Upgrade to V4 eliminates all Maxwell Materials and settings

[Andrew West 345]

I bit the bullet a couple of weeks ago and bought V4.   Installed properly on Windows 7 machine.  I opened a very large project that had about 105 Maxwell materials and dozens of lights.  All the lights are now Form.z distant lights and all the materials have reverted to Form.z materials.  On top of that all my camera settings and maxwell scene settings are gone.  Start over.  Lost about 4 days of work and now I have to call the client and make another lame excuse as to why I will be days late.  Has anyone else experienced this and if so is there any way to get Maxwell settings back to where they were?

Andrew

[pylon 288]

Hi Andrew,

 

In response to your thread title "Upgrade to V4 eliminates all Maxwell Materials and settings": No, it does not.

 

There should be no problem opening a formZ project that had Maxwell 3 for formZ materials, lights, etc., into a formZ with the Maxwell 4 installed.  Perhaps you opened your project into formZ without either of the Maxwell plugins installed, and then saved it (again, without a Maxwell plugin installed) so no Maxwell data would be embedded in that case. (The plugin must be installed to read and write the Maxwell data.)

 

Assuming that you have Maxwell 4 successfully installed now, just open your project with the embedded Maxwell 3 settings and it should work fine. It sounds like you saved over that version without Maxwell installed, so you'll need to revert to a version of your project just prior to that.

 

(Alternately, if you saved your project with the Maxwell 4 plugin, the data will not readable by the Maxwell 3 plugin. If you want to re-install Maxwell 3 for some reason, you will again want to go back to the last version of the project saved with the Maxwell 3 plugin.)

[Andrew West 345]

Your response was as expected.  I opened the project AFTER installing the software and plugins but before the program accessed the license server.  I believe I should have opened a blank project and then tried to license the software from there instead of from my current project.  Just a guess.

[pylon 288]

The Maxwell plugin does need to be installed to read and write the Maxwell data within the formZ project, however, it doesn't need to be licensed.

[Andrew West 345]

Then I have no clue as to why it eliminated all things related to Maxwell.  Now that it is properly licensed I can open other projects and their associated materials and camera settings are all there.  Just not on my current project.

On another topic I have assigned Maxwell in my Nvidia 3D control panel to use the video card for processing.  I then go to Display Settings-Maxwell-Scene- Quality- set it to GPU (windows +Nvidia).  If I now hit the render button Maxwell launches, hangs for a really long time doing nothing and my Form.z window goes blank and hangs up as well. Force quit everything and relaunch.  If I go back to not using the GPU  the scene takes considerably longer to render than it did in V3.  I have looked at the V4 manual and under Render Quality there is no information about how to use the GPU for processing.  Is there any documentation anywhere that explains how to set this up?

[pylon 288]

Andrew,

 

As I mentioned above, for your current project you will most likely have so step back one project version. If you are not currently saving multiple versions of your project under incremented filenames as you go, I would highly recommend you do so (for instance, I save my projects under a new filename every half hour or so, as well as whenever I make a major change; many people use formZ's autosave feature for this, or the LAB Incremental Save plugin).

 

GPU requirements may be found here: http://support.nextlimit.com/display/maxwell4/System+requirements?src=search

 

For questions regrading GPU rendering, please see the Maxwell 4 topic over in the main Next Limit forums, as this is part of the Maxwell application. (I know you render very large images with lots of textures; it may be that you do not have enough video RAM to hold and process the scene.)

 

[Andrew West 345]

My Nvidia k2200 card has 4GB of ram and 640 CUDA cores.  How can that not be enough?  My file size is only 82MB and the 105 textures aren't that big.  I assume from the manual that just the project and its textures need to fit on the card.  Is the program being loaded onto the card as well?  I don't have any experience with this.

I also see that the program can only access one card for the time being.  That is unfortunate.