Fire in form•Z 7. form•Z Model Courtesy of Craig Williams, Becker Morgan Group, Inc.

Maxwell Fire - Fast Interactive Rendering

Maxwell's Fire feature is accessed through the Maxwell Fire palette. Using Maxwell Fire, it is possible to view changes to materials, lighting, and geometry interactively as you work with the model. This greatly improves the Maxwell workflow, as it removes the need to do many incremental exports and test renders. While Maxwell Fire can be used to render final images, its primary purpose is to provide real-time feedback during scene setup. It is assumed that an MXS file will subsequently be written, and rendered in Maxwell Render. See Fire for more detail.

Fire Checkbox: Enabling translates the project and starts the render engine. Disabling stops the render and disposes of the temporary scene.
Pause: Stops the current render, but does not empty the render cache. The render will begin again immediately when further changes to the model, lighting, or view are made.
Status Bar: Indicates the status of the current render process. Messages posted here are also copied to the Log.
Save Image: Saves an image of the current Fire rendering to disk, at the resolution specified in Fire Preferences. Snapshots can be made while Fire is rendering, without interrupting it.
Preferences: Invokes Fire global preferences; see below.

Most actions taken in form•Z will result in the Fire image updating as well. However, there are a few cases where form•Z does not alert plugins that things have changed, such as when layers are toggled in the layers palette. If the scene falls out of sync, force a full scene refresh by toggling the Fire checkbox.

If a non-supported view is enabled (such as orthographic or 2D perspective), the plugin will continue rendering the last supported 3D view.

Fire Preferences

The following settings are system-level; they apply to all open projects. (They are saved in your form•Z preference file.)

Save Image Button:
- Save Dialog: When the button is clicked, a standard file save dialog will be invoked to specify where the image should be stored.
- Snapshot: When the button is clicked, the image will be automatically saved with a unique name alongside the current project (in a subfolder, if specified).
Format: Specify Image format
Threads: How many threads will be spawned by Fire. Setting this to zero will cause Fire to auto-detect and render using all available CPU resources.

0 is recommended for machines with two cores or fewer. For systems with four or more cores, [number of physical cores - 1] is recommended for the best balance between interface responsiveness and rendering speed.
Time: Time is the maximum time Maxwell will render before stopping, in seconds.
Sampling Level: Rendering will also stop if it reaches the specified Sampling Level (if it is unable to reach the specified SL before the Time has been met).
Viewport Dims:
- Scalable: When the Fire palette is resized, the display image will expand to fit the palette. (The Fire image buffer will be resampled to the size of the Fire palette.)
- Fixed 1:1: The image displayed in the Fire palette will have the same pixel dimensions (horizontal and vertical) as the Fire image buffer maximum resolution setting.
- Fixed 2:1: The image displayed in the Fire palette will have 2x pixel dimensions (horizontal and vertical) as the Fire image buffer maximum resolution setting.
Resolution: The maximum number of pixels (horizontal or vertical) for the Fire image buffer.

For systems not licensed with Maxwell Render Suite, resolution is limited to 720 pixels.
Display Dispersion: This override enables / disables Dispersion in Fire.
Display Displacement: This override enables / disables all Displacements in materials in Fire.
Display Grass: This override enables / disables all grass geometry modifiers in Fire.

The 'Display' settings here only affect display in Fire, not in exported scenes.

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