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This node holds all the material properties and Layer connections. It is the equivalent of the "Material Properties" in the MXM (Maxwell material format). Here you can change Global Bump textures, global texture tiling, activate dispersion or shadows for the material etc. From this node you can also click Add Layer to add a new Layer node to the material. The Maxwell Layered Material must always be connected to the Surface output of the Softimage Material node. For more information about these parameters, see the Global Material Properties page in the Maxwell documentation.

Maxwell Layer

This node describes a Layer in the MXM, which can hold several BSDFs and Emitter components. Effectively, each Layer is a material in itself, which can be blended together using Layer masks.

To add a Layer to the material, double-click the Maxwell Layered Material node and click the "Add Layer" button. The order in which Layers are connected matters - a Layer above another Layer will hide the Layer underneath it, unless it is set to Additive mode or you are using a Layer mask. Please see the Maxwell Materials section for more details on working with Layers and more specifically the Stacking Layers page. Due to an SI SDK limitation it is not possible to automatically create a new port when trying to connect a Maxwell Layer node into the MaxwellLayeredMaterial node. You have to add an new port via the "Add Layer" button in the MaxwellLayeredMaterial PPG.

Maxwell BSDF

This node describes the BSDF component of a Maxwell material. To add BSDF to a Layer, double-click a Maxwell Layer node and click the "Add BSDF" button. The order in which BSDFs are connected does not matter, they are always blended together similar to blending paints in a bucket. Each BSDFs strength can be adjusted using the Weight Value parameter in the BSDF node.

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You can choose either the Maxwell Texture node or the regular Softimage Image node when using textures. An Image node is automatically added when you connect a texture to an input port that supports textures, ex. Reflection 0, Bump Texture, Opacity Texture etc. If you want to use the Maxwell Texture node you have to first drag & drop it in the Render Tree and connect it.

Previewing Maxwell Render materials in Softimage

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You can specify the material preview scene to be used for each material by opening the MaxwellLayeredMaterial PPG and unchecking "Use global scene". Then choose the preview scene to use for this material. The list is populated from the Next Limit/Maxwell 2/preview install folder. For info on how to create your own preview scenes, see the Maxwell material editor page (Material Preview section).

Import/Export a material

The MaxwellLayeredMaterial node has options to export the current render tree to an MXM, or import an MXM file into the render tree.

• Export: Will export the entire render tree to an MXM file
• Import: Will import an MXM file and replace the current render tree

Working with referenced materials

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• Library: Opens MXEDs library browser that lets you browse your collection of MXM files. The browser shows thumbnails of the MXM files for easier selection. Please the MXED page for more details. The Library window has two tabs: Local and Web. The Local tab is for browsing MXM files on your local computer, the Web tab allows you to browse and download materials directly from the online MXM gallery which has over 4000 user submitted materials.

• Online: Opens up the Library browser with only the Web tab visible to search the online MXM gallery. You can click on the small thumbnails in the search results list to open a bigger thumbnail of the material. Click on the Import button and MXED will download and unzip the material and any textures that belong to it. By default it will download the material to a temp folder that the plugin createsand any textures to the <current project>Pictures folder. You can instead also choose where to download materials from the Preferences in MXED. To do this, open MXED.exe, either from the icon on your desktop or browse to the Maxwell 2 install folder. Go to File>Preferences>MXM Gallery and enter an alternative download folder. After the material has downloaded and unzipped, MXED will close and the newly imported material will replace the previous material.

• Embed material in scene: When this option is checked, the plugin will embed the MXM file into the generated MXS file - it will no longer be a referenced material.

Unsupported Softimage Render Tree nodes

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