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Although we are obsessed with quality and taking a real world approach to rendering, it doesn't mean we don't understand the needs of our users to "bend" reality when needed. It is often said that unbiased rendering means no flexibility. This is simply not true. To mention a few concrete examples in Maxwell: you can hide objects to camera but still have them influence the scene lighting and reflections, you can hide objects to reflections/refractions, you can hide objects to GI, you can render a diffuse only pass, or a reflection only pass, you can turn direct or indirect caustics on/off, you can render a motion vector channel in case you wish to do the motion blur in post, a shadow pass channel (which takes into account the full GI of the scene and changes to lights using ML), a fresnel pass, a normals pass etc. You can find the full list of render channels available in Maxwell here. And the object visibility options are described here.
Mature feature set
Easily controlled true 3D motion blur with unlimited substeps, accurate displacement (incl. vector displacement), instancing, MXS referencing, high quality materials, subsurface scattering, hair/fur, grass, emitter settings using real world values, real world film/photo camera settings (incl. anamorphic bokeh effects), accurate reflected/refracted caustics, RealFlow connection for rendertime meshing of RF particles (included with each license of Maxwell), IES lights...
MXI file
During the render, Maxwell generates an image file (in your desired image format: exr, tiff, tga, jpg...) plus another image file in the proprietary MXI format (stands for Maxwell Image format).
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We strongly recommend to first of all read two short sections in our documentation which will help to avoid excessive render times and bad looking renders.
Installation and Licensing
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- In Linux, to add MAXWELL3_ROOT to your environment, assuming that you are using bash and maxwell is installed in
/opt/local/maxwell-3.1, edit $HOME/.bash_profile and add this line:
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export MAXWELL3_ROOT=/opt/local/maxwell-3.1 |
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If you use csh or tcsh, edit $HOME/.cshrc and add this line:
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setenv MAXWELL3_ROOT /opt/local/maxwell-3.1 |
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 MAXWELL3_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. |
More information about the installation process can be found here:
http://support.nextlimit.com/display/maxwelldocs/Installation
Licensing
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If you are installing Maxwell in one or few computers, the easiest way to get it correctly licensed is to use the License Info panel (from Maxwell.exe, go to Help>License Info), and paste there your customer licensing information (this customer information is a license text block embedded in the confirmation email you received from our Sales Department after acquiring Maxwell). You simply have to copy and paste that license text in the License Info panel, and Maxwell will automatically create a license.txt file containing your customer info and will store it in your user folder, where it will easily find it (the exact location of the license file is displayed in the popup window if the licensing process went successful, stating “License saved in.....”).
More about licensing Maxwell is described here: Licensing
To license more than one computer, repeat the same procedure on each computer, pasting your same license text block in each License Info panel.
Licensing many computers
In order to license many computers at the same time you can set the license path through an extra MAXWELL3_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.
The license path can be a network path (\\mypc\shared\maxwell\license.txt), or if the user has mounted an image it will look like a normal path (z:\maxwell\license.txt).
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Maxwell
Maxwell 3 has, basically, two different license types: Node-Locked and Floating. Node-Locked are designed to be used on one computer only and once activated the license it gets tied to it. On the other hand, Floating licenses are served from one central computer and used from different computers connected to it in the network.
More about licensing Maxwell is described here: Licensing
Network Rendering
The native Maxwell Network System
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The full list of running flags and parameters can be found here: Command Line
Launching a Rendernode using command line
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
Special features
Resuming a render
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More info on command line flags can be found here in the online documentation or typing maxwell –help in a command line window.
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Multilight is the ability to change light intensity (and optionally color in the Color MultiLight mode) in real time while rendering or once the render has finished. A full description of this acclaimed feature can be found here
Important: Multilight does not increase render times significantly, except the files generated are bigger so time to save to disk can be slower depending on the hardware performance. However Multilight increases the memory consumption linearly with the number of lights. It means if this feature is enabled, a render with 20 lights will need to allocate 20x more memory in image buffers than a render with one light. It is important in scenarios where the user does not want to adjust lights later, to disable MultiLlight from Render options or using the -multilight:off flag.
Specifically Color MultiLight needs even more memory than intensity MultiLight and should be used only when there is a real need of changing light colors after the render.
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One important tip is to merge lights that you want to be controlled together, by applying the same emitter material to all geometry that you want to control using a single ML slider. This way you can still benefit from ML, but keep the memory usage to a minimum. |
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Every purchase of Maxwell Render includes for free all our plugins so you can easily work across multiple 3D and compositing applications (incl. After Effects, Nuke, Photoshop). There is a separate section for each plugin in the documentation - see the Plug-ins section for the full list.
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