3.2 Release Notes

Owned by Jenny Fermor (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 04 Jan, 2016 by Next Limit
2 min read

Render courtesy of Fernando Tella

New Features

  • Nested Dielectrics: Nested priority method for interacting dielectrics. Render complex water/glass/ice surface without numerical issues - just simply add a small overlap between geometries. Click for more info
  • Stereo Lenses: Two new lens types implemented- Stereo Fish Lens and Lat/Long. They are suitable for virtual reality (VR) systems such as Oculus. Click for more info
  • Extensions API: 3rd party developers can now develop their own procedural geometries, geometry modifiers, procedural textures, camera lens, etc.This extension API is included with the main package. Click for more info
  • PSD Output support: Maxwell can now save the render in PSD format in 8, 16 and 32 bits. Click for more info
  • Procedural Emitters: Apply emitter materials to non-triangle mesh entities such as hair, particles, etc. Click for more info
  • Separated Reflection & Refraction channels: Render more combinations such as "Diffuse", "Reflections", "Diffuse + Reflections", "Refractions". Click for more info
  • New "Reflectance" channel: Shows plain colors without the influence of global illumination. Click for more info
  • New "Asset Reference" extension: Reference a variety of file formats directly in Studio without pre-converting to MXS. Click for more info

Improvements

  • Subsurface Scattering: Significant speed improvements have been made
  • Maxwell Scatter: New "remove overlapped" option to avoid collisions between instances generated by the scatter algorithm, and new "uniform scaling" option to avoid undesired deforming when scaling scattered instances
  • Multilight editor: Added feature to select and edit multiple emitters at the same time + new "Sort by name/type/intensity" functions
  • Grass and Scatter "Grow Towards World-Y" option: This percentage allows you to define if the main growing direction of the blades will be completely vertical towards the world-Y axis (when set to 100%), perpendicular to the "ground" surface (when set to 0%) or at any value in between.

Bug Fixes


  • The new "nested dielectrics" feature also fixes artifacts with dielectrics/SSS objects that intersect.
  • Fixed artifacts rendering intersecting volumetrics
  • Error messaging improved, specially with licensing errors.
  • Fixed issues in opaque material type when using textures
  • Color space management of input textures improved
  • Fixed "hidden from reflections and refractions" was not working properly with coatings.
  • Fixed instances of hidden reference were not visible unless they were translated
  • Fixed issue with scaled instances of procedural geometries not showing up in the render
  • Extra Sampling:
  • Fixed Extra Sampling with render region was not stopping at the desired sampling level
  • Better support for missing paths for bitmap masks
  • Fixed custom alpha channels in referenced MXS
  • Fixed other minor bugs
  • Fixed potential crash in procedural displacement
  • Fix potential crash when using EXR in OSX
  • Fixed hang when using deep channel at very high resolutions
  • Fixed crash when opening/resuming corrupted MXI files
  • Fixed issue in texture interpolation
  • On the fly displacement improved. 

Network


  • The new network system (tp_network) is much more stable now. Many features of the old network system have been added.
  • Better support for Extra Sampling in cooperative renders