3.0 release notes

Owned by Mihai Iliuta (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 01 Apr, 2014
7 min read

Major new features and improvements 

Procedural textures

Maxwell Render now includes a collection of procedural textures that can be used alone or in combination with other textures to produce a range of effects. Being mathematical fractals, they are 100% seamless, customizable and cross-platform. See more information here. 

 

Custom Sun Radius for both Constant Dome and Physical Sky System 

The sun in Maxwell's physical sky system is now customizable in size and color allowing for dramatic sun effects, as well as introducing a physically correct approach to controlling shadow softness (via sun radius) or distant emitters with parallel shadows. See more information here. 

 

Fast GPU-driven Multilight preview

See your Multilight changes instantly in the main render view. Even Scattering and Dispersion update instantly - thanks to the new GPU accelerated Fast Multilight display! See more information here. 

 

Improved Fire voxelization

Our scene preview engine Maxwell FIRE is much smarter in V3 - re-voxelizing only the objects which have changed, saving a tremendous amount of time when setting up your scenes. See more information here. 

 

New Lenses: Pin hole, Orthographic, Spherical and Cylindrical

Five new lens types have been added to the Maxwell Camera: Spherical - great for making HDR environments or virtual walk-throughs, Fish Eye, Pinhole (creates no depth of field effect), Cylindrical and Orthographic. See more information here. 

 

Material Assistants that ease material creation and editing 

Maxwell materials assistant is a new, easy to use material editor which builds the basic material characterisitcs for you - greatly simplifying the material creation process and saving you lots of time. Choose first a category such as glass, metal, translucent, opaque and the material assistant will help you create perfectly optimised materials for your scene in just seconds! See more information here. 

 

Double-sided materials 

Separate materials can now be applied to the back-face of a polygon surface - making it much easier to create bottle labels, translucent paper, or add more variation to leaves etc. And as a bonus, it also works with the Maxwell grass modifier! See more information here. 

 

Custom Alpha channel per object

A long awaited feature, now you can create unlimited 'layers' of alphas and add any object(s) to those layers, allowing you to isolate the exact objects you need. See more information here. 

 

UV and Deep channels

Maxwell Render 3 can now render in 'deep image' format, which stores color as well as depth information per pixel, making it much easier to composite rendered objects together as well as eliminating troublesome edge artifacts. You can save the deep info in either .EXR or .DTEX formats, in rgba or alpha. See more information here and here. 

 

On-the-fly booleans in render time 

An object bounding box, sphere or plane can now be used as a 'cutting' object, which works in a similar way to the cameras Z-clip feature, except now you are no longer limited to the cameras near/far planes. See more information here.  

 

Blockable emitters

Now you can isolate the contribution of each emitter to each individual object in the scene, allowing you to have objects not affected by certain emitters in the scene. This way, you have custom control over the lighting of each object in your scene. See more information here. 

 

Image projectors 

Emitters in Maxwell can now project light using any bitmap (or even a procedural texture!), much the same as a slide projector projects an image onto a canvas. See more information here. 

 

Maxwell Volumetrics: Constant, Noise and Particle-driven fields 

The new volumetric feature in Maxwell can work in several ways: as a constant density volumetric object - useful for large atmospheric haze effects or thick fog, it can work with particles files in several formats, including RealFlow .bin, and also with density fields/voxels directly from Maya or Houdini. See more information here. 

 

Maxwell Sea 

Maxwell Sea creates realistic ocean surfaces and waves based on the Ocean Statistical Spectrum from RealFlow. Various parameters such as water depth and surface dimensions allow you to produce a convincing water surface, from swimming pools to open ocean. The meshing is only done at render time, meaning it takes up almost no extra space in the .MXS file. See more information here. 

 

Maxwell Scatter

The new Maxwell Scatter modifier distributes instances of an object (or even referenced MXS files) across the surface of another object, with similar parameters to the Maxwell grass modifier - including the ability to add density maps, or randomize the size and rotation. See more information here. 

 

Pixar Open SubDivision in render time 

The new Subdivision feature allows you to subdivide low-polygon objects into smooth surfaces, by implementing Pixar OpenSubdiv. Because it's subdividing the geometry only at render time - your scene files take up far less space and can be transfered much faster around your network. See more information here. 

 

Improved and accelerated Motionblur

Maxwell V3 offers massive speed improvements when motion blur is used in scenes with many objects, especially where hair and particles are used. In a scene using millions of hairs for example, the increase in speed can be upwards of 100X! 

 

Alembic format support 

The Alembic file format allows for very efficient storage of geometry and other scene data, which can now be referenced directly in Maxwell V3. Support for Alembic includes static and animated geometry as well as particles. It also works with the Exocortex CRATE suite of Alembic plugins. See more information here. 

 

10 rendernodes included with every Maxwell Render Suite Floating license 

Maxwell Render Suite floating licenses for V3 will now come with 10 rendernodes included, as standard! See more information here. 

 

Minor new features and improvements

Render Engine

  • OpenEXR 2.0 support
  • Half Float EXR support 
  • Histogram
  • Wireframe shader (exposed as a procedural texture)
  • Overlay text
  • Pure non gui mode in linux (no need to have a X-server running or to run a virtual frame buffer)
  • MaxwellMesher upgraded to take advantage of the new mesh generator in RealFlow Renderkit V3.
  • New opacity attribute per object 
  • New normals backface culling attribute per object

Maxwell Studio

  • Better GUI, with less panels and improved workflow. Many panels merged in a new Attributes Panel editor, Many lists merged in the Scene Tree.
  • All the extensions can now have presets, including the grass extension. These presets are simple text files which the users can also create themselves.
  • Material list can be viewed as an icon list or tree view (this one has additional columns for switching on/off matte and shadows)
  • Big improvements in the material browser. Now it is much faster and not just for materials but for any resource now (textures, ies, etc..) files can be drag n dropped anywhere (i.e a texture to a map slot of the material editor, or an hdr file to the OpenGL viewport).
  • Unified panel for objects and instances. Instances workflow enhanced - they are handled as normal objects now, they don’t have a separate panel. It is possible to change the object the instances refer to after they are created.
  • Preferences stored in .ini files so it is easier to move them to other computers.
  • When selecting cameras there are two handles now so it is much easier moving the camera point and target (or both together with the Shift key pressed)
  • When Studio gets the focus again it refreshes the textures that have changed automatically, this is useful when a texture has been edited in an external editor.
  • Added Hue control for the Texture Picker
  • Added rotation and mirroring controls to the Texture Picker
  • Big improvements in FBX and Collada import

Material editor (MXED)

  • New displacement presets to make it easier to handle displacement maps created in different sculpting applications such as Mudbox or Zbrush.
  • material preview window can be resized to predefined sizes
  • Preference to display the material editor in a vertical layout
  • Matte & shadow flags of materials can be changed in a selection of materials at the same time
  • Materials can be renamed inside the material editor

Network

  • More stability
  • "-nogui" flag works as true no gui application and does not need an Xserver in linux
  • Implemented a system to avoid that there is more than one Manager running per session using the same port range. If the user wants to bypass this system they can launch the Manager with the flag "-multiplemanagers"
  • "SL Update" is not greyed out in Batch network render mode
  • Sockets handling improved
  • Now when send dependencies is not checked and the paths are not network paths the app asks to continue instead of cancelling the job wizard
  • Now when the user clicks "release node" it asks the user if the current job should finish first
  • Fixed "release node" function was not working properly in some cases
  • "reset_all" and "reset_node" are much more robust now
  • Missing paths handling improved

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