy 3dsMAX if we want nice renderings. Fact is, if there were another alternative from Revit (exporting out) to just about anything else...I would switch in a heartbeat. 3dsMAX is overkill for 90% of all architects to say the least.

Also I don't know if there is any possibility of a direct Revit>Maxwell connection, but I suspect that Autodesk is making that as difficult as possible too. Nevertheless its a bit ridiculous that things still don't work in a simple way, I've owned Maxwell for over a year and have yet to deliver a rendering from any of the 1.x releases.

Paul Schuyler

[pschuyler]

Bogdan,

As you mentioned via email, the key to correcting the geometry problems was to deselect the "Use Instancing" checkbox in the Max plugin.

Here is the same file again, with the instancing turned off:
http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/1156 ... ll2qq6.jpg

Thanks!

Paul Schuyler

[Bogdan Coroi]

Ok, glad it worked. Now for a detailed description of my e-mail: :)

Mental Ray automatically detects that it can't translate some instanced geometry due to some impossible modifiers and renders the instanced objects as normal geometry. You can check this out by exporting the scene from Mental Ray and look at the objects in the file.
Since we haven't found the trick Mental Ray does to know when it can't render the instanced geometry, we made a global check named "Use instancing" to be used in such cases.

Since instancing was introduced with Maxwell 1.6, this instancing issue is only related to Maxwell 1.6.

[Search72]

As a side note that needs to be fixed for us architects. It would be great to add Maxwell materials when I get the time, but an automatic conversion of materials is essential or Maxwell is useless as a renderer (because it requires manually reassigning all architectural materials--way too time consuming).

I don't either post frequently on this forum, but I use Maxwell with Revit 2008 frequently. I have the same pain with material conversion. Though I'm quite fast converting materials manually, I have to spend 1-3 hours / model just reassigning all the materials. So please, please add support for architectural materials. The only reason I go through this reassigning drill every time is the awesome result Maxwell produces - that's rewarding!

[wagurto]

Disabeling instance means that we are not going to be able to export intances geometry of trees for example? Fixing the revit/dwg/3dmax situacion mean that revit user wont be able to use the instancing feature then? I am correct?
thanks

[Bogdan Coroi]

Depends on the modifiers applied by 3dsmax when translates the geometry. In some cases you will be able to use it and in some you won't.