Maxwell Render 3 is out
Dec 04, 2013 by CGP Staff
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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.