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.HIGH QUALITY
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.
The concept of "Aerosols" - particles found in the air that interact with light and influence how lights scatters and reacts in the atmosphere - plays an important role. Aerosols have a big impact on the coloration of the sky and scene illumination.
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
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
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, 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.
All supported plugins are free for license holders and demo users.
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 the customer Download Area where plugins are available for download at any time free of charge.
Features
- Components
- MXCL Maxwell Engine: Plug-ins to the most popular 3D and CAD applications.
- MXED Maxwell Material Editor: A versatile material editor and material browser with powerful, physically correct materials.
- MXST Maxwell Studio: A sophisticated scene editor with a full 3D environment, allowing the user to manipulate objects, set up lights, apply materials, specify camera and environment settings and send to render. An alternative workflow to work with 3D applications that do not have a Maxwell plug-in.
- General features
- Physically correct
- Unbiased
- Multilight: Real-time Interactive Emitters with Keyframe Animated Intesities
- Advanced Physical Sky System
- Aerosols
- Presets
- Real-life Parameters
- Save as HDR
- Skydome
- HDR/ MXI Environment System
- Multi-channel Control (Background, Reflection, Refraction, Illumination)
- Screen-mapping for Background
- Activating Channels for Skydome/Physical Sky
- Advanced Illumination System
- Color + Luminance Emitters
- Temperature Emitters (Kelvin)
- HDR/ MXI Emitters
- Luminaries Presets
- Watts/ Efficacy Control
- Lumens/ Candela Control
- Composite Emitters: Emitter over Materials (Emitter + Basic Layers)
- Advanced material system
- SimuLens
- Diffraction
- Lens Scattering
- Vignetting
- Shift Lens
- Polygonal / Circular Diaphragma
- Shutter Speed
- Focal Length
- F-stop
- Auto Exposure
- DOF: Depth of Field
- Network rendering
- Hybrid Network Support: Windows 32, Windows 64, Mac OSX and Linux
- Full Monitoring: State, Frames, SL, Target SL, Time, Resolution
- Auto-detect Render Nodes
- Cooperative/ Independent Jobs Modes
- Batch Rendering/ Render Queue
- Priority Control
- Instances
- Motion Blur
- Resume Render
- Render Channels
- Alpha, Object ID, Material ID, Coverage, Velocity, zBuffer
- Render Layers
- Render, Alpha, Object ID, Material ID, Velocity, zBuffer, Shadow
- HDR32 Render Output
- Z-clip Planes
- Hidden Objects
- Objects Hidden to Camera, including Hidden Emitters
- Material features
- Maxwell Displacement
- Sub-Surface Scattering Component
- Layer Blending
- Basic Layer Blending (Normal, Additive)
- Weight Mapping
- Fresnel Simulation
- Spectral Dispersion
- Advanced Absorption and Transmittance
- With Attenuation Distance
- Mapped (Smooth, Color)
- Clipped (Explicit, B&W)
- Advanced Anisotropy: With Angle mapping
- Matte Material: Creates Invisible Materials
- Bump and Normal Mapping: Flip, X,Y, and Wide Range Z Support
- Complex IOR Files: IOR Files with Installation
- Coating Layers
- Thin Film Interference/ Iridescence
- Thickness Mapping
- Plug-ins
- All available plug-ins have been adapted to version 1.7.
- Plug-ins supported by Next Limit Technologies
- 3dsMax (7, 8, 9, 2008 and 2009)
- VIZ (06, 07 and 08)
- Maya (7, 8, 8.5 and 2008)
- LightWave (8.x and 9.x)
- CINEMA 4D (9.6 and up)
- Rhino (4 SR3)
- XSi (5.x and 6.01)
- SolidWorks (2007 SP3.1 and 2008)
- Archicad (10, 11 and 12)
- form·Z (6.1 and up. 6.5 recomm.-)
- SketchUp (5 limited and 6)
- Maxwell Studio
- A Flexible Scene Composer as an Alternative Workflow Option:
- Import Objects
- Set Up Cameras
- Apply Materials
- Set Up Sky and Lights
- Send to render
- Hierarchy Support
- Instances Support
- Flexible and Customizable GUI
- Real-time OpenGL Previews
- Sky/ Skydome
- Environment
- DOF Indicator
- Real-time Compass/ Sun Position
- Material Editor
- Wizard
- Drag and Drop Functionalities
- Material Browser: Material libraries
- Orthographic Rendering
- Filmback for Camera
- UV Mapping Tools
- Multilevel Editing
- Group, Object, Polygon Selection
- Select Objects by Name
- Select Objects by Material
- Remove Unused Materials
- Select Render Engine
- RS0 (preview engine)
- RS1 (standard)
- GoogleTM Earth KML Markup Support
- Export OBJ Option
- Supported 3D File Formats: mxs, obj, stl, lwo, xc2, dxf, ply, 3ds, fbx
Maxwell Render 1.x Standard licenses come with:
- Complete feature package of Maxwell Render Engine (MXCL), Maxwell Studio (MXST), and Maxwell Material Editor (MXED).
- Free Plug-ins: access to all available Maxwell Render plug-ins for the major 3D design and CAD software.
- Free Updates until a new major version is released.
- No CPU Core limit Each standard license is valid for a single machine with no CPU limit
- Software is download only and your license information will be sent by email as soon as your order is processed.
- Maxwell Render 1.x is currently available for Win (32 & 64 bits), Mac OSX and Linux (64 bits).
System Requirements
- For WINDOWS:
- Windows XP or Windows Vista
- 2 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, Athlon AMD or better
- 512 Mb RAM minimum. 2 Gb of RAM memory is highly recommended
- 300 MB available hard disk space for installation
- A CD-ROM / DVD drive for installation from Disk (if applicable)
- 3 button mouse
- For MACINTOSH:
- OSX 10.3.9 and up
- G4, G5 or Intel® cpu. G5 or Intel® is strongly reccommended
- 512 Mb RAM minimum. 2 Gb of RAM memory is highly recommended
- 300 MB available hard disk space for installation
- A CD-ROM / DVD drive for installation from Disk (if applicable)
- 3 button mouse