Maxwell 1.7 release

Next Limit and Smart Technology is very proud to announce the release of Maxwell Render 1.7. This latest update which is FREE for customers offers several new and vastly improved features, which we have summarized for you below.

New 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.




New Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) 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.




Other improvements include:

1.7 Material Editor

Material Preview: the material preview now shows incremental updates and you can stop the preview rendering at any time by double clicking on the preview.
Material Swatches: here you can store material “swatches” or previews. A material state can be stored as a preview and the user can easily browse between the saved previews, allowing for faster material editing and experimentation.
Texture Editor: the Texture Editor in 1.7 offers various new image controls: Saturation; Brightness; Contrast; and Clamp min/max. These new controls allow users to work much more efficiently with textures. There is no need to use an external image editing application to make small changes to a texture, and the same texture can be used for colour, bump, roughness and weight map.
Wizards: this is a step-by-step guide to creating several types of common materials such as shiny wooden floors, plastics, clipmapped materials for leafs, SSS materials, etc. The “Common” wizard can be used to create Diffuse, Emitter, Metal, Dielectric or Plastic materials. The “SSS Converter” serves as both a wizard and a converter of measured SSS data into values used in the SSS parameters of the Material Editor.

1.7 Maxwell Studio Improvements

· Texture Handling and Memory Optimizations: texture handling, scene loading times and overall memory usage have all been improved. With scenes that use many large textures, objects and materials, the loading time is around 10 times faster.
· Realtime OpenGL Preview of Physical Sky: with the vastly improved Physical Sky system in Maxwell Render 1.7, the OpenGL preview in the viewports has also been improved, allowing you to change any of the Sky parameters and camera settings and seeing an accurate realtime preview in the viewports.
Isolate Selection: useful if you have a cluttered scene and wish to view only the currently selected objects.
UV Operator: this option lets you apply the same transformations to all the selected UVs at the same time. You can, for example, scale all the selected UV sets by 10%.
Material Browser: improved for version 1.7; it has a more common functionality with the Windows Explorer, having a folder view on the left side and the contents of the folder displayed on the right side.

SimuLens:

SimuLens parameters: the SimuLens parameters have been added to the interface of Maxwell Studio and the plug-ins, and they are now also available through the command line. These changes allow for SimuLens to be used for animations.

These are the main new features, but we have also uploaded a What’s New? document to the usual reseller area with a full list of improvements and updates, and a guide on how to use them.

And don’t forget that our current Free Render node promotion runs to the end of June and will include all new V1.7 purchases once released! We will be providing you with more information over the next few days, but in the meantime if you have any queries then please don’t hesitate to contact us at 02 9939 4000 or email rkeeping@smarttec.com.au