Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 4, 2013. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Maxwell Render is considered a good choice for photorealistic images and therefore a specialist for architectural visualizations—thanks to physically correct light sources, cameras and materials. The renderer is said to be integrable into all common software packages.
Among other things, the Custom Sun Radius feature has been presented so far: In it, the sun in Maxwell’s Physical Sky System can be adjusted in size and color and allows both dramatic sun effects and control of shadow strength through the sun-radius setting.
Version 3 will also include a procedural texture collection that can be used alone or together with other textures. Since they are mathematical fractals, they are said to be one hundred percent customizable and usable across platforms.
The speed of the Main Render View is also said to be improved; even scattering and dispersion are updated immediately. The scene preview engine called Maxwell Fire has also been revised so that it only re-voxelizes objects that have actually been changed, which is intended to save a lot of time when setting the scene.
A feature that Maxwell users have been waiting for a long time, according to Next Limit Technologies, is Custom Alphas. These can be used to create an unlimited number of alpha layers and add any object to the layers, so that all objects can be edited exactly separately from one another.
In addition, Next Limit Technologies has added five new lens types, such as Fish Eye or Spherical, a new material editor and a Pixar Open Subdiv feature. By the way, if you would like to know more about Pixar’s Open Subdiv, in DP issue 05/13 we reported on it in detail in our cover story on "Monsters University".
This way to the 30 new features.
You can find all pricing information here.
