[Maxer]

One thing that would be tremendously helpful would be to give the material editor the ability to do real-time material previews using the lighting conditions that are currently in the scene. Half the problem with materials is you don't know what there going to look like until you render out the entire scene, this way you could spend less time rendering a scene over and over and more time working on materials.

[Maximus3D]

Ofcourse that'd be very much useful, but be patient young Padawan. Wait 2 more days and then.. who knows.. something like that might just appear

/ Max

[vicente2702]

Next Limit could creat Maxwell's own material window, independently of the software that supports the plugin. This would avoid the problems with the codes of each one that they are experiencing.

Sorry my poor english.

Falow!

[juan]

Next Limit could creat Maxwell's own material window, independently of the software that supports the plugin. This would avoid the problems with the codes of each one that they are experiencing.

Hi all,
We have thought a lot in this issue. Plugins always run as dll files (with different extensions but anyway a dynamic library that can not get the main thread of the process because this is for the main platform (max, maya...) so maxwell needs to be adapted to each platform and each of them has its own way to do that. Some are strong multiplatform, others are very MFC windows, each plugin is different... it's almost impossible to develop a window that can be connected to all of them..But this is not the essential issue..

Maxwell materials are so complex, except with difusses it's impossible to know which will be the final color and aspect after rendering because it's strongly dependent of the rest of the scene and the environment. Maxwell doesn't work in rgb color space but in a bigger spectrum. Each rgb diffuse color has an only spectral description but the opposite is not true: you can generate several rgb colors from an point of spectral space.

There are even more things that makes preview so difficult. You can see this is not easy at all, and even less integrate it in each platform. we have a lot of ideas about it, they will come for next releases of our standalone.

[vicente2702]

Thank you for the frank explanation, Juan!

[iandavis]

I understand the difficulty with a 'texture' preview in a scene, but what about a basic "based on ideals" texure window, where for example the material 'aluminum' could be shown on a ball... insofar as to show us our choices for the available parameters against an idealized renderscene.

In other words, a modal dialog box that doesn't have any relation to the render conditions of a persons scene, but rather the way the materal is being rendered based on its' parameters.

In this manner we could see how much roughness we were to add and it's effect. How much density with a selected colour our glass would be.. etc. This kind of immediate feedback would reduce time doing 'test strips' by a factor of ten. If we could quickly go through all the metal and check how reflective, how much the color shows, etc.. It would actually improve our ability to render complex scenes with higher realism!

However, thank you for the technical explanation. Most developers don't respond in that manner assuming the users are incapable of appreciating the actual development issues you face. I can assure you this isn't the case and we very much appreciate the glimpse into your world.

Cheers

[idas]

Maybe something like this is more user friendly.

[tom]

why not...

[idas]

very nice !

you made only this image or more, i mean edit script like my image.

[idas]

Is it possible to remove noise from your images and send it again...
Maybe i try edit script, and use your images if you permit it.