Image courtesy of Hervé Steff- Meindbender

Highlights

Grass

The Maxwell Render grass generator allows you to quickly create grass on a selected piece of geometry. Designed to offer maximum control over the look of the grass from impeccable detail on close up shots to fast-rendering further away from the camera. Compatible with Maxwell Studio and almost all supported plugins. Please refer to the Grass documentation for more details.

MXS/MXI compression

We have introduced a transparent, loss-less compression system for MXS and MXI files. Compression ratios are excellent when rendering additional channels such as alpha, shadows or ID's. With all channels activated, the MXI file can be 4x smaller. The compression system does not affect save performance more than 1-2%.

Anamorphic Bokeh

This new option allows you to get a non-uniform bokeh shape, typical when you use an anamorphic lens on a real camera. You can specify the bokeh ratio and angle. Please see the Anamorphic Bokeh page for more information.

Left: normal bokeh. Right: bokeh ratio changed producing an anamorphic bokeh effect

New Benchwell Test

A new Benchwell test, the official Maxwell Render benchmarking test, has been released, to allow the user test his/her computer's performance under controlled conditions, so that anyone can compare his/her rendering power with other hardware configurations. Now the Benchwell test will be launched directly from the Maxwell menu bar (in the Tools>Run Benchwell menu), and the results could be automatically uploaded to the official Benchwell page, to compare different hardware performances. A new beautiful Benchwell scene has been created by Hervé Steff and Atilla Akin (Tom). For more information, see the Benchwell Test page.

The new Benchwell scene, courtesy of Hervé Steff and Atilla Akin (Tom)

Fluids blend material

When you load more than one particle sequence into the same MaxwellMesher object (to be meshed together), you can now give each fluid a distinct look, by using just one multi-layered material. These distinct fluid material layers can even be blended in the transition between two fluids. See the Maxwell Mesher page ("Blend material" section) for more info.

Two fluid sequences loaded with the same MaxwellMesher and using a blend material

Maxwell

Improvements / New features

Grass generator and primitives added
Support for grass flat primitive in 3rd party hair systems
Anamorphic bokeh added
MXS/MXI file compression
New 3D vector displacement type for RealFlow displacement
Support for non-bin particles vastly extended
Added support for the environment variable "MAXWELL2_LICENSE_PATH" pointing to the folder where the license.txt file is located through an environment variable
Support for blending materials for Maxwell Mesher fluid simulations

Bugfixes

Multilight sliders went to zero when setting a numeric value higher than the current range
Bad transformations in MXS references when there were repeated references with hierarchies
Some issues in particle rendering
Merge with Multilight enabled could generate noise
SSS with Layer opacity
Emitters with motion blur could fail
Channels saved in HDR format were read as PNG 16
Batch MXI process was not applying diffraction properly
Disabling caustics was not working in some cases
Extension was not kept when dropping an MXI path over the image path GUI field
Issue refreshing Multilight sliders
IBL files in screen mapping mode looked incorrect in blow up renders
Blow up renderer size was saved incorrectly

Network

Improvements / New features

"Send dependencies" option can be unchecked now in Batch mode
Added a preference to choose the behavior of the application when closing the window (minimize to tray/exit)
Now the application prevents the system to enter automatically in sleep mode. It is not recommended to manually put the computer in sleep mode while networking, as this can break the communication between the network components

Bugfixes

Issue when an animation job was running, the following jobs could not start even if they were assigned to available nodes
Animation jobs could fail if "Send dependencies" was unchecked
Potential issue in cooperative jobs when some nodes are much slower than others
Issue in animation jobs sending dependencies in some scenarios
Potential issue when several nodes where sharing the same temporary folder. It is strongly recommended not to use a network folder as temp folder, but using a local folder on each node instead to avoid unnecessary data transfers
Display issue in coop jobs where the monitor says "Stopping.." when the job was already finished
Display issue with time left/elapsed time values in some scenarios
Issue stopping cooperative jobs when reaching maximum time instead of sampling level
Issue stopping animations
Fixed -no image:off flag was not working properly

Maxwell Studio / MXED

Improvements / New Features

Support for grass modifiers
Improvements in display performance and stability
Support for custom anamorphic bokeh in the cameras parameter
Support for overriding visibility flags in references
Improved routines to find missing dependencies
Startup faster
When launching MXED in MXMGallery mode, if the login fails it shows the preferences dialog to enter user/password

Bugfixes

Textures of a material were not properly displayed in viewport after creating the material using a wizard
Editing displacement values with FIRE running
Moving objects with motion blur
Crash copy pasting coatings inside bsdfs which already had coatings
Issue copy pasting displacement layers from one material to a different one
Problem reading sky files
Enable/disable autoGMT in the sky params was not working when moving the earth globe
Now attenuation distance is not disabled in the GUI when the extinction coefficient (K) is greater than zero
Fixed azimuth and zenith ranges
Fixed some memory leaks
Fixed other small GUI issues

Browser not supported