Rhino 6 and newer - Maxwell Material

Owned by Next Limit
Last updated: 12 Jul, 2024
5 min read

 

Unlike other render engines, Maxwell only has one material that is virtually capable of reproducing all types of materials. You will find the plugin adds a Maxwell Material item to the list of material types included with Rhino (when using the + icon to create a new material). The materials are, also, easily created or imported from the Materials toolbar:

To make things quicker and easier for the users, we also offer some Material Assistants that simplify the options and make it quicker to create new materials without having to touch many options. These assistants also use the same Maxwell Material under the hood and can be converted to the “Advanced” mode, so they can also be used as a starting point to create more complicated materials. With the assistants, you can create non-refractive glasses (AGS), opaque materials (plastics, ceramics, wood, lacquered surfaces,…), metals, transparent materials, translucent ones, car paint (with flakes effect), use Substance Painter textures, Substance Designer files,…

 

Material Editor layout

 

The Preview scene selector

It shows a list of the different scenes available to display the material preview. Some scenes can be more convenient than others to preview different features of the materials. For example, the “floor” scene will be useful to check the shine of the surface of your material, the “leaf” scene will be useful to create materials with single sided sub-surface scattering as it is backlit, or the “attenuation” scene can be useful to check the attenuation effect of a transparent material.

Floor, leaf and attenuation preview scenes.

You can add custom scenes to the list by creating your own MXS files and adding them to the “preview” folder in Maxwell Render installation folder. The scene should have a camera with 1x1 proportion and a material called “preview” which will be the one replaced with your material when it is rendered.

 

The layer tree

Here you can see and edit the main structure of your material. All the components are always hanging from the Global Properties component. Under it, you can have a Material Assistant if you have created one of those or the different components of the Custom Material: the Displacement component (only one in the material), Layers, that can contain the rest of the components, BSDFs (which is the main component of the material), Emitters, and Coatings. You can learn more about the different components on this page: Layer Tree

From the Global Properties item, you can change the material type from custom, to referenced, or any of the assistants.

If you click on one of the components, its properties will be shown on the right side.

You can create new components right-clicking on one of the existing ones.

From that menu, you can also duplicate and delete components and export the material to an MXM file (Maxwell Material file) to make a referenced material out of it.

You can drag and drop the different components to move them up or down in the stack, disable them using the dot icon (that turns into an X) and you can change the layers blending mode from Normal (N) to Additive (A). You can learn more about stacking layers here: Stacking Layers

 

Selection Properties

This area will show the different parameters of what’s selected on the Layer Tree.

Here you can find more information on each component (the options are the same as in the Maxwell Standalone Material Editor; the purple icon):

  • Global Properties.

    • The Override Map option is not available here as the plugin is handling it a bit differently than the Maxwell editor. You can use it directly from the Texture edition panel. Once you activate it, the projection parameters of the texture will be marked in blue and you’ll be editing the override parameters. Every texture that has the Override Map option active will be using the same parameters.

    • Additionally, in Rhino, it shows a box showing the custom alpha channels related to the material, letting you remove, add and edit them:

  • Layer. It lets you change the layer opacity, its mask and its blending mode.

  • BSDF.

  • Displacement.

  • Coating.

  • Emitter.

 

Texture options

In the different components you’ll find this icon:

It means you can load a texture for that feature. It will show like this when it has a texture loaded:

If you click once on it, the texture will be the active texture for the in-viewport display and it will be framed in blue:

If you double-click on it, it will open the Editing texture panel. In this panel, you can load a Maxwell Texture and edit its properties and you can also load Rhino textures such as Noise, Tile or Wood.

You can drag and drop the textures from one slot to the other.

Also, its right-click menu will let you remove the texture and copy/paste it.

 

Text Notes

This box lets you add your own custom text notes to the material.

 

The material previews are too dark

This issue can be corrected with the gamma setting in Rhino Render parameters.

In the Rendering panel, change back to Rhino Render; then scroll down to the section named “Dithering and Color Adjustments”. Set Gamma to 2.2 and check “use linear workflow”.

Then change back to Maxwell for Rhino so the previews are rendered again with Maxwell.