5.1.0.29 Release Notes

Maxwell

New Benchwell tools for CPU and GPU benchmarking with online live charts. You can access them from the Tools menu from Maxwell Render.

Asset Reference extension object: assimp library upgraded to 5.0.0 so it gives better support for all the file formats.
Upgraded Xrite SDK to 1.7.1 so it gives better support for the latest materials.

The bump map and the normal map were being affected by geometry’s transformations in some situations.
Crash computing denoised image in intermediate steps during render.
Launching a render with CPU, stopping, changing to GPU and restarting produced an error when starting the voxelization.
The RLM could not be installed on MacOS Catalina.
The Random Color procedural texture always returned the same color if the object ID color saturation was 255.
The command line parameter -mintime was not only setting a minimum time between each time Maxwell saved output images to disk but was forcing a maximum time too.
Maxwell CPU failed to render correctly texture channels higher than 0 if channel 0 was not used.

Wrong data issues with TIFF images and LZW compression in Linux platforms (including Maxwell Cloud nodes).
MaxwellScatter extension removes MaxwellScatter extension from the scattered objects (if they have).
On Mac, Xrite AxF materials make Maxwell close if they are used in the scene.

The maximum number of ray bounces is now set to the same as the CPU production value.
Much better support for transparent materials:
- The attenuation color and behavior now matches the CPU engine result.
- The transparent materials now produce caustics.
- The transparent materials now do not produce incorrect white fireflies.
Improvements in memory management.

Wrong textures could be accessed on materials in different circumstances.
Several fixes in dielectric (transparent) materials.
Bad interactions between emitters and clipmaps who could make light rays turn black (with all emitters) or generate extremely intense fireflies (IES).
The bump map and the normal map were being affected by geometry’s transformations in some situations.
Some scenes with hidden emitters rendered to black in FIRE GPU and could eventually crash. In general, this affected the scenes with hidden objects.
The GPU engine rendered black if no channels were selected (including the Render channel). This has been forced to behave as in the CPU engine and render the Render channel anyway.
The MXI file was saved twice after the render ended.
The time between SL updates eventually became extremely short.
The scenes with procedural geometry (grass, sea, etc.) did not render, even if they were hidden.
The command line option “-removegpus” didn’t work as intended.
No tiling texture option still produced tiling in the negative direction of the UV axis.
Non-coherent shading on 2 BSDFs on the same additive layer.
Maxwell crashed if Fire GPU was active when we apply a material with a coating.
A spotlight rendered with GPU could show a black hexagon in the light direction.

New search boxes to filter the content of the object, camera and material lists. This helps to find particular items by name in these potentially long lists.
New button next to the object search box to restrict the viewport selection only to the items that match the search. The rest of the objects won’t be selectable until the search is cleared or the button un-pressed.
New Substance Painter assistant; now you can easily create a Maxwell material from the textures generated by Substance Painter.

Now, when pressing the Maxwell Cloud button, Studio checks which is the active camera so that’s the one rendered.

The CPU priority was not loaded properly from the MXS file.
Cloned objects that had blocked emitters broke the blocked emitters' behavior (the emitters could not be unblocked).
Adding or removing blocked emitters to an object was not refreshing FIRE.
Random crash starting Maxwell Studio.
When you created a new MaxwellGrass modifier, the existing ones were reset to default values.
The Studio animation tool should add padding to the output files too (image name and MXI name).
Studio move/rotate/scale gizmos didn’t highlight the active axis on mouse hover.
The hidden camera and locked camera icons were wrong.
Projection properties in the texture picker were not showing in the preview anymore.
In some cases, it was not possible to change the Field Type of the MaxwellVolumetric.
Studio could crash opening a scene when the current scene has a camera selected.
Wrong FIRE update when moving the UV set.

New Substance Painter assistant; now you can easily create a Maxwell material from the textures generated by Substance Painter.

Now the users can override Extra-sampling and Denoiser parameters before sending a job to Maxwell Cloud.
The login dialogue had a dark background that made it hard to locate the different fields; now it is improved.
Now the users can set Maxwell Cloud to save outputs only at the end, saving render time.

Getting dependencies of a MXM reference failed if the MXM was not found.
The “request preview” button in mxnetwork local mode didn’t work.
When sending a job from a Mac to a PC the job showed on the node as received but nothing else happened.
Maxwell Cloud spent too much time saving intermediate results in some heavy renders.

Python module pymaxwell5 returns MXparamListRef instead of MXparamList objects in the following methods:
- CmaxwellCamera.getCameraLensExtensionParams
- CmaxwellMaterial.getMaterialModifierExtensionParams
- CmaxwellObject.getGeometryLoaderExtensionParams
- CmaxwellObject.getGeometryProceduralExtensionParams
- CmaxwellObject.getGeometryModifierExtensionParamsAtIndex
- CmaxwellObject.getCustomDataChunkByName
- CmaxwellObject.getCustomDataChunkAtIndex
New MXparamListRef class has the same functionality as MXparamList, plus getCopy(), which returns a MXparamList copy of the MXparamListRef object.
MXparamlist create/set methods’ input parameters updated to const.
Python module pymaxwell5 callback mwcallback now is mwcallback_cb.