Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 30, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
At the top of the list of new features is "Spot Emitters". This emitter type projects a cone-shaped beam of light, thereby imitating spotlights used by photographers or cinematographers.
The short clip shows how it works:
When rendering an image, some areas may contain noise – due to certain lighting and material properties. The new "Extra Sampling" feature is intended to help here. It allows problematic areas to be defined and then calculated with extra rendering power, rather than rendering the entire image over and over again.
There is also a short explanatory clip for this feature:
With the update to V3.1, Maxwell is now able to read and render OpenVDB files directly. In addition, an animation tool has been added to Maxwell Studio, which can be used to realise simple animations such as turntables or time lapses – see the following video:
Performance for the Windows 64-bit architecture has also been improved. The new "White Balance Tool" provides useful services when dealing with mixed-temperature emitters – see the colourful lead image for the news item. Maxwell Fire is now able to display floating shadwos and floating reflections of objects on the ground. Useful for the design phase or presentations – you can see how it works here:
Maxwell 3.1 now supports UDIM textures and the Shadow Channel has been optimised. Whereas compositing previously produced unwanted white edges, making it necessary to work with an additional shadow pass, the channel can now output a fully fledged shadow. In addition to Custom Alpha per object, Custom Alpha Channels can now be defined per material, enabling accurate masks of items to be created – without having to allow for additional rendering effort.
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