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Maxwell Render first appeared in 2004. Today, it continues to be the benchmark for render quality - with many of its innovative features being adopted right across the market. The backbone of the Maxwell Render project during these last 8 10 years has been “quality first”, and we firmly believe that this approach is the only sensible one in the long term.
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The easiest way of installing Maxwell is through the installer (provided for Windows, Mac and Linux). The installer just copies a set of files and folders inside the installation folder chosen by the user and also in Windows and Linux it creates a new environment variable called MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_ROOT which points to that folder.
To install Maxwell on many machines without running the installer in all of them it's possible to run the installer just in one node and then copy the Maxwell folder and set the MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_ROOT environment variable to the rest of the machines.
- In Windows, to add MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_ROOT to your environment, open your system Properties panel (Control Panel>System) and enter the Advanced System Settings section. Among the Advanced settings you will find the Environment Variables panel. Maxwell needs a System Variable pointing to the Maxwell application folder, so in the System Variables list, hit New to create a new environment variable, name it MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_ROOT, and in its value enter the path to your Maxwell 2 3 application folder. This will indicate your system when the Maxwell component are stored whenever it needed it.
- In Linux, to add MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_ROOT to your environment, assuming that you are using bash and maxwell is installed in
/opt/local/maxwell-23.71, edit $HOME/.bash_profile and add this line:
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export MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_ROOT=/opt/local/maxwell-23.71 |
If you use csh or tcsh, edit $HOME/.cshrc and add this line:
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setenv MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_ROOT /opt/local/maxwell-23.71 |
It's also possible to write a system specific script that does the copying for you and adds the environment variables to each machine.
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The installer also creates another environment variable called MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_MATERIALS_DATABASE that points to the folder where the resources (material files, etc) installed with the package are located. This variable is not needed when running Maxwell in node mode. |
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In order to license many computers at the same time you can set the license path through an extra MAXWELL2MAXWELL3_LICENSE_PATH environment variable. This environment variable (created in the same way as described above) must point to a path where you stored your license.txt file. This file is the one generated by the Maxwell License Info panel described in the paragraph above. So simply license Maxwell on one computer following the described procedure, find the license.txt file that Maxwell generated, and move it to your desired path.
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To launch Maxwell in command line mode using a node license instead of a full GUI, all that is needed is adding the –node flag to the arguments list.
A note on installing Rendernodes on Linux (X11 and Xvfb)
Due to 3rd part dependencies, Maxwell needs an X11 session running even in nongui mode. However there is a workaround that can be used to run Maxwell on machines with no display hardware and no physical input devices, using Xvfb (virtual framebuffer). More info on how to use Xvfb can be found here: Network FAQ
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