We will be undergoing scheduled maintenance on May 20th, 2013 at 02:00 GMT.
Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow Tutorials
Maxwell Scene Manager Introduction / Materials Preview
Subtitles of the Movie (Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow / Maxwell Scene Manager Introduction / Materials Preview)
Materials in SketchUp to Maxwell are somewhat complex so we're going to take a lot of time to really delve into how to work with Materials because that's a really big part of working with Maxwell anyway. To begin with we need to go ahead and Open the Window-Materials dialog and I'm just going to go ahead and go to In Model and here you're going to see all of the materials that we already have loaded for Susan here. In order to get rid of these we're going to go ahead and delete Susan, so I'm just going to delete Susan, I'm going to go up to Components and I'm going to Purge Unused and then I'm going to go over here and I'm going to say Purge Unused and that's going to get us back to zero with our materials. And now I'm going to Create a brand New Material by clicking here and I'm just going to hit OK to accept the Default values, so now we have a Material named Material1 at Default Value. So if we go over here to our Maxwell Scene manager and we go to Materials, you'll see that Material1 is loaded right here, now if it isn't on your system, just click this and Open up the Drop-down and click on Material1. The very first thing that we want to look at here is the Preview, and this works a lot like the Preview in MX ED or the Maxwell Material Editor, but it's got some subtle differences and I'll point them out to you. Now the first thing first here is that whatever you have loaded in the Previews Folder for your Maxwell Render Install Folder is going to be loaded here under Scene and you can choose any of these that you want, you'll find those in the Work Files, we have the Cornell, Default Preview, Drapery so on and so forth, so I'll just pick the Simball Version 2 Preview and we can choose the Target Sample Level. Now it's important, don't just jack this up, in the Maxwell Material Editor I would tell you just to jack this thing way the heck up and we'll just stop it when we reach a point where we're satisfied, but it doesn't work that way here in SketchUp and it's important that you know that. So for right now we'll just leave it at 8 and we'll just go ahead and hit the Render button here which is this little Refresh Icon, so we're going to click that and it's going to begin to count the seconds that it's actually rendering, it's not counting down it's counting forward. Now that little spinning icon will continue to spin until the render is done, now we've reached Sample Level 8, there is no time limit here as you can see and this can be big trouble, if you set this thing for something really high like say 20 and it's going to take you know a couple of hours to render that preview, then you're going to have to wait those couple of hours because there's no way to stop this render. So you want to be very cautious about easing this up so like I might go and set that for something like 10 and then I'm just going to click somewhere outside there so that that accepted and then I'm going to hit Refresh and now we're going to get it Rendered a little bit nicer but we're also going to pay attention to how long it took. Because now we're 5 seconds, 6 seconds and so on and so forth, if this takes more than 30 seconds it's probably not going to be practical for us because we don't want to be locked into something. For this particular scene I can probably get away with going somewhere around say Sample Level 12, but it's going to be different on different scenes and I recommend that you be cautious when you're working with this Preview because you can easily get yourself in trouble by setting it for something really high and then rendering and being locked in and really at that point the only way to stop it is to basically wait it out because it's more or less impossible to stop. You can stop it by, here I'll show you how to stop it, so if we're in really a bad pinch I'll just go ahead and hit something like 20 here, we'll start it Rendering and let's say that you know that's going to take way, way too long, it's never going to stop, it's just going to keep on rendering, it's going to slow down my system, I don't want it to keep going because I don't know when it's ever going to stop, I made a big mistake. I try shutting this down and it doesn't stop rendering, it's still rendering, my system resources are still going, I try shutting down SketchUp and it doesn't stop rendering, my system resources are still going. So if I do a Ctrl-Alt Delete to launch my Windows Task Manager, you'll find that we have in here a task called Maxwell, let me just see if I can't find it, there it is, Maxwell.exe. And you can see right now it's using 95 percent, 97 percent of my CPU and it will continue to use that until I tell it to stop so I'll just Highlight it and hit End Process. Now that may very well be different, completely different on your system depending on what version of Windows you're running or if you're on a Macintosh Operating System but short of that, there's no way to stop it, when you set those parameters too high for your Preview, you can really get yourself into trouble. Now that's something that I do believe will be addressed in a future update to the Plug-in, but I just wanted you to be aware of that when you're working with your, I'll just pick Black here, when you're working with your Previews you want to make sure that you do not set that set that target Sample Level for something too high, because it like I said can be a real pain.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Google SketchUp to Maxwell Render Workflow |
| Author: | Jason Maranto |
| SKU: | 34210 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-83-6 |
| Release Date: | 2011-03-22 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 82 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
VTC Sign up & Benefits
- Unlimited Access
- 81,350 Video Tutorials (14,200 free)
- Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
- Over 715 Courses
- $30 for One Month Access
- Multi-User Discounts Available
