
© Next Limit Technologies 2010
Maxwell Render 2.5 User Manual
Chapeter 2. The Maxwell Render Reality. Understanding Maxwell’s Approach to rendering | 8
2.02 Environment
Maxwell Render provides a complete Physical Sky system with a sophisticated atmosphere
model that reproduces skylight conditions at different hours, dates, and locations. The
Physical Sky system is a simple way to obtain extremely accurate lighting in your scenes.
The atmosphere parameters allow users to customize the look of the sky and the resulting
light in the scene, ranging from common Earth values to exaggerated fantasy skies. Users
can also create presets of the 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.
2.03 Interactive workflow
With Maxwell Render you will get an awesome interactive workow, saving a lot of your
time as you don’t need to re-launch the render for every parameter you adjust.
First: Maxwell Render allows you to re-expose your image interactively during the render
process. Multilight enables you to adjust the intensity of all the individual or grouped lights
in your scene during or after the rendering process to get the results you are looking for.
It is also possible to resume a render after it has nished rendering.
The exposure is the level of brightness of the nal image. With most conventional rendering
engines, if your image is too dark, you have to re-render again. In Maxwell Render, you
can adjust the exposure (adjust the level of brightness) during the render, or even after
the render has nished. Moreover, if you enable Multilight, you can adjust the intensity of
the different lights in your scene separately even after the render has nished.
Second: Maxwell Render includes a truly interactive render preview, Maxwell Fire (which
stands for Fast Interactive Rendering), which allows you to preview your scene in a fully
interactive window (in Studio and in those plug-ins where Maxwell Fire is available),
displaying a great quality preview render of your scene in seconds. This makes it much
faster and easier to adjust your materials, adjust the environment conditions, set up the
camera parameters or your emitter’s intensity and color, and see the results in real time.
Again, Maxwell Render is a huge time saver in your pipeline.
2.04 Cameras
Cameras in Maxwell Render™ operate completely different from those in other render
engines. Traditionally, most render engines use a pinhole camera. This type of camera
simulates a tiny hole that allows light rays coming from the scene to reach the viewing
surface. Instead, Maxwell Render™ simulates a real camera with the associated lens set,
diaphragm aperture, diaphragm blades and various other settings. By using this type of
camera model Maxwell Render™ can automatically simulate depth of eld or aperture
diffraction.
Along similar lines, motion blur in Maxwell Render™ is not produced as a post-process.
Maxwell Render™ considers the moving objects to have random positions along their
trajectories during the camera shutter speed time. This creates a natural and realistic
motion blur.
Maxwell Render’s SimuLens™ system allows you to simulate the shape of the diaphragm,
creating realistic lens diffraction effects. It is also possible to simulate the scattering of
light inside a lens system, an effect typically called “bloom”.
2.05 Materials
Maxwell Render™ materials – called MXM – are dened in a physically correct manner by
their BSDF functions (Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function), making it possible
to build up different layers of materials in the same object, like other BSDF or SSS (Sub
Surface Scattering) effects. Thin coatings are also available for very subtle and realistic
effects such as thin lm interference effects for the multicolored look of a thin layer of oil
in water, or soap bubbles.
Maxwell Render™ materials are not only physically correct but also very exible and
versatile.
Bump/ Normal Mapping, Displacement, Dispersion of light and Emitting properties are
other characteristics available in the Maxwell material system.
With Maxwell Render 2 and its new stacked layers system, it is possible to create
sophisticated materials easily. Materials can now be stacked in a layered way, so you can
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