Maya & Maxwell

[lukeLT7]

Does anyone have some info or links to a maya workflow? I have tried importing .obj's into maxwell's demo studio. but the geometry looks bad. I also tried the demo plug-in for maya, but it never seems to load or work at all. I get crashes when I try to render in maxwell studio. I am waiting for the new plug-in for maya due out soon. but I would like to get some test images going. Any help? thanks guys.

[AJLynn]

They haven't released Maya 8 or Max 9 plugins yet, and haven't announced a release date (because they've realized no good comes from that). The importing isn't great, but did you try it with triangulated faces and check Studio's smoothing options? Under smoothing, you may need to recalc normals.

[derijones]

Hi

I've been using Maya/Maxwell a bit for some pretty basic house images (just using sunlight, no fancy lights or interiors) and sort of muddled the following together:

I tend to do all of my modelling maya - don't use instances, or use the script that converts instances to geometry prior to exporting.

get the UV's right with simple maya materials to get feedback on positioning of textures - each different material has a maya version, so it's easy to remap with the Maxwell material when it comes to it. I then create my materials using the maxwell material editor and create a MXM node for each different material and connect them to the relevant files.

Swap the materials over from Maya types to Maxwell.

I think the same goes for lights - model them and apply a MXM to them.

Create a Maxwell camera node and position it.

Use the "export scene" option under the Maxwell menu to fire out a .mxs for each camera location.

Load these up in Studio, tweak the lighting settings, materials, sun etc (some of the options on environment don't seem to come through, or get corrupted).

As long as you don't need to make modelling or UV changes, you shouldn't need to go back to Maya.

Test Render and tweak.......

Hope it helps

Cheers

Deri