[hankusp]

Hi
I have big problems with bad quality texture preview in scene viewport. It makes work really difficult with Maxwell in C4d. I do mostly archiviz, so I use many real scale materials. I do not use Maxwell real scale materials, cause it is not working properly in C4D. I use cubic mapping of typical sizes like 200x200x200cm or 500x500x500cm. The problems appears if I use tiling in Maxwell Materials. Look at the example below. There is a comparision of Maxwell materials and standard Cinama materials in scene viewport. It is a huge difference! I use maximum 2048x2048 option for texture preview for Maxwell materials.
Could somebody help me with that issue? It makes work with mapping difficult. Also the colour of texture is not correct.




By the way I use also Rhino with Maxwell ,where the viewport preview is great.

[JDHill]

Can you send me the files you're working with, because I'm not seeing the texture color difference here.

Regarding texture preview size, I can add higher resolutions, but it won't make things work the same as Cinema materials, since a Maxwell material works within the context of the UVs created by its parent Texture Tag. Meaning, when you use repeat of say 8/8, the plugin has to render your texture 8 times into a 2048x2048 px bitmap (assuming 2048 is the texture preview size you've set), which is then handed to Cinema for drawing in the viewport. In fact, though, preview sizes other than 256x256 are not even officially supported, according to the Cinema SDK docs; I only include other resolutions because my testing indicated that it did not cause a problem.

Taking the examples you posted above, you would be better off to set repeat to 1/1 in your Maxwell textures, and use the Tiles U/V parameters in the Texture Tag to perform what you refer to above as internal material tiling.

[hankusp]

Hi
I know already that it works much better when I make tiling in TextureTag. But I need to make it in Maxwell material inside, to store kind of RealScale parameters. I can not save Texture Tag tiling with material, so I would have to repeat it all the time I assign material to an object in new scene. It makes no sense...

Well, that means there is no chance to improve that displaying ?

I e-mailed you a sample file. The colour difference is between Cinema and Maxwell displaying. This is the same texture used for every objects in this scene. Cinema perform it much closer to the original.

[JDHill]

Real Scale does not make much sense in Cinema, since you can map a whole object hierarchy using a single Texture Tag, in which you can directly set the size of a cubic projection. That is also the reason why it is not (and won't be) implemented in this plugin. As such, a productive workflow in Cinema might be to adopt a more Cinema-like approach: create a null, assign to it a texture tag and material, where the texture tag has the desired real-sized cubic projection (I would not use Tiles U/V in the texture tag to size the texture, and would rather directly set the desired real mapping size in the Texture Tag's Coordinates tab), and save it as a preset in the Content Browser. Later, you can drag this into any scene and place any desired geometry under it to apply the material and mapping, exactly as you had previously set it up.

It is not realistic to try to address the issue by adding more resolution to the texture preview, since as I wrote above, even what the plugin already does is not officially supported, and since it is already excruciatingly slow with 2048x2048.

Regarding the color difference, the only way I'm able to achieve the color difference you show is by disabling Linear Workflow in Project Settings. In theory that should not make a difference, but it does, so I'll look and see if I can do something about it.

[hankusp]

Thanks a lot for your answer. It seams to be a good idea with this "null" workflow you described. When I'll add it to a content browser I need to attach good preview to it. Is there any way to extract material preview from mxm as a texture file?

[JDHill]

I don't know of any way to do that, aside from using python to scan through a directory and extract the preview images from MXM files.

[hankusp]

ok, thanks for help