Cinema - Preferences

The plugin adds a Maxwell page to C4D's Preferences. The parameters in this page are used to control various aspects of how the plugin works.

Material Preferences

The Sampling Level, Preview Scene, and Viewport textures parameters are used when new Materials are created. Texture projection is used to set the projection for the texture tags associated when plugin Materials are assigned to objects. The Preview threads value determines how many threads to use when rendering previews for plugin Materials. Enable MXM Linking when MXM files are imported simply controls whether MXM Linking will be activated for materials when they are imported from MXM files.

Note: in versions prior to C4D R12, the Enable/Disable Real-time Material Preview option is also contained here, rather than as a button in the material editor.

Paths

These paths, in addition to the normal C4D Texture Paths, will be searched when attempting to locate missing textures and MXM files. Whereas the C4D Texture Paths are not searched recursively, these paths each provide a Depth value, which is used to determine how many directories deep to search under the specified location. In addition to the paths listed here and those set in C4D's Texture Paths, the plugin also recursively searches the following locations:

• [Maxwell root]/materials database/mxm files
• [Maxwell root]/materials database/textures
• [Maxwell root]/hdri

Checking the Don't search standard Maxwell directories option will cause the plugin not to add these paths to the search list. Note that changes made to the search paths require a restart of C4D before they may take effect – in general, adding paths will have an affect during the session, but removing them will not.

Defaults and Actions

If you have entered an Output Name here, it will be used for exporting when no name has been set in the Scene being exported. If no Output Name is set here, and there is also no name in the Scene, then the document name will be used. Similarly, if you have entered an Output Folder here, it will be used when none is specified in the Scene, while if there is none set, the plugin will try to use the path of the current document, or the current directory if the document has not been saved yet.

You can specify the plugin's document-overwriting policy using the last item. The choices are to use a warning dialog, to always overwrite existing files, or to automatically rename the output. When using automatic renaming, an incremental number will be appended to the filename if the specified file already exists.

File browser startup directories

The paths entered here will be used to set the startup directory for file-browser dialogs which are started from the plugin's Material Editor user-interface. When the option is enabled, the directories specified will be used for the first browsing for each file type; subsequent browsing will continue from the last-browsed directory for the file type. Note that this feature is not effective for files browsed from Attributes Manager parameters, and also that it may not work at all on C4D versions earlier than R10.5. If you do not wish the plugin to attempt to perform this action, enable the Allow Cinema to decide option.

Maxwell MXS Import Preferences

The plugin adds an MXS Import page to C4D's Import/Export Preferences.

Options

Maxwell MXS files contain mesh geometry in a meter-sized scale; depending on the scale you have set in C4D's Units Preferences, you may need to scale your MXS imports by some factor, and this is done using the Scale Factor parameter; all geometry will be scaled by this amount (i.e. scaled up 1000x in the screenshot above) when it is imported.

Maxwell MXS files use the concept of a currently-selected camera; when an MXS is imported, it is this camera which will be used to define C4D's Render Settings. Using the Selected Camera parameter, it is possible to override the camera selected in the MXS and use another one.

Filtering

Using the parameters in this group, it is possible to define what should and what should not be imported from MXS files.

The first four are fairly self-explanatory. The last two use string-matching on the provided list to accomplish their function. So, given the value for Meshes to include shown above, only meshes whose names begin with cube and sphere will be imported. That is to say, objects with names such as cube1, cube.1, cubeAnything, sphereLight, etc.

Other

The Import Commands (CSV) parameter is a variable-length list of strings, separated by commas, which represent other commands that the plugin will use to tailor the created C4D document during MXS import. Currently, only three import commands are supported:

Notes

The parameters presented above are also available when opening an MXS file with C4D via the command-line. Their names in this case are only slightly different, but their functions are the same:

Using these command-line versions of the MXS import options, it is possible to batch-convert a series of MXS files into C4D files. It is not possible to batch-render them in C4D (i.e. by using the -render C4D command-line option) though, because C4D does not pass the command-line to the plugin until after it has opened and rendered the specified file; in that case, the values specified in Preferences > Import/Export > Maxwell MXS Import will be used instead, as they are the only ones available to the plugin at the time of import.

Also note that currently, normals are not imported from the MXS file; they are calculated by C4D after the geometry has been imported. Also not currently supported for import are instances, and material selections.