Maxwell for Grasshopper [Scarab Beta 0.1]

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by RWNB on March 9, 2012 at 2:13am

many thanks that you have informed me afterwards.

i hope for me, for rhino and vray user and of course for you,

that your plan will be successful.

thanks

Permalink Reply by rehiggins on March 8, 2012 at 2:09pm

I was just thinking of something like this--thanks for creating it!

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on March 8, 2012 at 3:44pm

Hope to hear some feedback :D

Permalink Reply by Bramiozo on March 9, 2012 at 8:40am

I'm really looking forward to giving this a try :). But I can't get it working.

I get the following error:

 

Command: Grasshopper

An error occured during GHA assembly loading:

Path: C:\Program Files\Rhinoceros 4.0\Plug-ins\Grasshopper\Components\Scarab.gha

Exception System.IO.FileNotFoundException:

Message: Could not load file or assembly 'Maxwell, Version=2.6.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xxx' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

 

I replaced the key with xxx, because I have no idea what kind of key it is.

I've got Maxwell 2.6.10, Rhino SR9, Grasshopper 0.8.0066 and Maxwell for Rhino 2.6.0.0

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on March 9, 2012 at 3:21pm

You should update Maxwell for Rhino to 2.6.10 too.

I'm not sure if the 2.6.0.0 plugin even works correctly with the 2.6.10 Render Engine.

I'll try and make Scarab as much backward compatible, as possible, but for now just keep every link in the chain up to current speed.

Permalink Reply by Brian Harms on March 9, 2012 at 12:39pm

Sweet. What would be really useful though is a way to initiate maxwell renderings straight from grasshopper.

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on March 9, 2012 at 3:25pm

Planned for around 0.5 was fire support in the GH canvas, environments for 0.4... right now I'm focusing on materials.

Didn't see any reason for rendering from GH as I thought there already were some generic bake and render components.

Permalink Reply by Brian Harms on March 9, 2012 at 3:31pm

That's true, I've actually been messing around with them. The main problem i've run into is successive renderings all being overwritten since maxwell defaults to overwrite MXI's and images.

The other thing is I have not been able to get those bake and render components to actually save maxwell MXI and image files to the folder that I specify using those components.

I figured there might be some value in creating at least a new version of those bake and render components that are tailored for maxwell's idiosyncrasies.

Maybe I'll ask Giulio nicely :)

Permalink Reply by Brian Harms on March 9, 2012 at 5:19pm

Just stumbled upon an option to set MXIs, MXSs and images to auto name themselves in the maxwell for rhino plugin (couldn't seem to find it within Maxwell render... maybe I just missed it?)

So anyways, that problem is fixed... although it does still create individual MXIs for each image which is kind of overkill in a large animation. Maybe there's a way to enable batch rendering or have it automatically delete the associated MXI file one the image reaches a certain sampling level.

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on March 10, 2012 at 4:48am

With hours per frame I never did a Maxwell animation. :D

When you start an animation with the Rhino plugin, does it create some kind of batch mxi containing all the frames?

Permalink Reply by Brian Harms on March 10, 2012 at 12:01pm

I actually figured it out last night. In 2.6 you can enable a sort of animation mode while in rhino (via the maxwell for rhino plugin) and then each time you render it just creates a new scene file. Then in maxwell render there is a built in batch render script where you just select the folder that contains the scene files. It just does one at a time until they are all done (when they reach a given time or sampling level).

It's true that maxwell renders take a long ass time, but the way it deals with light just by default is sooo much better than other renderers (in my opinion).

There is also a progressive rendering mode (which I haven't messed with yet) but the idea is that you tell it an initial sampling level (of say 5 for example) and then a final one (of 15 or whatever). This creates a quick rendering that you can use to start doing post production on (an make little grainy test animations) and then it will continue on to the higher sampling level afterwards. Might be nice to integrate that into the process somehow.

Permalink Reply by Monique on April 5, 2012 at 2:54pm

Super Cool. 

Since Brazil is pretty well integrated with Rhino, any considerations for Scarab : Brazil for Grasshopper? 

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