[nicole]

Hi everyone,

We are pleased to announce the releases of Maxwell plug-in for Archicad 10 for OSX and Windows.

Archicad

The Mac version now has the same features as the Windows version; you can see the features list here:

http://www.maxwellrender.com/news/archicad.html

There are also some new improvements:

- Installation for ArchiCAD plugin was modified (the current installation allows selection of installation folder)
- Default project folder is correct even on international Windows
- Better error reporting implemented
- More stable support for ArchiCAD textures
- Fix: latitude/longitude ranges were wrong

You can get the updated plug-in from the usual customers download site: http://download.nextlimit.com/download.htm

3dsMax plug-in

We have also updated the 3dsMax plug-in with a patch and there is also a new video which explains the new workflow better.
http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php? ... 3dmax.html

New features:

- Much improved material preview. The previews are now rendered at the resolution requested by the Material editor or floating preview window
- Added options to control the quality of preview renders (Customize -> Preferences -> Maxwell tab)
- New materials display a "no preview" image in the Material editor instead of a completely black swatch
- Copying a material from one Material editor slot to another also copies the preview image
- Importing an .mxm brings the preview image in the Material editor, if a preview is stored in the file
- low priority is on by default in the render global options
- Implemented material-wide UV scale
- Importing an .mxm file also changes the name of the material in Max.
- preview resolution scale works now
- the color of Maxwell materials is displayed in the viewport

- We changed the translation for Blinn and Phong shaders so that the approximation works better when opacity is used. Now opacity is also connected as the weight of the lambertian layer, so an opacity of 0 completely disables the rough layer, resulting in a clean-looking glass material.
- normal map flip flags are now supported
- the rendered image is brought into the virtual frame buffer

Bugs fixed:

· fixed crash when creating a particle emitter
· fixed memory leak in the material preview code
· .r2 files can now be selected when browsing for IOR data
· fixed the value ranges for camera shutter speed, Abbe number, attenuation distance and coating thickness
· mapped network drives now show up when browsing for a folder in the material browser
· when importing old scenes, the plug-in was creating one new material for each object in the scene (as opposed to one material for each old material)
· material names were not preserved when converting old scenes

Thanks and enjoy!

Nicole