Softimage - Working with Maxwell materials

The Maxwell material system is represented in Softimage by a few nodes which work in the same way as regular nodes in the Render Tree. You can either build a Maxwell material using these nodes from scratch in the Render Tree, or use the option Get>Material>Maxwell Layered Material, to apply a basic Maxwell material to your selection.

Maxwell material nodes

The plugin adds several nodes that can be drag and dropped inside the Render Tree to construct a material. To see all the nodes available, type "Maxwell" in the Preset Manager search box.

Maxwell Layered Material

This node holds all the material properties and Layer connections. It is the equivalent of the "Material Properties" in the MXM (Maxwell material format). Here you can change Global Bump textures, global texture tiling, activate dispersion or shadows for the material etc. From this node you can also click Add Layer to add a new Layer node to the material. The Maxwell Layered Material must always be connected to the Surface output of the Softimage Material node.

Maxwell Layer

This node describes a Layer in the MXM, which can hold several BSDFs and Emitter components. Effectively, each Layer is a material in itself, which can be blended together using Layer masks.

To add a Layer to the material, double-click the Maxwell Layered Material node and click the "Add Layer" button. The order in which Layers are connected matters - a Layer above another Layer will hide the Layer underneath it, unless it is set to Additive mode or you are using a Layer mask. Please see the Maxwell Materials section for more details on working with Layers. Due to SI SDK limitation it is not possible to automatically create a new port when trying to connect a Maxwell Layer node into the MaxwellLayeredMaterial node. You have to add an new port via the "Add Layer" button in the MaxwellLayeredMaterial PPG.

Maxwell BSDF

This node describes the BSDF component of a Maxwell material. To add BSDF to a Layer, double-click a Maxwell Layer node and click the "Add BSDF" button. The order in which BSDFs are connected does not matter, they are always blended together similar to blending paints in a bucket. Each BSDFs strength can be adjusted using the Weight Value parameter in the BSDF node.

MaxwellCoating

This node describes the Coating component. A MaxwellCoating node is connected to the "Coating" input of a BSDF node. Only one Coating component per BSDF is allowed but you can add several BSDFs to a material, each with its own coating. You can also set the weight of the BSDF that has a coating to 0 in which case only the coating component will be visible in the render - the fastest way to create soap bubbles.

Maxwell Displacement

This node describes the Displacement component. A 8/16/32 bit image can be connected to the "Map" input. To add a Maxwell Displacement node, double-click the Maxwell Layered Material node and click the "Add Displacement" button.

Maxwell Emitter

This node describes the Emitter component. To add a Maxwell Emitter node, double-click the Maxwell Layer node and click the "Add Emitter" button, or drag the Maxwell Emitter node into the Render Tree and connect it to the "Emitter" input. Only one Emitter node can exist per Layer.

Maxwell Texture

This node is similar to the standard Image node in Softimage but it holds additional parameters to control how textures are used in a Maxwell material such as

• Tile Unit: Relative vs Meters
• Image Controls: Brightness, Saturation, Contrast, RGB Clamp (please note that currently the Softimage Image processing nodes such as Color Correction are not supported)
• Alpha only: use only the alpha of the loaded texture for formats that support an embedded alpha e.g TIFF.

You can choose either the Maxwell Texture node or the regular Softimage Image node when using textures. An Image node is automatically added when you connect a texture to an input port that supports textures, ex. Reflection 0, Bump Texture, Opacity Texture etc. If you want to use the Maxwell Texture node you have to first drag & drop it in the Render Tree and connect it.

Previewing Maxwell Render materials in Softimage

It is possible to preview a Maxwell Render material inside the Render Tree, or in a separate shaderball window. To use the preview in the Render Tree, right-click on the Material node and make sure "Show Shaderball" is checked. Uncheck it to disable material previews.

To preview the material in a separate Shaderball window, click on the little "V" that appears when hovering over the Material node.

Setting the material preview options

You can set the preview time/Sampling Level and the default preview scene used for rendering, from File>Preferences>Custom>Maxwell.

• Preview scene: Set the default preview scene.
• Quality: Use Draft mode for faster preview renders and Production for high quality previews.
• Preview Time / Sampling Level: the preview will stop when either the time or the Sampling Level is reached - which ever is reached first.
• Threads: Number of cores to use for the preview render. 0 means all available cores will be used.

Changing the preview scene per material

You can specify the material preview scene to be used for each material by opening the MaxwellLayeredMaterial PPG and unchecking "Use global scene". Then choose the preview scene to use for this material. The list is populated from the Next Limit/Maxwell 2/preview install folder. For info on how to create your own preview scenes, see the Maxwell material editor page (Material Preview section).

Working with referenced materials

Referenced materials are a great way to re-use your Maxwell material library and make sure that when you update an MXM (Maxwell material file) once, it will update in all the scenes where you use this material. To use a referenced material, select your object(s) and choose Get>Material>Maxwell Referenced material.

Referenced material PPG

• New: Will open up MXED, Maxwell Renders standalone material editor, where you can create a new material. The first dialog box that appears asks you where you want to save the new MXM file. After you choose a location and name, MXED will open. Once you are done editing the material in MXED, click the Save & Close button to save the material to the location you specified and close MXED.

• Edit: Opens MXED to edit the currently assigned material

• Library: Opens MXEDs library browser that lets you browse your collection of MXM files. The browser shows thumbnails of the MXM files for easier selection. Please the MXED page for more details. The Library window has two tabs: Local and Web. The Local tab is for browsing MXM files on your local computer, the Web tab allows you to browse and download materials directly from the online MXM gallery which has over 4000 user submitted materials. 

• Online: Opens up the Library browser with only the Web tab visible to search the online MXM gallery. You can click on the small thumbnails in the search results list to open a bigger thumbnail of the material. Click on the Import button and MXED will download and unzip the material and any textures that belong to it. By default it will download the material to a temp folder that the plugin creates. You can instead choose where to download materials from the Preferences in MXED. To do this, open MXED.exe, either from the icon on your desktop or browse to the Maxwell 2 install folder. Go to File>Preferences>MXM Gallery and enter an alternative download folder. After the material has downloaded and unzipped, MXED will close and the newly imported material will replace the previous material.

Unsupported Softimage Render Tree nodes

Currently the plugin does not support color correction nodes or gradient nodes for use as Layer masks or processing textures. You have to use the Maxwell Texture node to have access to the image controls that Maxwell offers (Brightness, Saturation, Contrast, RGB Clamp).