Everything related to Studio
#400146
Thanks, that works in the viewport, very useful to fine-tune materials within a real scene instead of relying on the Simball only or waiting for a full render. Now it would be great to simply display the SL in the viewport, too, just like in the FIRE window.

Now I discovered a real bug. When re-opening a file saved some days ago, suddenly the previously normalized projectors are no longer normalized on all rectangular flat plane objects, whereas they are still normalized on all square flat plane objects. I have to manually click the Normalize button for each object that "forgot" that its projector was normalized before, and that information should have been saved in the file, no?

Image

Image
#400147
Possibly related to the bug is the bug/glitch that Random UV materials "forget" (after opening a previously saved scene or while working within a scene) what texture the user selected to have displayed in the viewport (here, Reflectance 0 is "forgotten" to be displayed), please see below. Sometimes, when selecting the material in the material lister, the texture is displayed again. The other material, this time, did not "forget" what to display.

Image
#400148
Found three more bugs/glitches:
  • Sometimes, all of a sudden, Camera Focus To... stops working, and one has to restart Maxwell Studio
  • When clicking on an object which is part of a group, the entire group in the object lister expands, potentially a huge list of objects, in my case facade panels. Why not leave it to the user if one wants to expand grouped objects? Also the "rubber-band" expansion/contraction and opening/closing of subsections of the attributes panels is really annoying
  • When reopening a file with a terrain object and Arroway displacement map material assigned, the displacement is not rendered in FIRE. When I then take a "built-in" plane from the library, assign the Arroway displacement map material to it, the plane renders with the displacement, and the terrain object, too, not an intuitive process. Somehow, the displacement was "forgotten" and has to be "awaken" again
  • In line with the error above, the Position XYZ error occurs. After importing the terrain object, assigning a real scale material to it, the XYZ position of the object changes. It is no longer at XYZ 000 as it was after importing it. Things like this are difficult for the novice to handle, as there is no rational explanation given, or mentioning of this issue in the online manual, once the novice is away from the course and on her own
Regarding the prior Random UV material display glitch, I found that if one changes to the select UV Sets mode, then clicks on a Random UV material, the texture is displayed in the viewport again.

Thanks for considering.
#400152
Ok, thanks, better than nothing.

To help with the troubleshooting of 1. real scale material application changing an object's coordinates, as well as 2. the real scale material application problem when the projector is planar, not cubic, I put together step-by step screenshots. Hope that helps...

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image
#400155
So, after something like three weeks of evaluation, I got almost through everything relevant for industrial, product and packaging designers in today's diversified software environments (Alias, Catia, Creo, Fusion 360, Rhino, Siemens NX, SolidWorks all easy to integrate via the standalone MS). Found only two issues that cause an MS crash, far better than V4. I very much hope the listed UI glitches and bugs can be ironed out swiftly, important for novices and non-nerds who work under time pressure in internal and external design studios.
#400156
Here is a somewhat ordered list of things I observed. Only two crashes in four weeks of evaluation, which was good. Overall, easy to use because of the camera and material paradigm industrial designers can relate to. 13 photo studio, interior and exterior renderings could be set up in a short time and the rendering duration for HD size images on current Apple, Lenovo and Dell laptops was around two hours on average for SL 14 – 16. Topaz DeNoise was necessary with interior and exterior renderings with physical sky plus helping emitters, but not with product photography style renderings. With generic photo studio, interior and exterior set-ups, one can almost work in a drag-and-drop fashion and gets predictable results, important in the high-pressure environment of an industrial design studio. The benefit of the standalone app is integration of the various surface modelling and solid modelling softwares typically present, plus incoming client data

Usability quirks
  • While FIRE is running, the mouse pointer lags when using the trackpad
  • After launch, file opening and loading dialogues point to the main Maxwell folder, not the last folder the user used
  • When saving the layout, also the attributes panel heights and column widths should be saved
  • The automatic showing and hiding of subsections, the popping up and down in the attributes panel, is not user friendly; the user should be in control what is shown/hidden
  • When dragging and re-sizing the various sections in the attributes panel, the other sections re-size automatically for no practical reason, let the user decide what to show and how
  • Renaming of cameras, triangle groups, modifiers, etc. should be consistently enabled with a double-click instead of having to use a dedicated “rename” button for some but not all cases
  • Copying/duplicating and pasting materials, objects, etc. should be named like so, as is the convention in any other software
  • Input fields and application font are small and the green highlighting with a border surround obscures the value or name the user wants to change
  • When objects are grouped and one selects one of them in the viewport, the group it belongs to is expanded in the object lister; a group should only expand when the user wants it to
  • 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” (which should say “delete” as in all other software), but not in the materials lister
  • The constant dome section unnecessarily squanders space
  • Resizing panels 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), that is inconsistent for no practical reason
  • When loading/changing a length map for MaxwellGrass, sometimes the viewport or FIRE window goes black, and one must close it and recreate it anew
Improvement of existing functions
  • A pivot-point snappable and fixed mm, cm or m grid in all views, like in any other 3D design application, is missing. One should also be able to change the colour of major and minor grid lines
  • Change to the top, right, front, back, above, below viewport paradigm
  • The SL is displayed in the FIRE window, which is very useful, but not in the viewport rendering
  • Custom alpha for AGS is not black. Page https://nextlimitsupport.atlassian.net/ ... ha+channel says one can use the opaque option with custom alpha channels, but I only have that option with the normal alpha channel option under the render panel
  • Unlike in Maya, when some object is selected and the mouse pointer is over the viewport, pressing “C” does not frame/center the view on the selected object
  • The textures list display is odd. It would be useful if one could export it as CSV, ODF or other Excel compatible file format, or copy text from it and print it. Also, when deleting a material and textures, it retains the textures in the list until the file is reopened
  • When using operator under geometry to scale a projector up or down, for example dividing x, y and z by a certain number, one cannot undo/CTRL + Z that operation. One must click the normalize button again and then enter a new value. And, because operator has no persistent settings, one must select “/” for divide, deselect “position” and “rotation” again every time one wants to use that feature. This makes, apart from the lack of undo, using the operator function tedious
  • GPU rendering should deliver the same results as CPU rendering
  • Integrate Topaz DeNoise, for it rapidly delivers plain stunning results at lower SLs
Useful functions present in other software
  • Student version students with legitimate enrolment/email can purchase themselves
  • Setting up and launching a batch of renders directly from the app
  • Camera backplate matching with perspective feature lines or similar method
  • Pointing lights at an object and/or being able to view the scene from the light’s position
  • Simple part and camera animation
  • More typical industrial design materials in the resource library
  • More pre-set “photo studios” and HDRI lighting editor with HDRIs from real photo studio lights
  • A more engaging forum and YouTube/Vimeo/Bilibili presence
Bugs
  • Crash when FIRE is running and then making a hidden emitter plane visible in the object lister so it contributes to the scene lighting
  • Crash when FIRE is running and recalc in the appearance panel is clicked or the smoothing value changed
  • Sometimes “camera focus to…” in the viewport stops working, and one must restart to be able to set the focus point where one wants to
  • When opening a new MXM, FIRE restarts. When deleting an unused MXM, FIRE restarts
  • When applying materials with bump/normal maps, triangle smoothing related glitches emerge. Concave shading appears out of nowhere and one can detect the triangle edges in some places, but strangely not everywhere, so the glitch is not consistent. 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
  • 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 real-scale material, the object’s x, y and z coordinates are changed, while its visual position in the viewport remains the same. That makes subsequent rotations, positionings, etc. unnecessarily difficult
  • When re-opening a file, sometimes, but not always, the previously normalized projectors are no longer normalized on all rectangular flat plane objects, whereas they are still normalized on all square flat plane objects. One must manually click the normalize button for each object that “forgot” that its projector was normalized before; that information should have been retained with the saved file
  • Random UV materials “forget” (after opening a previously saved scene or while working within a scene) what texture the user selected to have displayed in the viewport (in my evaluation, reflectance 0 is “forgotten” to be displayed). Sometimes, when selecting the material in the material lister, the texture is displayed again. Another random UV material did not “forget” what to display, so this bug is inconsistent
  • When opening a scene with a mesh to which a displacement map material was assigned, the displacement is not rendered in FIRE. When one then imports a “built-in” plane from the library, assigns the displacement map material to it, the plane renders with the displacement, and the mesh also, which is odd. Somehow, the displacement was “forgotten” and has to be “nudged” again
  • Real-scale materials don’t work with planar projectors as they do with cubic projectors, which is an illogical inconsistency
#400159
Thanks, Luis, appreciated. It looks like industrial designers have a good use case with V5. To conclude, here are the 13 tests (JPG) with what I deemed to be most of the features one encounters in this field of work.

HD resolution, emitters, displacement, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:36 - UV unwrapping of CAD file necessary, otherwise no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:46 - UV unwrapping of CAD file necessary, otherwise no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:30 - UV unwrapping of CAD file necessary, otherwise no particular skill needed
Image

Instagram resolution, physical sky, i7-9750H, SL 16.5 03:00, Topaz DeNoise - two walls off for light escape, boosting emitters in windows, AGS alpha channel grey problem
Image

Instagram resolution, physical sky, i7-9750H, SL 15.6 03:00, Topaz DeNoise - two walls off for light escape, boosting emitters in windows, AGS alpha channel grey problem
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:38 - procedural plastic erosion texture would be necessary to get around tedious UV CAD file unwrapping, otherwise no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:52 - no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 17 02:06 - procedural real wood texture would be necessary to solve the endgrain transition problem, UV unwrapping of CAD file too tedious in real world situation
Image

HD resolution, emitters, IOR files, i7-9750H, SL 18.5 03:30 - no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:29 - no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:40 - no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, physical sky, random UVs, MaxwellGrass, MaxwellScatter, i7-9750H, SL 14.5 04:40, Topaz DeNoise - Vizpark or other plants necessary, no particular skill needed
Image

HD resolution, HDRI environment, displacement, i7-9750H, SL 17 01:35 - no particular skill needed
Image
Last edited by Andreas Hopf on Sat Oct 03, 2020 8:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
#400165
Usability quirks
  • When wanting to save a material (why "export"?), one has to copy the material's name field content to save it under that name; the Windows Explorer field should already be populated with that name
  • Dragging a Global Bump texture from one material to another is not working, while layers and textures below in the hierarchy can be dragged from one material to another
  • When rendering a material scene, for example, the Simball, the count-down timer is not always displayed in the top right corner
#400166
Hi,
  • I note down the first one.
  • Regarding the second one, I cannot drag anything from one material to another, to tell the truth, only can drag thing in the same material. I can only copy and paste layers and BSDFs between different materials or drag textures from the Textures list panel to any material.
  • Regarding the countdown, for some reason, it is only displayed when the Production engine is used to render the preview.
Best,
Fernando
#400167
All right, thanks for looking at the addenda.

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 19 05:38 - spotty caustics at high SL : (
Image

HD resolution, emitters, i7-9750H, SL 16 01:52 - UV unwrapping of CAD file necessary, otherwise no particular skill needed
Image
Last edited by Andreas Hopf on Sat Oct 03, 2020 8:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

...and 3 Days later, 82.528 Views !!! ...NL, every[…]

Hello dear customers, We have just released a new[…]

grass generator extension

Just downloaded MWR5 for Rhino 6 and want to use g[…]

Hello everyone, I have a new bug with the latest M[…]