Following is a tutorial that will help you get started using the plugin. Before doing so, though, it is a good idea to make sure that you have read the plugin overview.
Getting Started
First, it is worth mentioning that it is entirely possible to render a scene simply by clicking the Render button (or opening the Maxwell Fire window and clicking the Fire button). The plugin will automatically convert SketchUp's materials into Maxwell materials, using various heuristics to decide how each material ought to be converted. This process, however, is somewhat limited by a lack of information in the source SketchUp material; for example, all non-transparent materials will be exported as simple diffuse Maxwell materials, simply because there is no parameter in the SketchUp material by which the plugin could infer whether or not it should be exported differently.
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Let's render the scene now and see how it looks. The method of rendering depends on the plugin version.
SA
Click the Maxwell Fire button in the plugin toolbar:
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The plugin will export the SketchUp model to Maxwell Fire, and rendering will begin:
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RS
Click Render in the plugin's toolbar:
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Next, click the MXM toggle-button, which is located right next to the drop-down; when you do, the material page will spin around, revealing the material's MXM Mode interface. Next, click the Browse button to locate an MXM file; I will use tiles-29.mxm from the Arroway collection, which is included with Maxwell Render Suite (RS).
Clicking the buttons at the upper right will copy either the MXM's basic color, or its active texture (assuming it has one; this is set in Maxwell MXED) into the SketchUp material, so that we can see a representation of this MXM in the SketchUp viewport. As such, clicking the Copy Texture to SketchUp Material button, adjusting the texture size (in SketchUp) to 3 x 3 meters, setting focal distance to the near cube once more, and then clicking Render (in Maxwell Fire, the Re-export Scene [maxwell-fire.buttons.re_export_scene] button) will result in the following image:
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