Major new features and improvements
- Procedural textures
- Custom Sun Radius for both Constant Dome and Physical Sky System
- Fast GPU-driven Multilight preview
- Improved Fire voxelization
- New Lenses: Pin hole, Orthographic, Spherical and Cylindrical
- Material Assistants that ease material creation and editing
- Double-sided materials
- Custom Alpha channel per object
- UV and Deep channels
- On-the-fly booleans in render time
- Blockable emitters
- Image projectors
- Maxwell Volumetrics: Constant, Noise and Particle-driven fields
- Maxwell Sea
- Maxwell Scatter
- Pixar Open SubDivision in render time
- Improved and accelerated Motionblur
- Alembic format support
- 10 rendernodes included with every Maxwell Render Suite Floating license
Minor new features and improvements
Render Engine
- OpenEXR 2.0 support
- Half Float EXR support
- Histogram
- Wireframe shader (exposed as a procedural texture)
- Overlay text
- Pure non gui mode in linux (no need to have a X-server running or to run a virtual frame buffer)
- MaxwellMesher upgraded to take advantage of the new mesh generator in RealFlow Renderkit V3.
- New opacity attribute per object
- New normals backface culling attribute per object
Maxwell Studio
- Better GUI, with less panels and improved workflow. Many panels merged in a new Attributes Panel editor, Many lists merged in the Scene Tree.
- All the extensions can now have presets, including the grass extension. These presets are simple text files which the users can also create themselves.
- Material list can be viewed as an icon list or tree view (this one has additional columns for switching on/off matte and shadows)
- Big improvements in the material browser. Now it is much faster and not just for materials but for any resource now (textures, ies, etc..) files can be drag n dropped anywhere (i.e a texture to a map slot of the material editor, or an hdr file to the OpenGL viewport).
- Unified panel for objects and instances. Instances workflow enhanced - they are handled as normal objects now, they don’t have a separate panel. It is possible to change the object the instances refer to after they are created.
- Preferences stored in .ini files so it is easier to move them to other computers.
- When selecting cameras there are two handles now so it is much easier moving the camera point and target (or both together with the Shift key pressed)
- When Studio gets the focus again it refreshes the textures that have changed automatically, this is useful when a texture has been edited in an external editor.
- Added Hue control for the Texture Picker
- Added rotation and mirroring controls to the Texture Picker
Material editor (MXED)
- New displacement presets to make it easier to handle displacement maps created in different sculpting applications such as Mudbox or Zbrush.
- material preview window can be resized to predefined sizes
- Preference to display the material editor in a vertical layout
- Matte & shadow flags of materials can be changed in a selection of materials at the same time
- Materials can be renamed inside the material editor
Network
- More stability
- "-nogui" flag works as true no gui application and does not need an Xserver in linux
- Implemented a system to avoid that there is more than one Manager running per session using the same port range. If the user wants to bypass this system they can launch the Manager with the flag "-multiplemanagers"
- "SL Update" is not greyed out in Batch network render mode
- Sockets handling improved
- Now when send dependencies is not checked and the paths are not network paths the app asks to continue instead of cancelling the job wizard
- Now when the user clicks "release node" it asks the user if the current job should finish first
- Fixed "release node" function was not working properly in some cases
- "reset_all" and "reset_node" are much more robust now
- Missing paths handling improved