Installation and Licensing

Downloading the installer

Each Maxwell product has its own installer. You can download all the products you’ve acquired from your account at the portal (https://portal.nextlimit.com/) from the “My Downloads” section. Maxwell 5 products can be found in the section labeled with Maxwell 5 logo and Maxwell title:

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You’ll also find Maxwell 4, Maxwell 3 sections if you own any of them and some common products that are available for all our customers in a section below called “Maxwell - all versions”. It includes Maxwell Multilight Standalone application, an RLM standalone installer (including the License Activator) and a Maxwell material collection from Arroway:

Open

Installation

Once you have downloaded the installer for your product you have to install it.

The name of the installer usually describes the product, version and operating system in this fashion:

• maxwell_studio_5.2.1.49.release_win64.exe - Installer for Studio, version 5.2.1.49 for Windows.

• maxwell_rhino_v5.2.6.7_OSX.pkg - Installer for Maxwell for Rhino, version 5.2.6.7 for MacOS.

The first two figures of the product version always match the first two of Maxwell Render, but the rest may differ from one product to another.

In general, the installers for the different products include other installers inside; a bit like in this scheme:

• The main installer will install your plugin (the part that installs into your 3d app) or Studio.

  • It will launch the Maxwell Render installer; this is the render engine itself, which is common for all the plugins and Studio; it’s the core of Maxwell where the renders are processed.

    • The Maxwell Render installer includes the RLM installer (it’s only required if you are using floating licenses on the computer where all the licenses are hosted, not in any other computer or license type).

    • It also includes a thumbnails viewer extension for your computer’s file browser (called Maxwell Shell Extension on Windows or Quicklook plugin on MacOS), so you can see a preview of Maxwell files: MXS (Maxwell scene file), MXI (Maxwell image file) and MXM (Maxwell material file).

Just double click your installer file and it will start. The different product installers may differ a bit, but in general terms, you will be able to choose if you want to install the plugin, Maxwell Render or both things. If you already have the exact same version of Maxwell Render, there’s no need to install it again, but if not, it’s mandatory for the plugin to work.

Here’s how the Windows and MacOS Maxwell Render installers look like:

In this step of both installers, you can choose to install or not the RLM and the thumbnail viewer.

• On Windows:

  1. Check RLM License Server only if you are using floating licenses and you want to install the license server on that computer.

  2. The thumbnail viewer is called MXM/MXI Explorer Thumbnails, uncheck it if you don’t want it to be installed.

  3. Then click Next to install everything. The different installers will be launched in sequence.

• On MacOS:

  • Drag Maxwell Render 5 to the Applications folder.

  • Double-click on the RLM License Server icon if you wish to install it on that computer.

  • Drag MaxwellQuicklook.qlgenerator to the QuickLook folder if you want it to be installed.

License Activation

The next step is to activate the license so you can work normally.

Please, refer to these pages depending on your license type:

• Floating license activation

• Node-locked license activation

You can also try a Manual license activation by following this guide: Manual license activation

Installing Maxwell in silent mode 

Maxwell allows a silent installation of its components via command line on Windows. To do so, simply type /S when invoking the installer on the command line prompt: 

• maxwell_render_4.1.1.1_win64.exe /S /D=C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell

The additional arguments are: 

Having trouble with the installation?

You can find some common issues in this section: