3ds Max - Plugin Preferences

The plug-in preferences can be accessed from the menu Customize -> Customization -> Preferences -> Maxwell Render. The settings window looks like this:

Material Preview

Quality

Specify whether to use the Draft of Production engine when rendering material previews.

Quality Level

Specifies a scale factor for the material preview.

Update

This setting controls how swatches for the Layered material are rendered. On Demand mode renders the swatches only when the Update Preview button is pressed. Automatic mode refreshes the swatch whenever a material attribute is changed.

Sampling Level

Sets the sampling level that the material preview renderer must reach before it stops

Render time

Sets the total amount of seconds that the material preview renderer can spend rendering before it stops

Threads

Sets the number of threads that the renderer can use. When set to 0 the system will automatically detect the optimal number of threads.

Preview Scene

The path to a MXS file which is used as the preview scene. This scene must contain a material called preview which will be replaced by the material being rendered. If no such material is present, swatch rendering fails.

Update Settings

Check Automatically

The plug-in normally checks for new versions at every GUI mode startup (no checks are performed in batch rendering mode). This control can be used to disable update notifications.

"Check now" Button

Press this button to perform an update check. If no newer version is available, you will be told so using a dialog box. If an update is available, the same dialog box used for automatic checks will be shown:

The first button will open a browser window containing the change list for the new version. The second button will download the installer for the new version (for the current OS) using the default web browser. The "Don't notify me" checkbox can be used to suppress prompts about the current update. When an even newer update is published, the notification will be shown again.

Viewport Representation

Texture Resolution

The resolution of the textures generated for viewport previewing of the Maxwell Layered Material node. One texture is allocated for each node. The textures have 4 bytes per pixel, so to compute the video memory needed by the viewport preview, multiply the number of materials by the resolution and by 4. For example, 50 materials will need 200 MB of memory at 1024x1024.

FIRE

Resolution

For faster results you can set FIRE to render at a fraction of the viewport resolution and then upscale the image.

Threads

Set the number of threads to use in FIRE. Use 0 to autodetect the number of processor cores and use one thread per core.

Max Sampling Level / Max Time

Stop after the specified sampling level is reached or the maximum time expires, whichever comes first.

Link Cameras

When activated, navigating in the FIRE window also affects the rendered camera in the Max scene.