Modo plugin - Maxwell FIRE

Our plugin integrates Maxwell Fire - Fast Interactive Rendering into the modo user interface. With Maxwell FIRE you can follow the scene changes interactively, without the need to restart the export procedure after every modification.

It is similar to the modo native Preview Renderer, but the image is calculated by the Maxwell Render engine.

Maxwell FIRE greatly improves scene setup and the overall workflow. If you change item transformation values, material components (mxm and converted materials too), light parameters, environment settings, etc. the FIRE viewport refreshes immediately with the new scene parameters.

In some cases automatic refresh is not possible. In these cases you have to reload the FIRE engine to follow the changes.

You have to reload the engine after these events:

• uv map changes, texture locator projection changes,
• material mask changes

Plugin provides a dedicated Maxwell FIRE window for the interactive preview display. You can activate it by clicking on the Maxwell FIRE button in the Maxwell plugin window.

Another option is to switch any modo viewport to Maxwell FIRE viewport.

1. First you have to click on the small arrow at the top-right corner of the viewport, and change viewport type to Card View (from the list select Application > Card View).
2. Click on the arrow again and choose Viewport Settings > Maxwell Render - FIRE.

Maxwell FIRE integrated into the modo scene viewport

To start interactive preview, click on the FIRE button

FIRE viewport buttons

Interactive Preview has three control buttons: Options, Pause (Start) and Reload.

Options

Opens the Maxwell FIRE preferences pop-up window where you can control the main parameters of the Interactive Engine. You can read more about these preferences in sub-chapter Maxwell FIRE.

Pause (Start)

Pause or Start the interactive preview engine.

Reload

Re-exports the current scene, including all the changes.

Save

Save the actual FIRE image into an image file.