How do I "properly" use Maxwell Render with C4D?

[vesalus]

you must have the c4d plugin or at least you can get it through your friend.
once installed maxwell runs a a plugin, you do as you always do within c4d and then comes the time to assign maxwell's tag ( with some limitations thought ). see maxwell as an object oriented renderer, that s true for the lights, and most texture assignements, theres several topics on that matter here or in the maxwel render forum, check it out and if you need further help i'll see what i can do :)

ho dont forget to put maxwell tag on the camera ( targeted one) and check the plug in popup to access the maxwell render setup

[stevester1]

I thought all the texturing was done in maxwell?

[vesalus]

you can apply bitmap ( none of the procedural works btw ) and use several tex channels that 'll be recognise by maxwell ( see in the manual ) it sees the UW map and colors.

then if you want further control you can launch the maxwell tex editor or open your exported file within maxwellstudio ( to setup other option for example )

[davedavidson]

1, model in real scale so if its 10mm in the real world its 10mm in your scene
2, apply c4d materials using jpgs for like colour and bump in the normal way. apply to your object and then you can add a maxwell material tag ie like plastic you will see there is a place for a material to be added to the tag, all you do then is drag your objects texture sphere onto that area and the maxwell material will steal the c4d elements and mapping. you can also drag selection tags to the maxwell tag the space for this is under the space for the c4d texture.
3, set up your lights now these have to be objects, best to use a cube or a single poly. the more sides you light has the longer it takes to render. give these objects an maxwell emitter tag and then set the wattage level to what you want. remember bigger lights = softer shadows , smaller lights = sharper shadows. remember there are no fall off settings or shadow settings so you have to treat each light as you would in the real world. you could use the physical sky and sun for out door scenes etc, these can be found in the maxwell plugin dialog window.
4, you dont really need to set up a camera in the new version as it will render the active c4d view port but if you want to have a better DOF use a target camera and give it a maxwell camera tag, here you can set up the f,stop and shutter etc this will control the amount of light and the amount of DOF added to the scene, just like a normal light.
5, open up the render dialog from the plugins drop down and you will see some tags.
on the first tag you will see the output tab, give your render a name and then a place to store it ( ie working folder). set the scale to 0.0001 ( unless this has changed) this will export you scene to maxwell in the correct scale, if the scale is wrong it will make the lights and camera behave wrongly when rendering. then you see the command line opts, this should have -d (display render window) i always add -p:low at this point to make it render in low priority. the next tab is the camera tab, this is where you would set the size of the image needed. engine tab, set the render time to above what you need, its better to stop the render when you think its ready than to run out due to adding a low amount. set the threads to the physical number of cpus you have (dualcore amd would be set to 2). envinoment, this contains the skydome and sky/ sun settings. they pretty much explain themselves. i normaly leave all the other tabs alone on default.
6, hit render, from here you can adjust the shutter, burn etc while rendering. you can also add glare maps and obstruction maps, these are just black and white images ( ie a white pentagon on a black back ground) these will give glare to the image some will also act like a finger slightly over the lens.

thats about the basics. you could set up custom maxwell materials and use the presets in there to get to grips with how the materials work, but i find the normal material tabs fits most objects in a scene. also once render has been hit you can stop it and then import the mxi into the studio to work from there, but its a bit sluggish and i prefer to work from inside c4d

well thats about it, hope it makes sense :/ if there is anything ive missed or there is something else you need to ask fireaway and i will see if i can help ( if i can that is )

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