#337149
Good morning friends,

Yesterday we ran our first rendering and although we are excited about the results we saw that Maxwell did not render several objects with the mxm materials that we had assigned to them. We approached Jeremy about this and his explanation follows below. This is pretty heavy and obscure stuff. We wonder if someone could elaborate:


“The way that it happens is usually that you download an MXM from the MXM Gallery, and this MXM contains texture paths which were created on a different machine. When you clicked on that folder icon, you were importing the state of that MXM file into the material you were currently editing in the material editor. If bad paths are contained inside of that MXM file, then you will see them being reported there in the material editor once it has been imported.

You can alter your strategy to let the plugin help you out a bit here; if you access the MXM Gallery from the plugin (right-click in the Scene Manager > Materials window),”


Let’s stop here. We're not sure what Jeremy's saying here. What are we trying to do here? When you rc on the Materials window are you trying to go out to the Maxwell Resources website and download directly from there?

“… then when your chosen MXM is downloaded, the plugin attempts to fix up any bad paths it contains. After doing so, it saves the MXM to one of two places: (a) if the document has been saved, then the MXM is saved in an 'mxmgallery' folder next to the document, and its textures are saved in a 'textures' folder inside that. If the document has not been saved (and therefore has no location on your disk), then the MXM is saved to an 'mxmgallery' folder in your documents folder; you can also find this folder pre-populated in the drop-down.”

What does Jeremy mean by this?

“In practice, there is a choice to be made on the plugin's part: export an MXS with bad texture paths and let Maxwell tell you about it, or disable the textures preemptively. The plugin chooses to do the latter, and as a middle road, provides the 'Bad Paths' report in the material editor, as well as optionally, at export time (see the plugin Option 'Disable Path Check'). Usually this takes care of any issues, but in looking at your scene I did notice that while I am doing this for textures, I am not doing it for emitter MXI/HDRIs and IES files. So Maxwell can still refuse to render. I'll tweak this for the next plugin build, but until then, you'll have to make sure the paths you use are valid.”

How do we check and see if any of our mxm’s have bad paths before we render? Do we double-click on each and every one and look for the “bad paths” warning? If so, again – how exactly do we fix it?

Thank you.

Cosmas Demetriou
#337156
You can alter your strategy to let the plugin help you out a bit here; if you access the MXM Gallery from the plugin (right-click in the Scene Manager > Materials window),”

Let’s stop here. We're not sure what Jeremy's saying here. What are we trying to do here? When you rc on the Materials window are you trying to go out to the Maxwell Resources website and download directly from there?
There are several ways to obtain MXM files from the MXM Gallery:

1. navigate your browser to http://resources.maxwellrender.com, search, and download an MXM manually
2. open Maxwell Studio, open the Materials Browser, go to the Web tab, search and download an MXM
3. open Maxwell MXED, go to the Web tab, search and download an MXM
4. from within the plugin, by right-clicking in Scene Manager > Materials and choose MXM Gallery

If you use the fourth method (see page 31 in the plugin manual), which is what I was suggesting in that post, the plugin will attempt to fix any bad paths which may be present in the downloaded MXM file.
“… then when your chosen MXM is downloaded, the plugin attempts to fix up any bad paths it contains. After doing so, it saves the MXM to one of two places: (a) if the document has been saved, then the MXM is saved in an 'mxmgallery' folder next to the document, and its textures are saved in a 'textures' folder inside that. If the document has not been saved (and therefore has no location on your disk), then the MXM is saved to an 'mxmgallery' folder in your documents folder; you can also find this folder pre-populated in the drop-down.”

What does Jeremy mean by this?
This is simply telling you, as mentioned above, when you browse the MXM Gallery via the plugin, that the plugin will attempt to help you out a bit by fixing up bad paths in the downloaded MXM. Beyond that, I am just describing to you the convention used by the plugin regarding where downloaded MXM files will be stored.

Note that I had hit submit on that post before finishing the last sentence, which should have read: "you can also find this folder pre-populated in the drop-down at the top of the Database Manager." See page 67 of the plugin manual for information on the purpose and operation of the Database Manager's MXM Browser page.
How do we check and see if any of our mxm’s have bad paths before we render? Do we double-click on each and every one and look for the “bad paths” warning? If so, again – how exactly do we fix it?
There are two ways of checking:
  1. By clicking the red 'Bad Paths' link in the material editor. In this case, yes, you would need to have selected the material.
  2. By looking at the Rhino command-line and/or the plugin's Log Viewer window after an export, provided that Scene Manager > Options > Disable Path Check is set to No.
In order to fix a bad path, it is necessary to tell the plugin where the texture is physically located in your file system, assuming of course that it actually does exist. So that would mean, using the example of an emitter with a bad MXI/HDRI path:
  1. Open the material editor and select a material which has a bad MXI/HDRI emitter path
  2. Select the emitter component in question in the material layer tree at the left side of the material editor
  3. Double-click the Image Emission Texture button in the emitter panel to browse for the correct file
  4. Locate the MXI file in your file system using the file browser which is shown
Please review pages 24-25 in the plugin manual to become familiar with the controls which are used in the material editor; in particular, the Material Layers Tree and the Texture Control. See also page 62 to become familiar with the material editor's Emitter UI, and page 63 to learn about the material editor's texture-editing panel.
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