...
The material parameters are explained in depth in the Maxwell Materials section of the main manual. This section will focus only on the features specific to the Max integration.
Component Tree
A Maxwell material is composed of layers which are blended together like in a 2D painting application. Each layer can contain one or more BSDFs and one emitter component. An optional coating component can be attached to each BSDF. There are also a few global properties which apply to all the layers and an optional displacement component. The material structure is displayed inside MEdit using a custom tree control:
...
Components can be removed by pressing the delete key or clicking the delete button at the bottom of the tree. Layers and BSDFs can be renamed by double clicking them or pressing the F2 key.
Re-ordering components
You can reorder, reparent, copy and swap components by drag and drop. During the drag operation, a description of the operation which will be performed is displayed at the bottom of the item being dragged. Dropping an item over an item of the same kind will move the first item before or after the second item, depending on the exact mouse position. Dropping an item over a new parent will move the item as the last child of the new parent. Holding down the shift key will make a copy of the item being dragged, instead of moving the original. If the control key is held, you can swap two items by dropping one on top of the other.
...
All the operations are undoable.
Solo Layers
When a material contains two or more layers you can use the make solo context menu button to deactivate all layers except the one that is currently selected. This allows you to see only that layer during rendering in order to simplify tweaking specific parts of a layer in a complex material. This setting is available by right clicking any component of the layer and pressing the "Make Solo" button. Pressing "Make Solo" on a layer that is already solo will enable all the layers again. When the material contains only one layer, the Make Solo button has no effect.
Adding components
The first 5 buttons at the bottom of the tree allow you to add new components: D - displacement, L - layer, E - emitter, B - BSDF, C - coating. Some of them will be disabled when the given component cannot be added (because it already exists or cannot be added to the currently selected parent). The "Preview" button refreshes the material swatch when the preview mode is set to "on demand" in the plug-in preferences.
If you graph the Maxwell material in the Slate editor, you will see that each component corresponds to a separate node. However, no data flow occurs between the nodes, the connections are only used to represent the hierarchy. There is no point in adding non-Maxwell nodes between the components and doing so will cause the material to be exported incompletely at render time. It is best to use the material tree control to manipulate the structure instead of setting up connections directly in the Slate editor.
Textures
Maxwell uses the MxBitmap Texmap to represent textures. The parameters are the same as the ones presented in the image and projection properties from this page from the main Maxwell documentation. This section of the documentation will outline only the parts of the UI that are specific to the MxBitmap node.
...
MxBitmap does not yet support procedural textures. If you wish to render such nodes, you will have to use a referenced MXM material.
Viewport Display
When the viewport is set to shaded mode, the Maxwell material is displayed using the color of the first active emitter or BSDF found in the material. MXI emitters and BSDFs where the reflectance 0 attribute is textured are skipped.
...
Blended textures |
Single texture override |
|---|
Importing and Exporting Materials
Materials can be imported and exported in the MXM file format by using the corresponding buttons above the material tree. When you export a material, you are offered the option to also copy all the material resources (textures, IES files, IOR files) next to the MXM file.
Library
The Library button opens MXED (Maxwell Renders standalone material editor) in library browsing mode, so that you can import materials from the collection which is installed together with Maxwell, or browse to any folder which contains MXM files.
Gallery
The Gallery button allows you to browse Maxwell's online material gallery which contains hundreds of high quality materials made by Maxwell users. When you click the Import button, the corresponding MXM file and all its dependencies are copied to the sourceimages subdirectory of the current Maya project and the material settings are imported.
...
Wizard
The Wizard button allows you to create common material types by providing only a few parameters. These presets are a good way to start learning about creating materials.
Swatches
Material swatches can be updated automatically, whenever a material attribute is changed, or on demand by pressing the Preview button below the material tree. You can select the update mode in the plug-in preferences, along with the preview scene and quality settings. Depending on the hardware configuration, material complexity and number of materials in the scene, updating the swatches can become a time consuming operation, especially when opening MEdit, which tries to display many materials at once. In that case, switch to on demand updating. The swatch images are saved to disk when saving the scene, so in on demand mode they don't need to be recomputed every time they need to be displayed.