Current version

2.6.14

This build is incompatible with Maxwell 2.6.0, and the previous builds are incompatible with the newly released Maxwell 2.6.10. Due to some changes in the extensions (hair, particles etc.) mixing incompatible plug-in and Maxwell versions will cause Softimage to crash on startup. Please make sure you upgrade both the plug-in and Maxwell to the latest version.

Introduction

The Softimage plugin integration is much more than a geometry exporter from Softimage to Maxwell. Among the plugins features are:

support for SI hair, rendered with the Maxwell hair primitive in Maxwell 2.6 (see Hair and Fur in the main documentation).

support for SI particles using the Maxwell sphere particle primitive in Maxwell 2.6 and also particle instances will be exported as instances to Maxwell.

support for SI strands (strand UVs not yet supported).

Maxwell material system integrated into SI including previewing Maxwell materials inside SI (in the Render Tree or in the Shader ball preview window).

support for Maxwell Fire - Fast Interactive Rendering inside an SI viewport (as a custom display host) or in a separate floating window.

support for Maxwell Mesher and Maxwell Particler (see the RealFlow integration section for details on these extensions)

support for MXS references

UI elements added

The plugin adds the following entries to the Softimage UI:

Get>Primitive:

Maxwell Mesher - load a .bin particle file generated in RealFlow and the Maxwell mesher will create a mesh at render time using the particles. See the RealFlow integration section for more details.

Maxwell Particles - load a .bin particle file generated in RealFlow.

Maxwell Reference - load an MXS file as a reference (the MXS file will be represented as a point cloud). The MXS reference will only be loaded at render time allowing you to keep your main scene as light as possible. See the Referenced MXS files page for more details.

Get>Material:

Maxwell Referenced Material - to load an external MXM as a reference.

Maxwell Layered Material - create a new Maxwell material inside Softimage. The Maxwell material is represented by several nodes inside the Render Tree.

Get>Property>Maxwell Mesh Attributes

Adds a custom attribute to the selected object(s) for controlling: Hide to Camera, Hide to Secondary Rays, Hide to GI, Unaffected by Z Clip. See Objects visibility for more info.

Viewport dropdown>Custom Displays>Maxwell FIRE

This will run Maxwell FIRE in a viewport window. After switching it on, further settings will appear at the bottom of the Viewport dropdown to control Quality, Sampling level, Restart, Stop etc.

Render>Render>Maxwell FIRE

This will run Maxwell FIRE in a standalone window.

Explorer>Camera_Root>Camera>MaxwellCameraAttrs

These custom attributes control camera settings such as F-stop, Shutter Speed etc.

File>Preferences>Custom>maxwell

You can set the plugins global options from these preferences including Automatic plugin update check, and material preview options.

File>Export>Maxwell Scene

Export the current scene to MXS format. The options in the dialog box allow you to specify if you want to export the current frame or the entire animation, and if you want to protect the geometry in the MXS in which case any geometry inside it will not be exportable from Maxwell Studio (which has the functionality of exporting selected objects in the MXS as OBJ).

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