form•Z | Materials | Referenced MXM

Owned by
ben (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 03 Dec, 2013 by
Mihai Iliuta (Unlicensed)
Version comment
3 min read

Referenced MXM

Each form•Z material can be linked to a external Maxwell Material file (MXM) on disk. Maxwell will render using the referenced MXM, instead of auto-translating the form•Z Shaded representation.

MXMs can be designed from scratch with the Maxwell Material Editor application (MXED), or you can download and use thousands of user-contributed materials here: http://resources.maxwellrender.com/ (free)

Click on the 'Referenced MXM' radio button to enable this mode.

  • Open: Select the MXM file on disk. The MXM to 'Shaded' Renderer dialog is presented after selecting the MXM to assign texture maps.
  • Delete: Remove reference to external MXM.
  • Quote: Copy the name of the MXM file into the form•Z material name.
  • Edit: Edit the MXM in MXED.
  • Is Emitter: Enable if the MXM is an emitter.
  • Update Shaded: Invokes the MXM to 'Shaded' Renderer dialog. See section that follows.
  • Preview: Generate a preview of the material in the form•Z sample scene (6” sphere, 6” cylinder, 6” cube, or 6” plane)

  • Use MXED: Display the preview embedded in the MXED instead.

MXM to ‘Shaded’ Renderer

This dialog controls how bitmap textures in the MXM are assigned to formZ's 'Shaded' modes. This is necessary for editing the position, scale, and rotation of textures. If an MXM uses a bitmap texture, and one is not assigned to the corresponding formZ 'Shaded' material, a rendering error will likely occur.

 

If an MXM uses bitmap textures, at least one must be assigned to formZ's  'Shaded' color or transparency channels. (If a map is not assigned to either channel, formZ will not generate UVs for the objects that the material has been assigned to, resulting in a rendering error.)

Upon opening the dialog, the Resource Manager will attempt to find any missing textures. See: form•Z | Resource Manager

Info

This pane displays general information about the MXM, such as whether it requires a bitmap texture to be assigned.

'Shaded' Color Texture
  • Short List: Select from a list containing all bitmap textures referenced by the MXM.
  • Open: Manually select a bitmap image from disk.
  • Delete: Remove reference to bitmap image.
  • View: View the bitmap image.
'Shaded' Transparency Texture

Same as above, with the addition of:

  • Use Alpha Channel: The alpha channel of the selected bitmap will be used, rather than the RGB image.

 

When a bitmap is selected, it is analyzed by the plugin. A warning will be presented if the MXM uses image types that are not supported by formZ, such as 16-bit tiffs, or progressive-encoded jpegs. Such images will have to be converted in a photo editor to 8-bit images (or baseline-encoded jpegs) before they can be used.