Modo plugin - Materials

Our plugin has complex mechanisms to convert modo materials to Maxwell materials automatically (or semi-automatically ). You can set your modo material, adjust its values (transparency, reflectivity, etc.), add your texture images and the plugin creates the Maxwell material for you. It is so easy! In case you want to be more specific about the conversion, you can use the Maxwell Material extensions which are accessible from the Material Conversion tab of the Maxwell Properties viewport.

Automatic conversion is good enough in some situations, but for a really high quality render you have to use real Maxwell materials. Maxwell plugin for Modo R2 can handle “*.mxm” material files, so you can use your own Maxwell materials inside modo or you can download material files from the WEB. You can find more than 3000 free Maxwell materials there.

Automatic (and semi-automatic) Conversion

Plugin provides fully automatic material conversion for modo materials. It walks through the Shader Tree and builds the materials accordingly. Automatic conversion takes care about the layer order and layer transparency of the material items (summarizes color and amount values) but keep in mind that the modo layer structure is not perfectly transferable to Maxwell! It means that only the top most (visible) image or texture in the Shader Tree will be transferred as texture map to Maxwell.

Modo Layer effects and channels used by the Automatic conversion

• (effect) Group Mask
• (effect) Diffuse Color
• (effect) Diffuse Amount
• (effect) Specular Color
• (effect) Specular Amount
• (effect) Reflection Color
• (effect) Reflection Amount
• (effect) Transparent Color
• (effect) Transparent Amount
• (effect) Subsurface Color
• (effect) Subsurface Amount
• (effect) Luminous Color
• (effect) Luminous Amount
• (effect) Roughness
• (effect) Anisotropy Direction
• (effect) Stencil
• (effect) Bump
• (effect) Displacement
• (effect) Normal
• (effect) Vector Displacement
• (channel) Absortion Distance (Transparency)
• (channel) Refracive Index (Transparency)
• (channel) Scattering Distance (SSS)
• (channel) Front Weighting (SSS)

In case you are not happy with the result of the automatic conversion (but you don't want to use mxm material) you can tweak the material conversion with the Base Types.

Base Type (Maxwell material extensions)

With the Base Type parameter you can reach the Maxwell Material Extension functionality from inside the plugin. The default value of Base Type is "(automatic)" which is the normal material conversion mode (no material extension applied). Select an extension from the list to alter the look of the exported material. These extensions have their own parameter set.These parameters (colors or values) can be set independently from the modo material, or you can attach them to modo effect channels. For example the "Opaque" extension has its own Color parameter. Under the Color parameter you can see the Color Map drop-down list with the available effect connections. Choose "Diffuse Color" from the list and the plugin will read the color parameter of this extension from the Diffuse Color components (color, image, texture,...) of the Shader Tree.

Maxwell MXM item

To handle Maxwell mxm materials inside modo you have to add Maxwell MXM item(s) to your scene. Maxwell MXM is somewhat similar to the Image Map item, but while Image Map connects image clips to the scene materials, Maxwell MXM does the same with mxm files.

Actually the plugin loads the mxm material files into the scene as clip items, and Maxwell MXM represents the mxm file in the Shader Tree and attaches uv maps or texture projection (via Texture Locators) to the textures inside the material file.

You can add Maxwell MXM items to the scene from the plugin window (Load MXM Material button), from the Shader Tree (Add Layer > Maxwell > Maxwell MXM) or you can drag and drop it from the Preset Browser onto a geometry item.

Click on the Add Layer drop-down button to add Maxwell MXM item.

Enable

Enable/disable Maxwell MXM layer.

Render in modo

Set it to ON if you want modo to display Maxwell MXM in preview and final render.

View

Quick display of the mxm material preview thumbnail.

Edit MXM

Opens the mxm file in the Maxwell Material Editor.

MXM file

The mxm file connected to the Maxwell MXM item. With this control you can load other mxm files from your computer (load mxm), download it from Maxwell web catalog (load from Web Gallery) or you can create a new mxm file (new mxm).

Displayed in modo

You can select the material texture you want to display in modo. In the drop-down list you can see the layers and components of the material (bsdf, emitter, displacement, coating) and the available textures with the associated channel numbers. The first item in the list is an automatic proposal from the program (plugin tries to find the most typical texture or color for material display).

Channel Locators

In the Channel Locators area you can see the channel ids of the mxm file and the associated Texture Locators.  With these controls it is very easy to connect Mesh uvs or projected uvs (via Texture Locators) to the Maxwell materials.

You can follow the uv projection changes in the modo preview render window or in any 3D Model viewport with RayGL.

The connection between Maxwell MXM and Maxwell Material Editor is live. It is especially useful if Maxwell FIRE is running and you want to fine tune the material, or if you want to change the uv projection parameters. (In the second case you can follow the changes not just in Maxwell FIRE but in the modo preview window too). After you save the changes in mxed, the material updates automatically inside modo.