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Here you can find everything you need to adjust a Maxwell preview.
Illumination
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Intensity
This value is used to adjust the “brightness” of the sky and works like a multiplier. A higher value adds more light to the scene, lower settings result in a darker impression.
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When this option is checked the image-based lighting settings below will be accessible. The “Use physical sky” button will be deactivated simultaneously. As a consequence, you are no longer able to define the current time of the day with the slider, because all lighting information is now gathered from HDR images. The slots below “Use IBL” allow you to load different images for the render's background, illumination, reflection, and refraction channels.
IBL Channels (Background, Illumination, Reflection, Refraction)
These four tabs provide exactly the same parameters, settings, and buttons. “Background” specifies the image you will see in a render's background. With “Illumination” you are able to load an HDR image that acts like a global light source. An image under “Reflection” will be reflected on objects. This channel assumes that the object's material has some reflective properties. “Refraction” works similar to the previous channel, but here the node's material must not be completely opaque and have at least a small amount of transparency.
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To rotate the HDR image around the horizontal and/or vertical axes, please enter appropriate values to the two fields.
Global
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Image Quality
This value determines the quality level and resolution of the render engine. Higher settings yield better images, but also need more time. The range for this parameter is between 20% and 100%. Please note that “Quality” also influences the default pixel size of the render. When the value is too low, the render is blurred or receive a warning message that the task cannot be completed. A good value ranges between 60% and 80%. Although this parameter is named "Image Quality", it is actually a resolution value.
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Because Maxwell Render uses real world units for lighting and camera settings, the size of your scene objects must also have a real world scale. For example if you wish to render a building, but that building was exported with a size of just 1 meter, it will be rendered it as if it were a miniature building, and the lighting will not match your intentions. These differences can be compensated with “Global Scale”.
Playback
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Max Frame Time
If you want to limit the maximum render time per frame to a certain time, just enter the desired value here. The default value is 60 seconds. Please note that Maxwell will abort the render process after this time – even if the given “Sampling level” is not yet reached.
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Maxwell Render also support highly realistic motion blur. The value acts like a multiplier to stretch the blurs.
Channels
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RealFlow's implementation of Maxwell Render lets you several channels with your render. If you want to activate this feature just switch the appropriate channel from “off” to the EXR image format. The channel data is only stored with a Maxwell preview (Playback > Maxwell preview). When you do s single render with the “FIRE” engine, channels will not be calculated.
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If you want to visualize the normals please activate this channel.
Fire
This window is a 1:1 representation of the currently active viewport and the adjusted point of view. Each transformation of the viewport's perspective (zooming, panning, rotating) will be immediately performed in the render window as well. The rendered image is based on the settings you have chosen under “Maxwell Scene Preferences”.
When a RealFlow scene is rendered or previewed with Maxwell, it has to be translated into voxels first. The duration of this process strongly depends on the currently active scene's complexity and “MultiPoint” settings. The preparation of several millions of particle can easily take a few minutes. During this process you will see an orange progress bar directly in the “Maxwell Interaction” window with a label (“Voxelization”). The voxelization progress is not necessarily linear and you might observe that the progress bar stops for a while – this is absolutely normal.
Please bear in mind that some actions need a new voxelization, for example when new objects are added to scene or the number of particles has changed. Other changes (for example an increased image quality or a different tiling of RealWave surfaces) will also require a complete refresh. RealFlow will initiate the scene refresh automatically and you do not have to start it manually.
There are also some helpful shortcuts available:
Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + LMB: Force Maxwell to perform a new render with voxelization
Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + MMB: Force Maxwell to perform a new render without voxelization
The keyboard commands even work when the “Maxwell Interactive” window is inactive (in this case the Maxwell FIRE icon is yellow).
Send to Maxwell Command Line
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