Rendering with Maxwell

Owned by thomas (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 12 Jun, 2014 by Alex Ribao
3 min read

RealFlow's internal render engine consists of several elements:

  • “Preferences” section. Here, parameters like illumination, motion blur, or image quality are adjusted.

  • “FIRE”, an interactive render engine for real-time previews.

  • “Preview” engine. Used to render a single image or the entire sequence in production quality.

These elements are available from

  • Shelves > Display
  • Icon bar > Maxwell*

* This icon bar is not visible by default. To show it, right-click on the icon bar and choose “Maxwell”. A small bar with three icons will be added.


 

RealFlow's three Maxwell Render elements are available from the "Display" shelf and the icon bar.

Fire

This window is a 1:1 representation of the currently active viewport and the adjusted point of view. Each transformation of the viewport's perspective (zooming, panning, rotating) will be immediately performed in the render window as well. The rendered image is based on the settings you have chosen under “Maxwell Scene Preferences”. 

When a RealFlow scene is rendered or previewed with Maxwell, it has to be translated into voxels first. The duration of this process strongly depends on the currently active scene's complexity and “MultiPoint” settings. The preparation of several millions of particle can easily take a few minutes. During this process you will see an orange progress bar directly in the “Maxwell Interaction” window with a label (“Voxelization”). The voxelization progress is not necessarily linear and you might observe that the progress bar stops for a while – this is absolutely normal.

Please bear in mind that some actions need a new voxelization, for example when new objects are added to scene or the number of particles has changed. Other changes (for example an increased image quality or a different tiling of RealWave surfaces) will also require a complete refresh. RealFlow will initiate the scene refresh automatically and you do not have to start it manually.

There are also some helpful shortcuts available:

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + LMB: Force Maxwell to perform a new render with voxelization

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + MMB: Force Maxwell to perform a new render without voxelization

The keyboard commands even work when the “Maxwell Interactive” window is inactive (in this case the Maxwell FIRE icon is yellow).

Maxwell Scene Preferences

Here you can find everything you need to adjust a Maxwell preview.

Please visit the "Preferences - Preview" page and look for "Maxwell Options". There you will find a complete description the panel's parameters and settings.

Send to Maxwell Command Line

This button provides a very easy and comfortable way to create Maxwell previews and render jobs via the command line application. The advantage is that you do not have to compile the render commands and path to the scene file manually. RealFlow prepares everything automatically and fires off the scene file to the NOGUI application. Please note that the scene requires a “Camera” node, because otherwise the render will fail.

Creating Previews

Please read the "Simulation - Previews" chapter to learn how to render and create previews inside RealFlow with the Maxwell Render engine.