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Left: Version 2.6, Right: Version 2.6.10. Both rendered for 40 minutes. Click image to enlarge. Model courtesy of Artec 3D

Update also your plugin(s) to the latest ones available in the Customer Portal if you update Maxwell Render to 2.6.10

 

Highlights

Subsurface scattering improved

SSS now clears much faster in difficult indirect lit areas. You will see the most dramatic improvements when the SSS object is lit only by indirect lighting.

Added camera multi step motionblur

Unlimited motion blur steps are now taken into account also for camera movements, which previously was limited to 2 substeps.

Speed optimization in some render channels

Alpha, Z-buffer, Material Id and Object Id now render clean much faster.

Maxwell

Other new features

  • Now it is possible to type simple arithmetic operations in numeric fields, (i.e 200/2 ; 30*4). It also works in conjuntion with the Shift+Enter shortcut that sets the same value in all the numeric fields that share the same parent group, i.e scale in X, Y, Z.
  • When alpha channel is embedded and Multilight is enabled with "separate lights" option turned on, the alpha channel is also embedded in all the light images.

Improvements

  • Speed optimization rendering particles with motion blur
  • Stability of extensions improved
  • When resuming a render Maxwell now checks the MXI vs. the target SL before preprocessing to save time in case resuming is not needed
  • SDK improved
  • Speed optimizations in MXI read/write/merge routines

Improvements/Bugfixes (Maxwell FIRE)

  • Added some speed improvements
  • Overall stability improved - Now it is possible to change RealFlow toolkit parameters interactively
  • Voxelization was triggered in some cases when it was not necessary
  • Issues of pretessellated displacement in interactive mode
  • Override and default material were not properly refreshed when they were changed while Fire was running
  • Hierarchies were not properly refreshed if parents were hidden
  • Potential crash when changing the diaphragm parameter while interactive mode was running

Bugfixes

  • Embedded alpha is always set to have the same bit depth as the render channel 
  • Some camera parameters were not changing when changing the active camera
  • Multilight shutter slider range
  • Problem with greyscale TGA files
  • Resuming MXI from the menu option was failing in some cases
  • Reading of EXR displacement maps with negative values was clipping them to zero
  • Alpha channel could fail pure black textures
  • Problem with reverse colors in hair tips
  • Alpha channel could be wrong in areas with pure black reflectance textures
  • Hidden to camera failed when IBL + ML + Shadow channel 
  • Old MXI files could look too bright when opened in the viewer
  • Hang when rendering with "-node" flag
  • Problems searching dependencies in paths with dots
  • Bug when instances had an emitter material applied while their referenced mesh had a non emitter material
  • Bug in subsurface scattering in draft mode 
  • Memory leak in pretessellated displacement

Network

New features

  • "Progressive refinement". By default jobs are rendered until the target SL is reached but when the new "progressive refinement " option is enabled, the user can specify the amount of SL passes. For example setting it to 3,7,10, means that the job will be rendered up to SL 3, then automatically resumed to SL 7 and then will finish at SL 10. This is extremely useful for compositing purposes, since compositors can start working in the whole sequence at low SL while the sequence is being automatically refined. Note: the more refining steps, the more file transfers are needed. The syntax is identical to the one used in animation strings, you can type for example: 3,12-14,17.

  • Port:X command line argument allows you to set the port range. It is very useful to run different networks in the same local domain. A set of the nNodes, Monitors and Manager launched with a certain port will be invisible to other Managers launched with a different one. mxnetwork needs 14 ports so if i.e X = 25000, ports used will be in the 25000-25014 range.

  • Nodes in the node list can now be sorted by each column

  • Now a list with all the dependencies of a job is displayed in the last page of the job wizard

  • Added mechanisms to detect if the manager is running out of space on disk to avoid crashes

Improvements

  • Performance merging MXI files vastly improved

  • Jobs with both "Save MXI" and "Save Image" parameters unchecked are not accepted

  • Improved routines to search for missing textures and dependencies to avoid unnecessary Pack n' Go when launching network jobs

  • Improved performance of routines for checking dependencies

  • Error handling improved

  • Nodes in the node list can now be sorted by each column

  • Improved threads stability sending/receiving data

  • Now the preview images do not show premultiplied alpha

Bugfixes

  • Batch render was not working properly in 2.6.0
  • Dependencies of some extensions were not properly sent 
  • Original MXS file was sometimes deleted when "send dependencies" was unchecked 
  • Problem resuming MXI sequence if some of the frames already had a sampling level higher than the target sampling level 
  • Problem with paths in Linux 
  • Warning message when monitor was closed without sending all its dependencies was not shown in some cases 
  • Problem in cooperative renders when the "Save MXI" parameter was unchecked in the scene
  • Changing the camera in the job wizard was not updating iso/shutter parameters
  • Problems rendering at very high resolutions
  • Issues when a render node failed in a cooperative job and was restarted again
  • Paths with macros were not working. Now macros are replaced by regular paths when the job is submitted
  • Use scene settings didn't obey all settings in Batch mode
  • Format of channels was ignored (they were saved using the render output format and depth instead)
  • Problems with paths when "separate lights in files" was enabled
  • Reset entire network routines fixed
  • GUI issues resizing panels and other minor gui issues

Studio/MXED

New features

  • Added a checkbox to enable/disable auto GMT in the sky parameters
  • Now it is possible to drop textures directly from the Explorer/Finder to the texture slots of the material editor

Improvements

  • Now it is possible to make simple arithmetic operations in numeric fields, (i.e 200/2 ; 30*4)
  • It is possible to enter negative values in the displacement 3D scale parameters

Bugfixes

  • "Reset" with hierarchies
  • FIRE was voxelizing sometimes when it was not necessary
  • Objects with a reference material applied sometimes were not displayed properly in the openGL viewport 
  • Pack n' Go with references
  • Downloaded MXM Gallery materials gets added twice to the material list
  • Potential problem when switching between material preview scenes
  • When a material was renamed inside the material editor, Studio was not checking if the name was already in use
  • HDR Light Studio: sometimes data stored in the MXS file was not read properly
  • HDR Light Studio: Fixed some refresh issue
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