[dariolanza]

New thread for commenting all about the new interactive feature in Maxwell 2.5: Maxwell Fire.

[m-Que]

Allow me to hijack this thread straight away:
-how do you activate 'Isolate selection' in Fire? Every time I click on it, the preview window goes black or I only see the sky. No objects visible.

[Mihai]

Something must have broken between the testing versions and the release, it worked ok before. What you can do is simply click any of the gizmo handles of the selected object(s) and the Fire view will update to show only your current selection. It seems an easy issue to fix though, hopefully a patch soon after this release.

[m-Que]

Thanks Mihai!
This way it's working just fine, but I've noticed something else - the rest of the objects is being displayed as black while in 'isolate selection' - is this meant to be that way?

[sandykoufax]

I've tried interior test with 3dsmax plugin

Left image is maxwell render rendered one, right one is activeshade rendered one.

why two images are so different with the same camera setting ?

--------------------------------------------------

I think I found the reason.

Maxwell Fire Activeshade render doesn't recognize of gamma setting of 3dsMax.
Here is my setting.

If I uncheck the gamma, the result is similar.

Is this a bug?

[Chris Krüger]

I remember a different render engine had the same problem with the activeshade framebuffer in max. Perhaps this problem is related to max and not Maxwell?

Chris.

[Mihai]

Thanks Mihai!
This way it's working just fine, but I've noticed something else - the rest of the objects is being displayed as black while in 'isolate selection' - is this meant to be that way?

The unselected objects don't display for me as it should. What OS are you on, do you have a material applied to all the objects?

[m-Que]

The unselected objects don't display for me as it should. What OS are you on, do you have a material applied to all the objects?

I'm on Win7 x64. Looks like applying materials doesn't effect it.
It looks like actually not the object itself, but what's UNDER the object:
1. All objects visible:


2. Plane ONLY visible:

[dariolanza]

Hello m-Que,

If you are asking why those black areas appear below the objects, I can confirm that this is the correct result.

Although you can indicate to those cubes not to be visible in the render, the contact areas where the cubes touch the ground can not receive any light (neither from the sun or from the sky). So in that areas, the ground is not lit, so it appears this way.

Otherwise, if it would look different, then it would indicate that those contact areas were receiving light, which would be incorrect.

Let me know if this answers your question.

Greetings

[tom]

Yes. And this is the difference between hiding and isolating.

[alexxx_95]

Little question, how to change the resolution to the interactive render image, to save the image in the resolution we want?

alex

[Mihnea Balta]

Maxwell Fire Activeshade render doesn't recognize of gamma setting of 3dsMax.

Actually, 3dsMax ActiveShade doesn't recognize the gamma from 3dsMax; all that gamma stuff happens without involving the plug-in, so it's outside of our control.

The only thing we could do is apply inverse gamma before writing the bitmap in the AS window, so that when Max applies the gamma itself, we end up with the original image (assuming we can read those values from Max, which may not be possible). However, this seems a bit unnecessary. Why are you using the Max gamma settings with Maxwell? They are misleading, since Maxwell does its own gamma calculations based on the settings found in the global render options panel. Also, that window allows you to set the input gamma for textures, but those settings are not passed to Maxwell, so it's not ok to rely on them.

[m-Que]

Yes, that actually makes sense. I did the last test with the rings, so it looked like the whole objects where black.
Thanks for your help, guys!

So, those objects will not be displayed, but will still cast shadows, right?

[m-Que]

Just another little question: are caustics supported?

[tom]

So, those objects will not be displayed, but will still cast shadows, right?

Not only cast shadows but contribute fully to GI.

Just another little question: are caustics supported?

Yes. Although, slower in some scenarios.