Rhino 6 and newer - Maxwell Fire

Owned by Next Limit
Last updated: 19 Apr, 2022
2 min read

Maxwell Fire is our interactive render engine. The plugin integrates it as another viewport display mode, along with the Wireframe, Shaded, Rendered, etc. modes, so you can activate it in any viewport and you can customize what Rhino scene information you want to see overlayed on the render in the Rhino Options (Isocurves, curves, lights,…). While it is on, you can move around the scene and Fire will keep updating the render.

You can launch Fire by changing the visualization mode of any viewport to Maxwell FIRE, however, you can also use the convenient Fire button on the Rendering toolbar added by the plugin:

This button works as a toggle. It turns Fire on or off (reverting to its previous display mode) in the active viewport. If you right-click on that button, a new floating viewport will be added with Maxwell Fire active in it.

Status bar

The status bar at the bottom of the Fire window has some active and informative areas:

  1. Start/Pause button. It lets you pause or resume the Fire render

  2. Lock/unlock button. Fire will keep rendering the same view regardless you orbit the view or move the objects. It can be useful to avoid Fire restarting the render when changing things in the scene.

  3. Engine information. It will show which engine is used to render Fire: the CPU or the GPU engine. If you click on this area, the plugin will show the different Fire settings in the Rhino Options window.

  4. Status information. This area will show the rendering or completed status, as well as any errors that may happen. If an error occurs, clicking on it will show more information.

  5. Time elapsed. It will show the time used to render the current image.

  6. Current sampling level indicator and sampling level limit. Here you can see the current sampling level reached by the render as well as the sampling level target. If you click on this area you can edit the sampling level target number.