[tom]

Thank you Metin!
...and YES to all your wishes 1,2,3... they are on the way.
"Going ahead" is the only matter for all of us, we are NOT planning to give up anyway.

[Xlars]

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

Cool Thanks for the information on the materials .. sounds fantastic. Do you think there will be some way to control that the sum of ALL Weight Maps does not exceed 1.0 (that would be nice).

[jelly]

"Going ahead" is the only matter for all of us, we are NOT planning to give up anyway.

Glad to hear that
Hope I could help aswell, if only I could get the OSX version

I'll stay at the window looking for news and waiting for the mac version

[MetinSeven_com]

Thanks for your reply Tom. I'm confident that things will work out well with Maxwell.

New materials setup sounds great indeed, although I do think preset materials for metal, glass, car paint etcetera would be very convenient and educational to understand the new material approach.

Cheers,

Metin

[Becco_UK]

Finally got a basic scene from Cinema into Maxwell Studio. Triangulated all objects and exported as .obj file using a Cinema export value of 1. All the objects loaded correct in relation to them being seperate objects. Still large in the Studio window but I used Studios object scale to get it looking sort of correct.

Question: Can I set something within Studio to sort out scale - In RealFlow there is a scale input box. Is Maxwell Studio similar?

Tried a preview render and CRASH. Seems that objects need a material. The imported .obj file did not have default mats applied by Studio even though in Cinema they had been allocated materials. Even Poser will set up default mats! Objects without mats do not render garish green like in the beta. It would be more user friendly if default mats were allocated?

Question: Will a preview render commence if one or more objects do not have a material applied.

Instant crash when trying to move the camera in viewport.

Rechecked all the path stuff as detailed by others. Maxwell still doesn't render from the render button.

Big Big Question: It seems most success by others has been where their plugin has been updated. So, when is an updated and working Cinema plugin arriving please? Without this, RC even if functioning would be very unweildy for anything but small simple scenes.

[Becco_UK]

New Question: I would like to change a material to a different one. How do I delete an objects' existing material so a different one can be applied?

Also does Matador Light work with RC yet?

[jurX]

...every time I push the render button,...the RC1 crashes,...this happens with simple sphere or cube objects...

[dd_]

becco ive tried to delete the materials too and found that dragging a new one ontop gets rid of the old one


not that i can render anything anyway, preview crashes every time
BUT im still trying to work around it. I WILL GET A RENDER ON THE WAY TODAY

[big K]

goodday folks,

i followed the whole event yesterday/today while i was working on a project.
firts the tension all over the day, the madness while users were waiting
then midnight - oooh they missed the date again... posts
then around 1.30 - hey its ready for download
30 minutes later hundreds of angry messages - its crashing, doesn´t work, sh... f... and so on. - i have to say i really felt sorry for the guys at NL.
now it looks like the first storm is over and people are calming down and getting into it.

my first attempts were in the late night (i couldn´t withstand it) the results were a bit disappointing: got too many crashes.

but today refreshed i started again, read some helpful posts (thanks mike and the other testers !!!) and hey i got it working !!
looks good to me (unfortunatly i have started an animation (the project i mentioned above - no not with maxwell ) and i do not have much renderpower left.)

so here is what helped me getting it to run:
- i did not uninstall the beta (but maybe this is good for something i do not know)
- i changed the paths ( Right-Click MyComputer>Properties>Advanced>environment variables
Set the User variables for PATH to [installtion path] (e.g. C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell\) ;[installtion path]\mxcl\ !!!!! MAXWELL_ROOT was set to [installtion path] )
- and very important to be able to launch the mxcl window you need to copy the license.dat file in the \mxcl directory

hope this helps you out !

there are still minor bugs and place for improvement,
but hey thanks NL team
and thanks tom for just being there and answering questions

cheers
michael

[Becco_UK]

dd_: thanks for that. I seem to be ok with getting previews to render if not much else!

[Becco_UK]

big K: Thanks for the info' but having done all what you describe last night and rechecking this morning, the render button doesn't function for me.

While setting paths variables may help some it really shouldn't be necessary in this day and age unless a user has a specific reason for changing these things. This is the only software I have where variables have to be entered by hand. Next Limit haven't learned from their errors with the Beta installation?

[MetinSeven_com]

I'm playing around with the material editor and I'm actually quite excited. Finally a Maxwell material preview, yee-haa!

A few questions:

1: I assume the Reflectance is comparable with the diffuse color?
2: Is the Transmittance comparable with refraction, in order to create dielectrics, or is it the reflection amount? I turned it to red, but I didn't see any change in the material preview.

Wishes [revised]:
1: Undo / Redo.
2: Keyboard customization, especially viewport navigation.
3: Keeping the gap between Max and Maxwell as small as possible.
4: The ability to have a second object behind the preview sphere, so we can test transparent materials.

A quick 'n' dirty manual would be mucho, mucho, mucho apreciado! Come on Maxwell beta-testers, I've written the first manual to get everyone going, Tom followed, who's next to contribute to the Maxwell community's knowledge?

Cheers,

Metin

[big K]

becco:
did you copy the file to \mxcl or did you move it ?
i meant to have two files of license.dat. one in your installation path (\maxwell folder) and one in the subdirectory \mxcl !
just to be sure you got it right.

and check this testfile from mike: http://www.mikeverta.com/Posts/MikesTest.mxs
then you are able to find out if it works at all!

cheers
michael

[rendertaxi]

hello everybody,

so here is what helped me getting it to run:
- i did not uninstall the beta (but maybe this is good for something i do not know)
- i changed the paths ( Right-Click MyComputer>Properties>Advanced>environment variables
Set the User variables for PATH to [installtion path] (e.g. C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell\) ;[installtion path]\mxcl\ !!!!! MAXWELL_ROOT was set to [installtion path] )
- and very important to be able to launch the mxcl window you need to copy the license.dat file in the \mxcl directory

i confirm the first two parts, but i didn´t have to copy the license file to this folder to get it working.

i can render mikes scene even in res of 800x600 (thanks for your time and effort!!). i really like the new inferface.. it all looks very promising.

i was hoping to be able to do a project with the RC next week, but that still has to be done in beta, i guess.

well, NL thanks for the work! hope you got some rest and now: BACK TO WORK!!

[Frances]

How do I cancel a render in the viewport? I've given up on trying to get the Render Scene button to work.

(Using the RC is like trying to pick your nose with gloves on - it doesn't work right and it doesn't feel good either)