The core rendering application in Maxwell Render (previously called MXCL) is the engine which computes your render and shows you the final image. The component is called Maxwell.exe in Windows, Maxwell.app in Mac OSX and Maxwell in Linux. It provides a standalone interface that allows users to load MXS scenes to render, view the rendering progress and adjust render parameters. Many of these parameters can be adjusted while the render is in progress. When adjusting parameters, the small preview image will show you the results in real-time.
Introduction and basic concepts
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Progressive rendering
The Maxwell Render approach to rendering is quite different from that of other rendering engines. Because of its physically correct behavior and spectral calculations of light, there is no concept of a “finished” render. The render will keep calculating until you stop it, progressively getting cleaner and cleaner. Maxwell renders the entire image at once, not in "buckets" giving you a very quick idea of what the final render will look like.
Sampling Level
As the render calculates you will see the image output get less and less noisy and the Sampling Level (SL) increase continuously. The SL is a basic measure of quality, the higher it is the less noise the render will have. A few key points regarding SL:
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An MXI file is always written to disk when Maxwell renders and it updates with every change in SL. If you don't specify an output path for the MXI file, it will be written to your systems temp folder. It is always a good idea to specify an output path for the MXI when rendering, not just an image output path. This will ensure you can always resume a render, even if the systems temp folder is purged, and it allows you save several versions of your render using different exposure or Multilight settings, without having to re-render.
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| In Maxwell 2.7 we have introduced a transparent, loss-less compression system for both MXS and MXI files. Compression ratios are excellent when rendering additional channels such as alpha, shadows or ID's. With all channels activated, the MXI file can be 4x smaller. The compression system does not affect save performance more than 1-2%. |
Supported input image formats
The Maxwell application can also import image files to perform certain simple image adjustments (like changing its exposure to get a brighter or darker result) or change the file format. You can use Maxwell to convert a i.e. Tiff file into a Tga format. These are the supported image formats:
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*Images with embedded alphas can use the alpha as a layer mask | ||||||||||||||||||