Maxwell Render

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Maxwell Render™ is a physically correct, unbiased rendering engine. By calculating complex light interactions, Maxwell Render is capable of simulating light exactly as in the real world. Unbiased means Maxwell Render™ does not use tricks to imitate real world behavior like other renderers – everything is reproduced as it is through governing physical equations.

Maxwell Render™ can fully capture all light interactions between all elements in a scene no matter how complex they are. All lighting calculations are performed using spectral information and high dynamic range data.

Maxwell Render™ is more than just a render - its core is completely different from other engines. The concept of “rendering” falls short of Maxwell Render’s scope and potential. What we are dealing with isn’t just another render, it’s The Light Simulator.

Maxwell Render™ has been acclaimed as a landmark in the next-gen rendering technology, having produced the best photorealistic images to date.

Maxwell Render™ is the perfect solution for high end rendering for photographic quality and advanced lighting, especially in areas like architectural visualization, industrial and product design, prototyping and 3D production.

EASE OF USE

All parameters in Maxwell Render use real world units.  You don't have to learn strange concepts or set a long list of uncertain parameters.  Because of this, setup times are extremely low compared to other renderers.

SUB-SURFACE SCATTERING COMPONENT

Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) simulates the effect of light entering a translucent object and scattering inside it. Some of this light is absorbed and some is also scattered back to the surface. It is a crucial component that allows you to accurately simulate many kinds of materials including plastics, marble, milk, skin etc. The SSS component has been entirely rewritten for Maxwell Render 1.7, following an entirely new approach compared to the old system or any other SSS system currently available.

PHYSICAL SKY SYSTEM

The Physical Sky system in Maxwell Render 1.7 uses an entirely new approach and has been greatly enhanced adding more parameters to control the look of the sky and the resulting light in the scene, ranging from common Earth values to exaggerated fantasy skies. Users can create presets of sky settings to quickly load a new sky, or share their presets with other users. It’s also possible to save the current sky as an HDR map. This new sky system renders faster than the previous one – in certain scenes the difference can be dramatic.

MAXWELL DISPLACEMENT

Displacement is a powerful texture-driven tool that can help users to create real geometric detail on objects on-the-fly while rendering. As opposed to many other displacement solutions currently available in the industry, Maxwell Render offers you its very own, unique displacement technology which is capable of simulating any detail without extra memory consumption.

Many of the other displacement methods presently offered, pre-tesselate the given geometry and displace the vertices of this new cluster, which wastes a lot of memory resources before and during the render. Maxwell Displacement does not use triangle tesselation methods and does not prepare subdivided/tesselated geometry before rendering. Even when rendering, this technology has nothing to do with additionally created triangles.

Maxwell's powerful infinite surfacing technology is capable of rendering very fine displacements even beyond texture resolution. With its seamless precision control, users can easily customize surface accuracy/ability and optimize the performance depending on your needs. In addition, Maxwell Displacement has very few parameters and is very comfortable to control.

INSTANCES

Support for Instances means that you can have thousands of high polygon objects in your scene and Maxwell Render will render them using the same amount of memory as if you only had one of those objects in the scene. Instances are handled very well in Maxwell Render and are extremely useful to reproduce objects such as plants, bricks, stones and furniture.

Many of the other displacement methods presently offered, pre-tesselate the given geometry and displace the vertices of this new cluster, which wastes a lot of memory resources before and during the render. Maxwell Displacement does not use triangle tesselation methods and does not prepare subdivided/tesselated geometry before rendering. Even when rendering, this technology has nothing to do with additionally created triangles.

Maxwell's powerful infinite surfacing technology is capable of rendering very fine displacements even beyond texture resolution. With its seamless precision control, users can easily customize surface accuracy/ability and optimize the performance depending on your needs. In addition, Maxwell Displacement has very few parameters and is very comfortable to control.

MAXWELL MULTILIGHT ™

Don't re-render, adjust the lights in real-time! For the first time, it is possible to have unlimited variations of lighting from just one render.

Multilight™ allows the user to change intensities of individual lights and multiple scene emitters during and after the rendering process. This feature is the first of its kind in a commercial render engine and it is extremely powerful.

Multilight™ is extremely useful because it eliminates the need to run various renders to tweak the lighting set up.  This gives you infinite possibilities and you can save numerous different lighting versions of the same scene without rendering it over and over again. You can also make a lighting video thanks to Multilight.

MAXWELL SIMULENS ™

New advanced bloom and glare controls that bring a new level of realism and quality to computer graphics.

SimuLens™ allows the user to define a pattern to simulate the shape of the diaphragm that will model the pattern of light reaching the camera film, creating realistic lens diffraction effects (glare). Users can add a second pattern which defines 'obstacles' in the lens such as dust, fingerprints or eyelashes adding to a more realistic diffraction effect.

MAXWELL MATERIALS

What makes them so different and unique?

For the first time in the CG industry, you can have access to the most realistic, simulated materials within a simple user interface. It has never been easier to create outstanding materials. Maxwell Render customers also have access to the MXM Gallery website http://mxmgallery.maxwellrender.com, now featuring over 3000 free Maxwell materials.

CROSS-PLATFORM

Maxwell Render™ can exploit all the processors available on your system, and is a cross-platform solution available for Windows™ 32 and 64 bits, Mac OSX ™ and Linux™ platforms.

Maxwell Render™ connects via plugins to the major 3D design and CAD applications like 3ds Max™, Viz™, Maya™, LightWave™, Rhinoceros™, SolidWorks™, Archicad™, CINEMA 4D™, form·Z™, and SketchUp™ Pro.

All of our supported plugins are free for license holders and demo users.

