[F. Tella]

Hello Maxwell community!

We have released the fresh new Early Build 4.0.0.18.

We added support for GPU on Mac (with external Nvidia cards with Maxwell and Pascal architectures) and Linux and a good amount of bug fixes.
In a different post we will explained how we managed to make an external Nvidia graphics card work on a Mac Pro.

You can get the new version here for Studio and Maxwell Render; the rest of the products will be uploaded in the following days using this engine version:

http://www.maxwellrender.com/betas/


These are the release notes for this version:

4.0.0.18
Publish date: Thu, 09 Feb 2017

MAXWELL GPU
- Linux supported.
- OSX supported.
- Improved emitter sampling and triangle artifact solved.
- Fixed crash with emitters and instances with motion blur.
- Fixed Stack overflow on high-depth voxelizations.
- Fixed clipmaps issues.
- Improved voxelization copy to GPU.
- Fixed memory crash with disabled BSDFs.
- Fixed crash when a coating is on a non active BSDF or when having a material with mixed active and non active BSDFs.
- Fixed Z channel through clipmaps. Normals channel has bad values in areas with no geometry.
- Fixed crash using default material in nogui mode.
- Fixed crash in scenes with no emitters (i.e. sky dome).

MAXWELL RENDER
- Fixed MXI batch processing is exporting channels when user unchecks the option to export them (in some cases).
- Fixed RGB numeric values displayed under mouse pointer (bottom status bar) have not gamma applied for bit-depth 8 and 16.
- Fixed switching from GPU engine, channels does not work on RS1.
- Software opengl DLL added to Windows installers. needed in some cases for old GPUs or remote desktops to show viewport.
- Fixed HDR sky changed to physical sky if using ortho lens, and emitters not reflecting on other objects.

ASSETREFERENCE EXTENSION
- Fixed Load of asset referencess for OSX

MAXWELL STUDIO
- Fixed layer transparency values updated wrong in interactive mode (GPU).
- In scenes in which the paths need a high number of bounces now it can be solved withouth affecting performance (GPU).

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Previous versions release notes:

4.0.0.12

MAXWELL GPU
- Fixed bug in indirect lighting
- Fixed problem rendering some dielectric materials
- Fixed rendering artifacts that could show up depending on material settings.
- Fixed issues with opacity in materials with layers with more than one bsdf.
- Fixed issue with emitters hidden to camera
- Fixed tiling parameters were not working for global bump
- Fixed issues with clipmaps
- Fixed some stability issues
GENERAL
- Fixed command line help does not show all the render engine options.
- [OSX] Fixed assets loading


4.0.0.11

MAXWELL GPU
- Render booleans implemented
- Fixed general stability issues
- Fixed specular materials were too noisy in some scenarios.
- Fixed wrong look of materials with more than 2 BSDFs in some scenarios
- Fixed wrong look of materials with textured opacity layers
- Fixed bug in materials with transmittance that could make them to look wrong
- Fixed issues with object opacity
- Fixed anisotropy and angle when using maps
- Fixed some issues with ghost materials
- Fixed some issues with clipmaps
- Fixed some general shading artifacts
- Error handling improved
- Fixed texture interpolation was not working properly in some cases
- Fixed potential crash reading old MXI files with embeded channels
- Support for unicode (non ascii) characters improved
- Fixed potential crash rendering scenes with disabled BSDFs
- Fixed roughness channel
- Fixed issues rendering instances of hidden objects

MAXWELL CPU
- Color multilight uses less memory now.
- Fixed IES emitters were too dark when multilight was enabled.
- Fixed maxwell.exe was unable to start GUI without NVIDIA driver installed in windows.
- Token %multilight% added to output filename tokens available.

NETWORK
- Fixed issues with transference of MXIs from nodes to manager
- Fixed issue sending preview images

STUDIO/MXED
- Fixed GUI issues
- Fixed scaling in all axis
- Fixed issue downloading zipped materials from the gallery
- Now it is possible to create persistent MXS files when launching Maxwell from Studio
- Interactive engine preference added


4.0.0.8

MAXWELL GPU
- Fixed general stability issues
- Fixed issues assigning/editing emitters in interactive mode
- Fixed stability issues dropping materials over objects in interactive mode
- Fixed potential issue when (yet) unsupported channels were enabled
- Fixed artifacts that could show up when using normal mapping or bump
- Normals channel now shows normal mapping/bump
- Fixed incorrect calculations when using two BSDFs in some scenarios
- Fixed incorrect rotations in Maxwell Mesher

MAXWELL CPU
- Fixed issues with rendering priority
- Fixed regression bug that was causing issues reading some MXI files


STUDIO/MXED
- Material gallery browser improved
- Fix loading of layouts with high resolutions
- Fixed some small GUI issues

GENERAL
- Fixed issues with some installers missing components
- Fixed pymaxwell issues in OSX


4.0.0.6

MAXWELL GPU
- Fixed issues with axis transformation in interactive mode
- Fixed some issues with glossie materials
- Fixed potential memory corruption with HDRI textures
- Added some speed improvements
- Fixed assign o object an emitter material existing on scene switched off all emitters.
- Fixed dropping difuse material on a emitter object in a scene with 2 emitters crashed.
- Fixed anisotropy in dielectrics.
- Fixed some issues re-rendering after changing the engine type

MAXWELL CPU
- Fixed regression performance issues
- Fixed motion blur bug in Production CPU mode


STUDIO
- Stability when using FIRE GPU improved
- Fixes in the new material gallery browser
- Fixed loading of layouts with high resolutions

GENERAL
- Fixed issues in OSX and Linux installers