While Maxwell Render is uncomplicated and straightforward, it does make use of some concepts and functions that may be new or different to you. They account for Maxwell Render's superb quality and realism. It is important to understand these concepts and how they differ from more commonly used notions before you start working with Maxwell Render. Note that these functions are explained in further detail later on in the manual.
Lighting in Maxwell Render
Light sources in Maxwell Render™ are defined by spectral characteristics and a light source usually possesses a lot of information about the intensity of emission at any of the possible wave lengths.
Maxwell Render does not use abstract lights typically used in traditional 3D applications (distant, point, omni, spotlights). Instead, Maxwell Render uses actual geometry with emitting materials. This approach to simulate lights emulates what happens in the real world and mimics real-world lights, producing a high degree of realism, outputting smooth shadows, providing a natural light distribution in your scene, and increasing the overall quality of your image. Maxwell Render can handle large numbers of lights in a scene without the performance loss sometimes experienced in other applications.
Lights in Maxwell Render™ are created applying an emitter material to an object. You can adjust the color and intensity of the emitter using everyday terms like watts or efficacy, or you can look into more advanced definitions using lumens, lux, Kelvin degrees, and RGB. If you are new to Maxwell Render, it is best to start by selecting an emitter from the Presets dropdown.
Environment
Maxwell Render provides a complete Physical Sky system with a sophisticated atmosphere model that reproduces skylight conditions at different hours, dates, and locations. The Physical Sky system is a simple way to obtain extremely accurate lighting in your scenes.
The atmosphere parameters allow users to customize the look of the sky and the resulting light in the scene, ranging from common Earth values to exaggerated fantasy skies. Users can also create presets of the sky settings to quickly load a new sky or share their presets with other users. It's also possible to save the current sky as an HDR map.
Interactive workflow
- Change emitter intensity/color and overall image brightness (exposure) interactively. Maxwell Render allows you to re-expose your image interactively during the render process.
MultiLight TM
enables you to adjust the intensity and color of all the individual or grouped lights in your scene during or after the rendering process to get the results you are looking for. It is also possible to resume a render after it has finished rendering. The exposure is the level of brightness of the final image. With most conventional rendering engines, if your image is too dark, you have to re-render again. In Maxwell Render, you can adjust the exposure (adjust the level of brightness) during the render, or even after the render has finished.
- Maxwell Render includes a truly interactive render preview - Maxwell Fire - (which stands for Fast Interactive Rendering), which allows you to preview your scene in a fully interactive window (in Studio and in those plug-ins where Maxwell Fire is available), displaying a great quality preview render of your scene in seconds. This makes it much faster and easier to adjust your materials, adjust the environment conditions, set up the camera parameters or your emitter's intensity and color, and see the results in real time. Again, Maxwell Render is a huge time saver in your pipeline.
For more info about Maxwell Fire, see