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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.
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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.
 Drag and drop to move items |  Hold the shift key to copy instead of move |
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 Hold the control key to swap two items | |
All the operations are undoable.
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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.
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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.
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The following screenshots show a material similar to the one used in the Stacking Layers example. The material has 3 layers: a painted ceramic layer at the bottom, a gold layer using a mask over the paint and the yellow symbols on top of everything. The image on the left shows the blended layers in the viewport, while on the right the ceramic paint texture was selected as an override, so it's displayed by itself.
 Blended textures |  Single texture override |
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The plug-in offers a few more advanced display modes which are accessible if you switch to a Maxwell viewport by going to the Panels -> Maxwell menu. The submenu which opens shows a list of cameras, just like the Perspective menu, but also has 3 quality settings:
Normal Shading: specular highlights are computed based on the sun direction (if the sun is enabled in the environment settings). If a normal map is applied in the global material parameters, it is also rendered. Speculars are applied everywhere, regardless of material roughness.
Advanced Shading: also takes into account the image-based environment, reflectance 90, Nd and roughness parameters to produce a preview which is as close as possible to the rendered look. This mode does not support emitters and does not compute shadows.
Interactive Rendering: uses Maxwell FIRE to render the viewport.
 Normal Shading - specular highlights and normal map |  Advanced Shading - IBL and roughness play an important part |
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 Interactive Rendering - FIRE in the Maya viewport |  Final rendered result, for comparison |
The Advanced Shading mode performs complex calculations which can significantly slow down the viewport. It has become somewhat obsolete with the introduction of Maxwell FIRE.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Merging materials
The Merge button allows you to merge two existing materials from the scene:
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