The plug-in preferences can be accessed from the menu Customize -> Customization -> Preferences -> Maxwell tab. The settings window looks like this:

Default Material Preview Options

In this section you can specify the default options for the material preview. What you set here will be the default options for new materials in the next session.

Engine

Specify whether to use the CPU Draft or CPU Production engine when rendering material previews.

Update

This setting controls how the swatches for the material preview are rendered; On Demand mode renders the swatches only when the Update Preview button is pressed. Automatic mode refreshes the swatch whenever a material attribute is changed.

Scene

Here you can choose the default scene to be rendered in the preview. The plugin is picking the scenes from Maxwell's preview folder (in the installation folder). This scenes are normal Maxwell scene files (.mxs) which include a material called preview which will be replaced by the material active in the editor when rendered. If no such material is present, swatch rendering fails. It should also include a camera with square resolution. Maxwell includes several preview scenes to adapt to different situations but you can also create your own; if you store your preview scenes in that folder, they will show in this menu.

Quality

Sets the sampling level that the material preview image must reach before it stops.

Render time

Sets the total amount of seconds that the material preview can spend rendering before it stops in seconds. The render of the preview will stop if it reaches the render time or the quality specified, whichever comes first.

Threads

Sets the number of CPU threads that the preview can use. When set to 0 the system will automatically detect all the threads available.

Update Settings

Check Automatically

The plug-in normally checks for new versions at every GUI mode startup (no checks are performed in batch rendering mode). This control can be used to disable update notifications.

"Check now" Button

Press this button to perform an update check. If no newer version is available, you will be told so using a dialog box. If an update is available, the same dialog box used for automatic checks will be shown:

The first button will open a browser window containing the change list for the new version. The second button will download the installer for the new version (for the current OS) using the default web browser. The "Don't notify me" checkbox can be used to suppress prompts about the current update. When an even newer update is published, the notification will be shown again.

Viewport Representation

Texture Resolution

The resolution of the textures generated for viewport previewing of the Maxwell Layered Material node. One texture is allocated for each node. The textures have 4 bytes per pixel, so to compute the video memory needed by the viewport preview, multiply the number of materials by the resolution and by 4. For example, 50 materials will need 200 MB of memory at 1024x1024.

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