A growing number of Maxwell Render plug-ins are being developed by and made available through third parties including solidThinking™, Houdini™, MicroStation™ and Allplan™.

Additionally, Maxwell operates as a stand-alone application featuring Maxwell Studio – a full 3D editor to compose scenes –, Maxwell Material Editor – a versatile physical material editor –, and Maxwell Engine – the command line controllable render engine –.

Maxwell Render™ license pack includes access to our customer Download Area where plugins are available for download at any time free of charge.

SHADER FEATURES

• Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS)
Component
• Maxwell Displacement
• MXED re-written
• Single-Shader Material System
• Drag and drop functionalities   
• Layer Blending

• - Basic Layer Blending (Normal, Additive)
• - Weight Mapping

• Fresnel Reflections
• Control of fresnel curve   
• Advanced Absorption

• - w/ Attenuation Distance

• Spectral Dispersion
• Advanced Transmittance

• - Mapped (Smooth-Color)
• - Clipped (Explicit-B/W)

• Advanced Anisotropy

• - w/ Angle Mapping

• Matte Material   

• - Create invisible materials

• Bump Mapping
• Normal Mapping

• - Flip X,Y and Wide Range Z support

• Coating Layers

• - Thin Film Interference / Iridescence
• - Thickness Mapping

• Complex IOR Materials

ILLUMINATION FEATURES

• Physical Sky - New Atmosphere system
• Sun in Skydome
• Free Dosch Design HDRIs
• Advanced Illumination System

• - Color+Luminance Emitters
• - Temperature Emitters (Kelvin)
• - MXI/HDR Emitters
• - Luminaries Presets
• - Watts/Efficacy Control
• - Lumens/Candela Control

• Composite Emiters

• - Emitter over materials (Emitters + Basic Layers)

• Emixer: Emitter Mixer Panel (multilights)

• - Realtime interactive emitters with keyframe animated intensities

• Gas properties

• - Ozone
• - Water Vapor

• Aerosol properties

• - Turbidity coefficient
• - Wavelength exponents
• - Reflectance
• - Scattering assymetry

• Skydome
• MXI/HDR Environment System

• - Multi-channel control (Background, Reflection, Refraction, Illumination)
• - Screen-mapping for background
• - Activating channels for skydome/physical sky

STUDIO FEATURES

• Texture Handling and Memory Optimized
for speed.
• Realtime OpenGL Preview of Physical Sky
• Simulens parameters available in Studio
• Hierarchy support
• New transform network
• Robust UV creation
• Instances support
• Flexible Drag'n'Shape GUI
• Customize and Save Layouts

• - Switching between different layouts

• Realtime OpenGL Environment Preview
• Realtime OpenGL DOF Indicator
• Realtime Compass/Sun Position
• Material Browser IMPROVED!

• - Material Libraries

• Material Editor IMPROVED!

• - Material Wizard
• - Drag and drop functionalities   

• Camera Autofocus
• Orthographic Rendering
• Filmback for Camera
• UVW Projectors
• Multilevel Editing

• - Group, Object, Polygon selection
• - Select objects by name
• - Select objects by material
• - Remove unused materials

• Undo
• Selective Render Engines (RS0,RS1)
• Bounce Control for Preview Engine
• Google™Earth KML Markup Support
• Command-Line Parameters Support
• Supported 3D File Formats

• - mxs, obj, stl, lwo, xc2, dxf, 3ds.

• Export OBJ option

CAMERA OPTICS FEATURES

• Polygonal/Circular Diaphragm
• Shutter Speed
• Focal Length
• F-Stop
• DOF: Depth of Field
• 3D Motion Blur
• SimuLens™   

• - Diffraction
• - Lens Scattering
• - Vignetting

• Shift Lens

RENDERING FEATURES

• MXiMerge Tool
• Instances
• Motion Blur
• Hidden Objects

• - Objects Hidden to Camera (incl. hidden emitters)

• Resume MXI
• Selective Engines

• - RS0 (Preview)
• - RS1 (Production)

• Simple/Advanced Tonemapping

• - ISO, Burn, Gamma
• - Auto Range

• Render Channels

• - Render
• - Alpha
• - Material ID
• - Z buffer
• - Object ID
• - Shadow   

• HDR32 Render Output
• Z-clip Planes

NETWORKING FEATURES

• Several managers available in
network
• Global SL
• Voxelization Multithreading
• Autodetect Render-Nodes
• Normal/Cooperative Modes
• Batch Rendering/Render Queue
• Priority Control
• Full Monitoring

• - State, Frames, SL, Target SL, Time, Resolution

• Hybrid Network Support

• - Windows, OSX, Linux

• Available Platforms

• - Multiplatform 32 and 64 bit for Windows, Mac and Linu

PLUG-INS

• Plug-ins developed and supported by Next Limit

• - 3ds Max and VIZ
• - ArchiCAD
• - Maya
• - CINEMA 4D
• - LightWave
• - SolidWorks
• - Rhinoceros
• - form·Z
• - SketchUp Pro
• - XSi

• Plug-ins developed and / or available through third parties

• - Houdini
• - AllPlan
• - SolidThinking
• - MicroStation

• Plug-ins interpret native shaders

Note: For all other applications (Autocad, Blender, Carrara etc.)
it's possible to bring geometry into Studio with the supported file formats.
(obj, stl, lwo, xc2, dxf, 3ds, fbx, ply)

LICENSING FEATURES

• Standard Licenses

• - Complete feature package MXCL, MXST and MXED
• - Free plug-ins
• - No CPU core limit

• RenderNode licenses

• - For additional rendering capacity