[polynurb]

we are just doing a sun animation in 3dmax here, and we have some odd problem with controlling the maxwell sun via the daylight system.

basically when the sun is visible in the render (the disc) on some frames it won't move, staying in the same spot .
then it moves on again eventually jumping one frame further than it should.. so it looks like two systems are not in sync frame by frame.

has anybody seen this before?

[raduc]

has anybody seen this before?

Yes, it's a known limitation in the engine, we are working on it, but we don't know when it'll be ready

[polynurb]

thanks for the info. if i get you right that means it has nothing to do with the max-plugin?

the odd thing is,it looks like we see an error in the max daylight system itself.
as if the float values from the track editor do not get translated properly to solar time.

one frame in the animation timeline does not always equal to the same amount of seconds!

we then tried to "hack" the daylight system in manual mode, keying the sun manually, and first tests show it moves smoother..

is it even possible?

[Mihnea Balta]

The time of day is expressed in seconds inside the engine, and that doesn't provide enough precision when you're close to sunrise or sunset. The sun will be in one place for 24 frames (or whatever your FPS is), then jump visibly to another place and stay there for the next 24 frames.

Animating the direction manually is a different matter. In that case, the plug-in computes the sun direction at each frame based on the animation curve you've set up, and Maxwell uses the value as provided, without any limitation in sampling resolution.

A workaround would be if we computed the sun direction inside the plug-in based on the time of day animation and pass that to Maxwell instead of the actual time of day, but we'd have to do that in every plug-in and override the code that's supposed to do the same thing in the engine. A better fix will be to make the engine accept milliseconds instead of seconds as its time of day input. This is what is planned, but we don't have an ETA yet.