Preferences and shortcuts

The Preferences panel

On the Menu bar, the Edit>Preferences option allows you to open the Studio Preferences panel, where you can adjust your preferences for notification messages, texture repository paths where Maxwell Render will look if any textures are missing, exporting channels formats, and general issues on its several sections.

Open

General

The General Preferences tab allows you to change the look of the interface, colors, icons, sky and manage the temporary files and Auto-save option.

The Auto-save option will store a temporal copy of your scene file in regular intervals if the scene has been saved. In the case Studio crashes, the next time you open it, Studio will ask you if you want to load the stored version of your file.

Warnings

In the Notifications section you can set the log verbosity level (varying from None to Debug mode), to display different depths of messages in the Console about the render process.
In case of problems during the render, it is highly recommended to set this parameter to Debug Mode, to get more in-depth information of all the events happening during the render.
In normal behavior it is more suitable to leave it to a lower mode, to get a cleaner messages console.

Paths

This section allows you to specify the search paths for the missing textures, IOR files and other dependencies, and the path to the Default MXM material (the material used by default by Maxwell when an object has no material assigned to).

Now Maxwell will search for dependencies in the specified folders and 3 extra subfolder levels. This is very convenient, as you can now just set the base path of your collection of textures and allows for keeping it well organized in categories.

Open

Generally, Maxwell will first look for the files in the paths stored in the scene and MXM files; if they cannot be found in their original location, Maxwell will start searching for the missing files in these paths:

1. In the same folder of the MXS file;

2. In a folder called "textures" next to the MXS file;

3. In the case of referenced MXS and MXM files, it will look next to those referenced files;

4. In the case of referenced MXS and MXM files, it will look in a "textures" folder next to those files

5. In the search paths specified in the Preferences window > Paths and 3 extra subfolder levels.

6. In the extra paths added through the command line and render flags (using -dependencies:[path], -dep:[path], -bitmaps:[path] or -b:[path])

Viewport Rendering

Allows you to control the appearance of the OpenGL render in the viewports: shading mode, colors, grid...

In the Performance subsection, you can adjust the performance of your OpenGL rendering, depending on your graphic card's capabilities.

In some graphic cards with OpenGL problems, it is needed to disable the Vertex Buffers and Smooth Antialiasing options to allow a fluid visualization.

Import Options

Options regarding the importation of models in MXS, OBJ or DXF formats.

Materials

Here you can set the path to your textures folder, in case you want to create a texture repository. You can set 5 alternative repositories folders where Maxwell will automatically search when a texture file is missing.

Here you can also set your username and password in the MXM Gallery, to be automatically logged in and be able to download materials from the MXM Gallery. For more details on importing materials from the MXM Gallery directly into Studio see the Resources Browser Panel page.

Instances

Default settings for instances, such as their display and shading mode, and the percentage of instances displayed (necessary when the number of instances could exceed your RAM or graphic card visualization capabilities).

Preview

Options to control the quality of the interactive renderer, both in the Interactive viewport (Maxwell Fire) and in the Material Editor.

Shortcuts

This panel allows you to edit the Studio shortcuts and customize them to fit your needs.