[daros]

So i must reboot too? ok. I try.

[Tyrone Marshall]

It's not the point to blame the users, Gary.. I'm a user, too. What I'm saying is that Maxwell is orders of magnitude more complex now because it can do so much more and so much more powerfully than before. The trade off is that it takes more time to program those things, hunt down bugs, etc. A decision was made to quell the very understandable frustration around here to the best degree possible, and that was by putting it all out there.

I knew there was going to be a lot of harsh feelings whether they did or didn't release RC 1; but I for one am glad that they're willing to withstand an avalanche of fury rather than compromise on the product. Because in time here, all this annoying stuff will be hammered out, and the killer engine that it is will rock. I hope you'll help...

_Mike

Mike, a simple blog-like development report would have sufficed and satisfied many of us without the need to actually have the product by a certain day. Some images of current gui, what's possible, what the current issues are, and new things that can be talked about in the developing program could have bought the team another six months without releasing any thing. I am sure of this.

[mverta]

I like the new mxcl: ESPECIALLY the countdown to the next sampling level. The preview doesn't work anymore, tho.

Yep.. it'l come back.. the new viewer is actually way more powerful.. the networking stuff is SUPER easy to configure and run...

_Mike

[Frances]

I've rebooted my machine to see if the constellations would thusly align. Now mxst.exe won't start at all. In other words, I can't even bring up the Studio.

DAMN.. what the hell's going on there I wonder. I don't want to insult you with all the usual suggestions, but when something fails so utterly it's usually something simple right at the heart of it, you know? I mean, these apps are buggy as hell but they freakin' LAUNCH... I just gotta say go back over the process again, make sure you didn't miss something, mistype something.. I hate not having more to offer.

_Mike

The variables are right. I uninstalled the beta. Installed the rc and edited the environment variables. I could bring up the studio but it would not render. The "default" material was applied to all objects. [Skydome used for illumination.] I rebooted. Nada.

But at least the material editor rocks.

[mverta]

Mike, a simple blog-like development report would have sufficed and satisfied many of us without the need to actually have the product by a certain day. Some images of current gui, what's possible, what the current issues are, and new things that can be talked about in the developing program could have bought the team another six months without releasing any thing. I am sure of this.

You'll get no argument here, Tyrone. I'm just a bottom-line type of guy. It's good, I think, to be able to express the frustrations and keep communication going, but as some point you gotta work the problem, no matter how avoidable it may have been, and that's where we are. I'm just glad to see that the most patient among us are slowly getting something out... everyone (nearly everyone) who's posting their process here tonight is going to be a hero to hundreds of others tomorrow. And that's a good thing any way you cut it.

_Mike

[zoetropeuk]

the networking stuff is SUPER easy to configure and run...

_Mike

If it's so easy where is it then ?

[mverta]

how do we set f stop?

It's in Camera Params

why do the settings in mxcl not match the settings from studio? (not really a problem because you can stop the render, switch settings and resume--quite nice actually)

They will... just not connected properly yet.

why can you only change resolution in mxcl or have I completely missed something from studio?

check my post about this (you have to SAVE [!?])

_Mike

[mverta]

The variables are right. I uninstalled the beta. Installed the rc and edited the environment variables. I could bring up the studio but it would not render. The "default" material was applied to all objects. [Skydome used for illumination.] I rebooted. Nada.

But at least the material editor rocks.

This is really pissing me off. When you hit the render icon, did it not launch the mxcl?

_Mike

[lebbeus]

thanks--should have looked a little more closely…I don't know about the rest of you (and installation hiccups aside) but I'm kind of digging the standalone

[Tyrone Marshall]

whoa. this materials editor thing is a real trip to figure out without any user manual, and for those used to "diffuse, metal, plastic, dielectric, emitter". kind of like going to movie 30 minutes into it.

now its "basic or emitter" and within basic "bsdf and/or coating".

mverta, thank goodness you gave us a MikesShiny to help out.

umm, hate to sound stupid but can someone give a sentence on what exactly BSDF and IOR stand for?

All you need to know so far about BSDF:

ref: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8906

[mverta]

the networking stuff is SUPER easy to configure and run...

_Mike

If it's so easy where is it then ?

Boy.. I really don't want to go here yet. Right now.. you have to launch manager and client separately, but that's being automated. It's gonna be pretty much one-click. Right now, as I work with it.. with one app open and running on my farm, my Viewer automatically detects and recruits the farm and it works seamlessly. It's the inital launching and configuring thing that's getting hammered out. If I were you, I'd hang back.

_Mike

[deesee]

Mike,

It's working for me now! Let me tell you what I did. I DID NOT uninstall the beta. I just doubled clicked the RC1 .exe, it installed and off I went. I did have to do the license thingy seperately.

I then updated the environment varialbles like you said (in XP it's in Control Panel>System>Environment variables.

I think you should post a sticky somewhere telling everyone to update the variables. That alone would have saved me and others going nuts with the pissed off comments.

Great work buddy!!

EDIT: The installer should have done this by the way.

[lebbeus]

…though I did just crash the thing (my first of the night) by being too impatient waiting for the shading modes to change (I tried to switch to a different mode before a previous one had "loaded")

[Voidmonster]

BITMAP TIP:

So far, it appears that only .png files are recognized. I've tried .jpg, .tiff, .tga and .png. The .png files reliably load in. Nothing else does.

The next issue is getting those files mapped onto something, which is currently proving very obscure.

[mverta]

MATERIALS -

There is, more or less.. only one type of material now. BSDF. Coatings are very special.

For things like carpaint, you just stack Basic Materials. But don't look at the "Material Layers' Window like it's actually stacking, top to bottom. In fact, that's going to be relabeled so it's not confusing. You don't have to think top-down, like in photoshop.. you just make all the various elements of your overall shader, and control the blending through the BASIC WEIGHT MAP. Make sure the sum total of all your shader's elements Basic Weight Map values don't exceed 1.

So in my shiny ball, it's just two elements: a transparent gloss coat, and a satiny blue anisotropic thing. But they're just two tweaked variables of the same basic material - Basic BSDF. Each one's Basic Weight Map is set to .5. .5+.5 = 1. There are only two layers, you see...

Gone are specific models for types of materials. You can do them all here, and you can stack as many layers as you want! ALL PHYSICALLY ACCURATE.. control the blending with maps.. it goes on and on. And if you have the complex IOR data for a real-world material, you can just plug it in. Look for a library of that to be available. They're a little slower to render because of the extra complexity, but you can't touch them for realism.

It's streamlined, infinitely flexible and accurate.

_Mike