SketchUp - Overview

Maxwell | SketchUp offers the full power of Maxwell, including Maxwell Render, the Network System components, Mxed (the standalone material editor), Multilight Standalone, PyMaxwell, and all without any resolution limitation. Maxwell Studio is not included, as it is sold as a separate product.

In Maxwell Render V4 stage, the plugin for SketchUp does not have two different versions anymore, as happened in V3.

What do I need to know to use the plugin?

The Maxwell for SketchUp plugin has been designed to work in as simple a manner as possible. Wherever appropriate, unnecessary items have been optimized away, leaving what is intended to be a very simple and straightforward, yet complete, interface to Maxwell Render from within SketchUp. After reading this overview, you may wish to continue on to the Quick Start.

The main items used to build Maxwell scenes and render them are these:

1. The Maxwell Menu & Toolbar

The plugin adds a new Maxwell menu to SketchUp's Plugins menu, as well as a new Maxwell toolbar.

The plugin's toolbar looks like this:

From left to right, the commands are as follows:

2. The Scene Manager Window

The Maxwell Scene Manager window is the single central point of access to all Maxwell-related scene parameters.

These parameters are divided into four main categories, Materials, Camera, Environment, and Output, each of which is contained in a tab in the Scene Manager.

3. The Maxwell Fire Window

Maxwell Fire window is used to show the render interactively while moving objects, cameras or changing materials:

By default (see Start Maxwell Fire in Plugin Options) the SketchUp model will automatically be transferred (a.k.a. exported) into Maxwell’s format, and the rendering will be started:

When the rendering is finished, the image may be saved by clicking the Save Image button. However it is usually the case that Maxwell Fire serves as more of a scene-setup tool, with final rendering being done using Maxwell Render itself.

4. The Maxwell Context Menu

In the context (i.e. right-click) menu for SketchUp entities, you will find a Maxwell item:

The commands here allow you to enable the various Maxwell Hide-from flags on a SketchUp entity, to decide how the faces it contains will be separated, and to decide whether or not to you would like to override SketchUp's UVs for the entity. Additionally, there are commands for exporting or rendering just the selected entity.

5. Included Assets

 All versions of the plugin are provided with a set of assets, which may be found in Maxwell's installation directory. These assets are organized into several sub-directories: