The plugin adds a new Maxwell page to Rhino's Object Properties window:
As with any Object Properties page, this page is context-sensitive, tracking the current object selection in order to shows relevant information about the selected objects. The page is divided into four main sections.
Assigned material
This section shows which material, if any, is assigned to the selected object or objects. It also indicates whether the material is assigned by object, parent, or layer. Clicking on the preview image opens or closes the plugin’s Material Editor.
Render Properties
This section contains checkboxes for enabling the various Maxwell object properties:
| Property | Function |
|---|---|
| Hide | When enabled, this object will be exported, but will be hidden. |
| Hide from camera | Hides this object from being seen directly by the camera. |
| Hide from Reflections and Refractions | Hides this object from reflection/refraction calculations. |
| Hide from GI | Hides this object from the global-illumination calculation. |
| Hide from ZClip | Hides this object from Maxwell’s Z-Clip feature. |
| Object ID Color | Sets the color of this object when the Object ID channel is rendered. |
Real Scale Texture Control
When the assigned material’s selected texture has Real Scale enabled, and that texture uses Channel 0, then these x/y/z inputs may be used to adjust the attitude of that texture’s mapping. Real Scale mappings always use a cubic projection, so adjusting these values has the effect of rotating the theoretical mapping cube. To learn more, see the Real Scale tutorial.
Note that there is one very special case in which the Real Scale texture control's Z-Axis value is used for a very different purpose, and it has to do with experimental support for IES emitter directionality in this version of the plugin. When a Rhino spotlight is selected in the object properties page, and an IES-enabled emitter material is assigned to it, the Z-Axis value here may be used to rotate the IES lobe around its axis. This is useful because many IES profiles are asymmetrical. In the future, this functionality will be augmented and moved out of this Real Scale texture control (it is only used now since the feature is still experimental) and placed into an emitter-specific object properties page.
Motion Blur
The plugin supports Maxwell object motion-blur using two different strategies:
| Strategy | Description |
|---|---|
| Linear motion only | This may be used for objects which will only move in a straight line. Use this mode to save memory. |
| Full-range motion | This must be used for objects which will rotate or move in a non-linear way; this mode stores info for each mesh point. |
When one of these is enabled for an object, the plugin stores the object’s current position for use during export. At that time, the object will be written into the MXS file using both the stored position, and its position at export-time. Maxwell will figure motion-blur based on the difference between these two positions.
At any time, an object’s ‘initial’ position may be manually reset by selecting the object and clicking the ‘Reset Initial Positions’ button. During an animation, both the ‘initial’ and ‘current’ object-positions will be figured automatically, frame-to-frame, by the plugin.