Studio includes an interactive preview mode, Maxwell FIRE (which stands for Fast Interactive Rendering), which gives you a completely interactive feedback of your scene, rendered quickly in CPU draft or GPU modes.
As it works internally with Maxwell Render technology, it is physically correct , and provides an outstanding lighting and shading quality.
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The Interactive Preview panel provides you quick feedback during your scene setup
You can launch it by clicking the Fire button use the action buttons to launch or stop the preview either in CPU or GPU mode in the Interactive Preview panel.:
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Action buttons
You can interactively adjust the materials, the environment conditions, and the intensity of lights or move the camera and adjust its settings.
You can also move objects and lights in your scene whenever you want, although it needs a quick voxelization time to update the scene configuration.
On the main bar of the Interactive Preview window you have the following tabs:
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tools and options as well as the informative area at the bottom:
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Tools in the Interactive render panel
Camera selector
This drop-down lists all the cameras that are available in your scene. Use it to select the camera you want to be rendered in the Interactive Preview. You can freely navigate in the Interactive Preview window with the Studio navigation shortcuts (Alt+LMB to orbit, Alt+MMB to pan and Alt+RMB to zoom) to explore your scene in detail. To revert to the original camera position, select your camera in the Camera selector drop-down.
Options
• Set Camera View: If you find a view that you like, you can set it to be the cameras new position. Choose Set Camera View and your camera in Studio will move to your current preview view.
• Isolate Selection: When this option is enabled, only the selected object will be rendered in the Interactive Preview. It is very useful for getting faster feedback when adjusting one particular object. Disable this option to render the whole scene in the Interactive Preview.
• Save Image: You can save the preview render to disk in any supported image format using this option.
• Settings: This opens the Interactive Preview settings menu, which allows you to set the quality of the interactive render, by adjusting the target Render Time (for the interactive render) in seconds, the target Sampling Level, and the rendering quality in a 1 to 5 scale, which affects the preview images antialiasing level - lower quality gives you faster and rougher previews. The quality level does not affect the quality of the global illumination or any other lighting or rendering feature except for the resolution of the interactive preview, so the higher the quality level, the higher the resolution of the interactive preview.
Tools
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Icon | Function | Description |
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  | Linked camera toggle. | This icon synchronizes or frees the camera movements with the interactive preview point of view. When the movement is free, you can orbit, pan or zoom the camera without updating Fire or orbit, pan and zoom in the Fire window without moving the camera. |
 | Save Image. | This button lets you save the resulting image obtained from the interactive preview. |
 | Settings. | This button opens the interactive preview options panel which allows changing the Sampling Level and Time Limit for the interactive preview as well as the Quailty level which controls the resolution of the image rendered with the interactive preview. |
Preview Options
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Sampling Level: This sets the Sampling Level limit for the interactive preview; once the render reaches that SL Maxwell will stop calculating the preview.
Time Limit (s): This sets a second limit to stop the render, this time in seconds. The limit that is reached first will stop the preview.
Quality: This setting changes the resolution of the preview. It can go from 1 to 10. Lower quality means a lower resolution and faster previews and higher quality means a higher resolution and slower previews. This doesn’t affect the quality of the light solution, ray bounces, or anything similar.
Here is the resolution of the different quality levels; the horizontal dimension is fixed and dependant on the quality level, the second dimension depends on the proportion of the camera used. This list shows the resolution of the default camera.
1: 200x150
2: 320x240
3: 400x300
4: 640x480
5: 720x540
6: 1024x768
7: 1280x960
8: 1440x1080
9: 1680x1260
10: 1920x1440
Floating Shadows and Floating Reflections
Studio is able to display Floating Shadows and Floating Reflections of your objects on the ground, even without a geometry ground plane in the scene. You can get more information about this feature here.