Maxwell Render

I'm getting some weird emitter behaviour that has come about through editing emitters to get to groups (I hate that - it truned to shite), now many of the emitter plane are either flipping on export or only emitting from the reverse face and into the light fitting!

Is anyone else noting this behaviour? It has seemingly come about when I did something weird?

I'll try to fix it firstly then see if I can work out the steps that got there!

BTW is there a way to show normals in studio V2 - there was a simple switch in V1?

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

a similar switch for normals is in studio V2... under object parameters.

Best,
Jason.

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My Tutorial Video Series: Maxwell Render 2 - SketchUp to Maxwell Workflow - ZBrush 4 - Corel Painter 12 Advanced - Substance Designer 2.1

Face normals are flipping on export? I don't quite see how that would be possible, so if you have any more details, let me know.

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Next Limit Team

Christ - it is there! Dam I keep missing things that are check by the little box after the word, I cant see them black on black!

As that worked I can then suggest that the emitters are indeed emitting from the reverse face!

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

JD as just posted they aren't flipping but emitting from the reverse face! I couldn't work out how to check in studio!

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

That doesn't make any sense, so I can't really make any guess about it -- do you want to just send me a (SketchUp) file so I can reproduce it here on my machine?

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Next Limit Team

Sorry JD I should also have added that this seems like an intermittant issue - as it only effects those objects that have been edited!

This is a very rough of what I think may have triggered -

1. All my lights (components) are in groups containing the fitting and a nested group (emitter geometry),
2. I wanted to group by emitter material, so opened each group, selected all fittings and made unique,
3. Open the group for edit down to the emitter, painted it a random unassigned SU material from out of SU library to paint the emitter, then deleted this material from the material list to bring back default!,
4. Then closed out and painted light group with new emitter material for that group, btw this stuck as a workaround though it seems now these lights and others are infact emitting from the wrong side.
5. Now I have no idea that these steps created an issue somewhere?
6. One thing I do note and could this be the issue - oh and to think about it - dam I may have answered my own question, when one closes out from the matrial edit I did note that the nested geo took on the body material, hmmm? It could be the front face does but not the back? Though there is a stickler to this. I bought in a completely new light and different light comp and it occured to that as well!

I'll do some more checking, it may not be that it is an issue with export but something fundamental to the edit process that is a no no with the new plug!

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

I'll pull some bits out send mate - JD at ? dot com

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

It's jeremy at nextlimit dot com. Regarding front/back face materials, the plugin always uses the front material, if there is one; otherwise it tries to use the back material, if one is assigned, and if the Output > Face Materials option is not set to Use front only. But that is unrelated to normal direction; emitters in Maxwell always emit according to normals.

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Next Limit Team

not this time!

I'll send you the file now mate! Btw I've tried to replicate it with new geometry doing all sorts of things and it doesn't happen. Yet in this case you cant do anything to fix it but to replace geo or flip to reverse side!

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

If you negatively-scale geometry, it will have the same effect as reversing its normals. I think it's confusing to look at in Studio, because the normals display is not showing this -- but that's how the engine considers it.

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Next Limit Team

Hmmm? Not sure what your meaning there JD, the flip normals feature worked in studio, though I did go back to my original model in SU and simply reversed the planes and it worked fine.

Not sure how you went looking at the file, just a weird issue that came up there as you can see there is nothing wrong with the Geometry! Even exploding right down would do nothing to effect the emitter directing off the rear face even if I painted carpet or something bizarre to the reverse face the emitter still directed from that side!

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

What I mean is that some of your geometry has been negatively-scaled along at least one axis SketchUp.

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Next Limit Team

Well mate aren't you clever! Wow would never have thought that an issue! Certainly something to be mindful of! JD mate is the flip along axis considered a negative scale in SU? I'm not normally one to ever negatively scale something I just normally flip along axis, a lot?

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

Apparently, Flip Along does its work using negative scale. You can even undo it (for groups/components) using Reset Scale, although it doesn't actually seem to work very well -- the entity will probably move somewhere unexpected instead of un-flipping.

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Next Limit Team