Next Limit’s Juan Cañada has announced the improvements that will be brought by v3.2 of Maxwell Render. New features include:
- Faster subsurface scattering
- Improved rendering of nested dielectrics – especially useful for rendering fluids
- Stereo Lenses for VR rendering – Lat/Long and Stereo Fish Lens
- API Extension – it is now possible for third party developers to develop their own procedural geometries, geometry modifiers, procedural textures, camera lens, etc. Many of the latest improvements in Maxwell use this API internally. The API extension is included with the main package and is free for both personal and commercial use.
- PSD Output Support – ability to save in PSD format in 8, 16 and 32 bits. It supports multi-layered PSD’s, so channels and light buffers (when Multilight is enabled) can be embedded as separate passes.
- Procedural emitters – now it’s possible to apply emitter materials to entities that are not triangle meshes, such as hair and fur, particles, grass
- Separated Reflection & Refraction channels – you can now render many more channel combinations, such as “Diffuse”, “Reflections”, “Diffuse + Reflections”, “Refractions”, “Reflections+Refractions”. These 6 available options make it possible to apply de-noiser algorithms to specific passes. Rendering the diffuse and reflective components separately allows for greater flexibility when compositing. Less noise in glass buildings for Archviz.
- Improved Maxwell Scatter – a new “remove overlapped” option has been added to avoid collisions between instances generated by the scatter algorithm
- New “Reflectance” Channel – shows plain colors without the influence of global illumination, useful for achieving “self illuminated textures” when used in combination with custom alpha channels
- Maxwell Grass world-Y growth – allows you to define the overall growth direction of your grass blades towards the world-Y axis (sky direction)
- Improvements in Multilight editor – it is now is possible to select and edit multiple emitters at the same time and there is a new “Sort by name/type/intensity” function
- New “Asset Reference” extension – allows you to work with references of many different file formats, in the same way Maxwell works with referenced MXS’s – so these geometries are not pre-converted to MXS files but Maxwell now works with them directly, and they are loaded at render time. Some of the supported formats include OBJ, FBX, Blender, Alembic, DAE, STL, LXO, 3DS, LWO, 3D, etc.
Plus bug fixes. Maxwell Render v3.2 will be a free update for all v3 users. A beta has just been uploaded to the company’s Early Builds Area, so licensed users can try it. More on Maxwell Render’s website.
