Cinema - Maxwell Fire

Maxwell Fire provides an interactive rendering experience from within the plugin.

How it works

To activate Fire, it is first necessary to have a Scene Object; at any given time, only one Scene Object can be the object being rendered in Maxwell Fire. To activate Maxwell Fire, show the Scene Object in the Attributes Manager and click the grey 'Fire' button:

     

Once the Scene has been linked to Maxwell Fire, the Fire button will change color, and another button will appear to its right:

     

The new button is used to re-send the scene to Fire; this is necessary when objects have moved, or when material assignments have been changed; these actions are not interactive. Notice as well that (in version R11.5 and higher) the Object Manager icon for the Scene Object also changes to the yellow Fire icon, making it easy to tell which Scene is currently rendering in Fire. To unlink the Scene from Fire, simply click the yellow Fire button again, or link another Scene. Additionally, a new Fire Options group will appear in Scene Object > Engine tab:

     

This group is only visible when the Scene is linked to Fire. Sampling Level and Threads directly control their parameters in the Fire render engine, while the Quality parameter determines the actual size of the image being rendered (the image is interpolated to fit the current size of the Fire window).
When the Scene is linked to Fire, the Fire window will be opened, if necessary. There are also a very few controls in the Maxwell Fire window itself:

     

The first button enables or disables Fire rendering without un-linking the associated Scene. The second is a duplicate of the re-send button in the Scene Object's Attributes Manager interface; it causes the scene to be freshly exported to Fire. The third button allows you to save the current Fire image to disk. At the right-hand side, there is a toggle which switches between 'Render' and 'Active' camera modes; in Render mode, only the current rendering camera will be shown in Fire, while in Active mode, which ever viewport is active will be rendered. By default this is toggled to Render mode, to allow for adjusting the camera in viewports other than the one being rendered.

At the bottom of the Fire window is a progress bar, and buttons for warnings and errors from the engine; if the scene contains errors, click the buttons to find out what is preventing the render from proceeding.

     

When Fire is active, changes to materials, Scene parameters, and cameras are fully interactive and require no special actions to update. As mentioned previously, changes which affect the scene physically, such as the addition, removal, or movement of objects, or the assignment of materials to objects, will require that the Scene be re-exported.

Maxwell Fire is also used in the plugin's Material Editor, and allows changes to materials to be visualized interactively. You may set the number of threads allocated to the material preview renderer in the plugin's Preferences page.