The latest version of Next Limit’s renderer brings over 30 new features, enhancements and optimizations. New features include:
- Custom sun radius – introduces a physically correct
approach to controlling shadow softness (via sun radius) or distant
emitters with parallel shadows. - Procedural textures – a collection of fractal,
seamless, cross-platform procedural textures. - Fast Multilight preview – updates instantly in the main
render view (including scattering and dispersion) thanks to the new GPU
acceleration. - Render Booleans
- Custom alphas – create unlimited ‘layers’ of alphas and add
any object(s) to those layers, allowing you to isolate the exact
objects you need. - Material Assistants – help build the basic material
characteristics for you, saving lots of time. - Pixar’s Open SubDiv support
- Blockable emitters – ability to isolate the
contribution of each emitter to each individual object in the scene. - Maxwell Sea – creates realistic ocean surfaces based on the
Ocean Statistical Spectrum from RealFlow. Various parameters such as
water depth and surface dimensions allow you to produce a convincing
water surface, from swimming pools to open ocean. - Improved motion blur – significant speed improvements when
motion blur is used in scenes with many objects, especially where hair
and particles are used. - Alembic support – can now be referenced directly
in Maxwell v3. Support for Alembic includes static and animated
geometry as well as particles. It also works with the Exocortex CRATE
suite of Alembic plugins. - Deep Compositing – ability to render in ‘deep image’
format, which stores color as well as depth information per pixel,
making it much easier to composite rendered objects together as well as
eliminating troublesome edge artifacts. You can save the deep info in
either .EXR or .DTEX formats, in rgba or alpha. - Volumetrics – can work in several ways: as a
constant density volumetric object – useful for large atmospheric haze
effects or thick fog, it can work with particles files in several
formats, including RealFlow .bin, and also with density fields/voxels
directly from Maya or Houdini. - 10 nodes – Maxwell Render Suite floating licenses for
v3 come with 10 render nodes included as standard.
Sample videos can be found on Next Limit’s Vimeo channel. More on Maxwell Render’s website.
