Everything related to Studio
#400120
Some more UI glitches that should be easily rectified:
  • Right-clicking in the object lister, as well as right-clicking in the Viewport and selecting Object, show a red X in front of "Remove" (should say "Delete" throughout the app), but not in the materials lister
    When selecting/deselecting one, more or none objects, the Attributes Panel elements jump up and down for no practical reason; let the user decide for herself
    When saving the layout, the column widths in the object lister are not saved
    When dragging and re-sizing the various sections in the Attributes Panel, the other sections re-size automatically for no good reason
    Resizing works by click-dragging above AND below the new search fields but not on the upper resize zone of the lower search field (although the resize icon comes up), so that is inconsistent for no logic reason
While doing some timing tests (how many minutes it takes to go from "nothing" to "something" with raw G2 NURBS surfaces saved as OBJ as input and one "built-in" Maxwell lighting set-up from the library), an approach emerged how to avoid bump maps and normal maps interfering with the triangle smoothing. HD resolution to SL 16 here took 80 minutes with CPU only (new mid-range Dell Precision/Apple MacBook Pro); is this "good", "bad" or "normal"?

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#400133
Thanks, Luis, that is good news for usability.

I meanwhile discovered another usability problem and two bugs:
  • When using Operator under Geometry to scale a projector up or down, for example dividing X, Y and Z by 7, one cannot undo/CTRL + Z that operation. One has to click the Normalize button again and then enter a new value. And, because Operator has no persistent settings, one has to select "/" for divide, deselect "Position" and "Rotation" again, every time one wants to use that feature. This makes, apart from the lack of undoing, using Operator very tedious
  • After importing OBJs and "zeroing" them in the right place by changing X, Y and Z coordinates and then pressing reset - if one now applies a realscale material, the X, Y and Z coordinates are changed. That makes subsequent rotations, positionings, etc. unnecessarily difficult
  • Clicking Recalc in Appearance or changing the Smoothing value while FIRE is running crashes Maxwell Studio
Thanks for noting!
#400136
CPU (no Nvidia GPU available).

Another oddity, but maybe there is a technical reason for it? When applying a spherical projector to one object and clicking adjust (brown part) and applying a cubic projector to a similarly sized object and clicking adjust (beige part), the exact same normal map's effect needs a value of 50 in global bump with the spherical projector to become visible, but only 0,3 with the cubic projector with a similar visual strength.

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#400137
The manual is not explicitly clear, important for industrial design software users using Studio:
  • When importing an OBJ from CAD and assigning a highly reflective IOR based material, artifacts pertaining to the triangles show up. If one lowers the smoothing angle to 10 and then clicks recalc (no visual confirmation that the action was executed), the artifacts disappear. Only changing the smoothing angle but not clicking recalc has no effect. The manual does not point out explicitly that the recalc button must be clicked after entering a new smoothing angle and that only clicking recalc without a different smoothing angle has no effect. This can confuse novice users.

Smoothing: Smooth objects at render time or do not smooth the object(s) (Flat). The numeric field represents the angle of smoothing. If the angle between adjacent polygons is smaller or equal to this angle, they will be smoothed.

Recalc: Recalculates the object's normals. This parameter can be used to remove rendering artifacts due to corrupt normals of an imported object. If you see for example the individual polygons of a surface that's supposed to render smoothly, press this button to recalculate the normals.


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#400139
Found another glitch and another small UI issue:
  • When using a displacement map in a material, then deleting it, even after closing and reopening MS, FIRE is still "preprocessing scene" for quite some time. Using the override materials option leads FIRE to go straight to "voxelisation", as it should when no material has a displacement component and no object has a modifier, etc.
  • In the bottom right corner, FIRE displays "1280x720" which I assume are pixels. What do they relate to, as I have the FIRE window smaller than that on my screen
Thanks for taking a look...

FIRE displaying the SL is very useful. Why not also display SL in the Viewport for test renders there?
#400140
Andreas Hopf wrote:
Mon Sep 21, 2020 1:57 pm
  • In the bottom right corner, FIRE displays "1280x720" which I assume are pixels. What do they relate to, as I have the FIRE window smaller than that on my screen
You select the resolution with the quality parameter on fire. It's not attached to fire panel size as you may resize fire panel after render is finish and make it bigger and see some detail or whatever.
#400144
Ok, so what does 1280x720 tell me then? What is it useful for?

If I render the Viewport to try out a fairly translucent silk matt white PVC material on a real object (inflateable shape, similar to an airbed), but the material needs SSS, it is very slow. How, in the Viewport, can I select a smaller rectangular region to render only that to speed up the process of fine tuning the material?

Thanks!
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

Let's be realistic. What's left of NL is only milk[…]