Basic workflow

Maxwell Render provides two alternative workflows:

Through plug-ins

This method allows you to use Maxwell Render with your favorite 3D/ CAD package, through one of the available plug-ins. The Plug-ins create a .MXS (Maxwell scene file) which is then sent to Maxwell Render. This is the recommended workflow.

For the full list of available plugins and host versions, see: Plugins

Through Maxwell Studio

An independent GUI application called Studio is available for extra flexibility. It is possible to import geometry and .MXS files into Studio, where you can compose your scene, set up lights, cameras, and environment parameters, create and apply materials, and send to render. Studio accepts geometry in the following formats: OBJ, STL, LWO, PLY, XC2, DXF, 3DS, XML, NFF, FBX, Collada (DAE), DEM, SDTS

The Studio workflow is mostly recommended to people working with 3D/ CAD applications that do not have a plug-in to directly connect them to Maxwell Render. Even if there is a plug-in available for your application, you can still make use of Studio by importing a MXS scene or geometry, and making further adjustments to your materials / cameras / lights. Or you can merge different .MXS files together into one scene.

There's also another possible workflow using Studio which involves synchronizing many common 3D formats through the Asset Reference, allowing for simultaneous work on geometry in your 3d modelling application of choice and materials, lighting and rendering in Studio.

MXI Importer Plug-ins for Postproduction

Maxwell Render provides a great level of integration between the rendering engine and post-production packages. This allows you to import your MXI render files (including all the independent buffers contained inside) directly into your postproduction platform providing you with a comfortable and powerful workflow. Please, check this page to learn more about the plugins for post-production: Plugins

A typical example workflow

With your geometry created in your host application, or imported into Maxwell Studio, the following steps describe a typical Maxwell Render workflow:

• create Maxwell materials from scratch, or using the material Wizards and/or presets to quickly create common types of materials. You can also browse the online MXM gallery which contains more than 3500 freely available materials. The plugins and Maxwell Studio allow you to search the website from inside your application, and simply drag & drop the materials from the search results into your scene.

• Lights in your scene are also Maxwell materials, you can create them in the same way as regular materials and apply them to your geometry. Any geometry will become an emitter if it has an emitter material applied to it.

• Set up the camera using real world values such as focal length, shutter speed, ISO.

• Preview your scene using Maxwell Fire which will allow you to interactively see any changes you make to your materials, lights, geometry and camera settings. This will save a great deal of time by seeing exactly how your objects reflect the emitters in your scene and move them if necessary, how the camera depth of field looks, experiment with different colors in your materials etc.

• After you're satisfied with the look of your scene, press the Render button which will create an MXS file (the Maxwell scene file format) and start Maxwell Render.

• While Maxwell is rendering (and also after the render has finished) you can interactively change the intensity and color of the emitters in your scene and see them update in the Maxwell Render view.

• Maxwell will progressively update the render view to show a clearer render. You can stop the render at any time if you find the quality is sufficient. After stopping the render you can always resume it at a later time. This is possible because Maxwell saves an MXI file to disk while rendering. An MXI file is Maxwells high dynamic range image format which contains all the render calculations.

• The great advantage of the MXI file is that you can import it into a post-production application even while Maxwell is still rendering. For example you can import it into Photoshop and start making adjustments. After the render has finished, the Photoshop plugin will reload the MXI, while keeping your adjustments. This workflow is especially useful when rendering animations. You can tell Maxwell to render a a single frame in the animation for only 1 minute, then move on to the next one. After it has finished rendering the specified sequence, Maxwell can automatically resume the sequence, adding more render time to each frame. While this is happening you can import the already rendered MXI files into After Effects or Nuke, and start compositing your scene, adjust the different buffers contained inside the MXI and so on, saving you lots of time not having to wait for the entire sequence to be rendered - post production and rendering can be done simultaneously!