The Material Editor (MXED)

Introduction

The Material Editor (and the whole material system) is one of the most important elements of Maxwell Render™. It provides a powerful set of parameters for advanced editing of a Maxwell material.

The Maxwell Material Editor offers real-world parameters that define the materials in a natural and accurate way. It is possible to create Sub-Surface Scattering effects (see below), thin layers, light-emitting materials and advanced stacked materials. A material in Maxwell Render can have several layers, one stacked above the other much like layers in an image editing application, and each layer represents a material itself (that could be composed by several components).

This makes it very easy and intuitive to create interesting and complex materials, such as a rust material showing through a car paint material, or applying a logo on top of a combination of different materials. A large library with thousands of free, ready-to-use materials is also available.

The Maxwell Material editor as it is seen in Studio and in the MXED (Material Editor standalone). In this example you can see a material composed by two different Layers (two completely different materials: a metal on Layer1 and a green glass on Layer2)

Editing Materials in plugins, Maxwell Studio, MXED

You can create and edit materials in three different ways:

directly in your host application using the controls provided by the plugin. Most of our plugins have all the material parameters available to you.

with Maxwell Studio - the standalone scene creation and editing tool included with your installation of Maxwell.

with MXED - the standalone Maxwell material editor also included with your Maxwell installation.

All three approaches can be useful, even if your plugin fully supports all Maxwell material parameters. For example you may wish to quickly open and edit an MXM file (a Maxwell material file) found on your machine. For this, MXED can be very practical.

Important: While the Material Editor is implemented inside all the compatible plugins, the interface and/or functionality can be different depending on each 3D platform, but the underlying principles remain the same.

The information below explains the main areas of the material editor found in Maxwell Studio and MXED. In your 3D platform the interface may be slightly different.

Main areas in the Maxwell Material Editor

The five main areas of the material editor are:

1. Layers Tree

Maxwell Render's materials are made up of different "components" which are organized into folders (Layers). Each Layer can hold one or more BSDF components (BSDF is the main material definition), plus one Coating (varnish), one Emitter and/or one Displacement component.

Each folder represents a Layer, which are stacked vertically one on top of the other, similar to layers in a 2D image editing application. Please see the Stacking Layers section for more information about this.

The Layers tree

2. Material Preview

This window allows you to get a quick preview of the material while you are editing it. When you are changing your material parameters, double-click in the preview sample image to refresh the preview with the new parameters, or click on the Refresh Preview button (green double-arrow icon), and Maxwell Render will compute a preview of your material. During the preview, the green icon will be replaced by a red square icon, to indicate that it is calculating your preview.