Archive notice: This article was originally published on May 24, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Spanish software manufacturer Next Limit Technologies has presented an important update for Maxwell Render 1.1: The new version 1.5 is now available to owners of the previous version and brings numerous improvements.
For this, Next Limit has rewritten parts of the render engine. Among other things, this is intended to bring improved memory management and significantly reduced memory requirements compared with the previous version. Maxwell Render 1.5 can thus calculate very high resolutions such as 8000 by 6000 pixels with less than 2 GByte RAM. Memory-intensive tasks such as Glare, Multilight with many emitters, large geometries and complicated textures also benefit.
MXI files can always be rerendered or resumed and the size of these files is around 3.5 times smaller than in the previous version.
Next Limit has also rewritten Maxwell Studio and the Maxwell Material Editor and promises improved workflows and usability.
The renderer’s network functions are now said to run more stably and faster; they will offer the option of seeing preview images from each node and selecting individual computers by name or IP address.
All Maxwell plug-ins are be compatible with the new version. Next Limit has also further developed many of them, particularly the Lightwave plug-in. For XSI 6 there is a new, free plug-in for Windows and Linux.
There will also be a Linux version of Maxwell Render 1.5.
The update is free for owners of Maxwell Render 1.1. With Maxwell Render 1.5, Next Limit Technologies is also introducing a new licensing model. More about this and other functions of the new version can be found on the website.
Further links:
- Next Limit Technologies: Maxwell Renderer
