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The sun in Maxwell's physical sky system is now customizable in size and color allowing for dramatic sun effects, as well as introducing a physically correct approach to controlling shadow softness (via sun radius) or distant emitters with parallel shadows. See more information here.
Fast GPU-driven Multilight preview
See your Multilight changes instantly in the main render view. Even Scattering and Dispersion update instantly - thanks to the new GPU accelerated Fast Multilight display! See more information here.
Improved Fire voxelization
Our scene preview engine Maxwell FIRE is much smarter in V3 - re-voxelizing only the objects which have changed, saving a tremendous amount of time when setting up your scenes. See more information here.
New Lenses: Pin hole, Orthographic, Spherical and Cylindrical
Five new lens types have been added to the Maxwell Camera: Spherical - great for making HDR environments or virtual walk-throughs, Fish Eye, Pinhole (creates no depth of field effect), Cylindrical and Orthographic. See more information here.
Material Assistants that ease material creation and editing
Maxwell materials assistant is a new, easy to use material editor which builds the basic material characterisitcs for you - greatly simplifying the material creation process and saving you lots of time. Choose first a category such as glass, metal, translucent, opaque and the material assistant will help you create perfectly optimised materials for your scene in just seconds! See more information here.
Double-sided materials
Separate materials can now be applied to the back-face of a polygon surface - making it much easier to create bottle labels, translucent paper, or add more variation to leaves etc. And as a bonus, it also works with the Maxwell grass modifier! See more information here.
Custom Alpha channel per object
A long awaited feature, now you can create unlimited 'layers' of alphas and add any object(s) to those layers, allowing you to isolate the exact objects you need. See more information here.
UV and Deep channels
Maxwell Render 3 can now render in 'deep image' format, which stores color as well as depth information per pixel, making it much easier to composite rendered objects together as well as eliminating troublesome edge artifacts. You can save the deep info in either .EXR or .DTEX formats, in rgba or alpha. See more information here and here.
On-the-fly booleans in render time
An object bounding box, sphere or plane can now be used as a 'cutting' object, which works in a similar way to the cameras Z-clip feature, except now you are no longer limited to the cameras near/far planes. See more information here.
Blockable emitters
Now you can isolate the contribution of each emitter to each individual object in the scene, allowing you to have objects not affected by certain emitters in the scene. This way, you have custom control over the lighting of each object in your scene. See more information here.
Image projectors
Emitters in Maxwell can now project light using any bitmap (or even a procedural texture!), much the same as a slide projector projects an image onto a canvas. See more information here.
Maxwell Volumetrics: Constant, Noise and Particle-driven fields
The new volumetric feature in Maxwell can work in several ways: as a constant density volumetric object - useful for large atmospheric haze effects or thick fog, it can work with particles files in several formats, including RealFlow .bin, and also with density fields/voxels directly from Maya or Houdini. See more information here.
Maxwell Sea
Maxwell Sea creates realistic ocean surfaces and waves based on the Ocean Statistical Spectrum from RealFlow. Various parameters such as water depth and surface dimensions allow you to produce a convincing water surface, from swimming pools to open ocean. The meshing is only done at render time, meaning it takes up almost no extra space in the .MXS file. See more information here.
Maxwell Scatter
The new Maxwell Scatter modifier distributes instances of an object (or even referenced MXS files) across the surface of another object, with similar parameters to the Maxwell grass modifier - including the ability to add density maps, or randomize the size and rotation. See more information here here.
Pixar Open SubDivision in render time
The new Subdivision feature allows you to subdivide low-polygon objects into smooth surfaces, by implementing Pixar OpenSubdiv. Because it's subdividing the geometry only at render time - your scene files take up far less space and can be transfered much faster around your network. See more information here.
Improved and accelerated Motionblur
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The Alembic file format allows for very efficient storage of geometry and other scene data, which can now be referenced directly in Maxwell V3. Support for Alembic includes static and animated geometry as well as particles. It also works with the Exocortex CRATE suite of Alembic plugins. See more information here.
10 rendernodes included with every Maxwell Render Suite Floating license
Maxwell Render Suite floating licenses for V3 will now come with 10 rendernodes included, as standard! See more information here.
Minor new features and improvements
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