This forum will be used to announce new features and release
#398055
Dear Maya users,

Today we are releasing Maxwell 4 | Maya 4.2.2. It's a new version with several improvements and fixes which is completely free for current Maxwell 4 | Maya owners.

Among the things added, these stand out over the rest: Viewport 2.0 material and texture representation as well as the improvements in the material preview area. Here goes a teaser for the new preview area before you download it:

Material editor_2.png

We also added support for Maya 2019 but please, be aware that we were also forced to drop support of older versions: from Maya 2012 to Maya 2015. I hope it doesn't cause too much disruption in your workflow.

Here is a blog post showing the main improvements made to the plugin: https://blog.maxwellrender.com/uncatego ... rovements/, but of course, you can just download it from the portal and test it right away: https://portal.nextlimit.com

We hope you enjoy it. Please, let us know any problem you find.

These are the complete release notes:

Maxwell 4 | Maya 4.2.2
Publish date: Tue, 26 Feb 2019

New things and improvements:
  • Added support for Maya 2019.
  • Added support for Maxwell material representation in Viewport 2.0 (Core Profile) for Maya 2017 and newer; in the case of Maya 2016 Legacy Default Viewport has to be used but the features regarding viewport shaders will be the same as in previous versions.
  • Added support for showing in viewport the color or texture of Reflectance 0º and 90º.
  • Added support for showing in viewport the transformations of textures loaded in Reflectance 0º and 90º (Invert, UV Rotation, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Hue from “Maxwell Image Controls” and Repeat UV and Offset from “place2dTexture”)
  • Added support for showing in viewport the textures loaded in Layer Masks and BSDFs Weight Texture with support for Invert and UV Rotation from “Maxwell Image Controls” and Repeat UV and Offset from “place2dTexture”
  • Added support for showing in viewport any texture using “Enable Viewport Override” with support for Invert, UV Rotation, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Hue from “Maxwell Image Controls” and Repeat UV and Offset from “place2dTexture”
  • Added support for showing in viewport an approximation of the transparency set in Transmittance as well as textures with support for Invert and UV Rotation from “Maxwell Image Controls” and Repeat UV and Offset from “place2dTexture”
  • Added support for showing in viewport an approximation of the blending between Reflectance 0º and 90º (colors or textures) affected by roughness value.
  • Added support for showing in viewport an approximation of the blending of multiple BSDFs as well as multiple layers (limited to 32 elements, that is BSDFs or layers) taking into account Normal or Additive blending modes.
  • Added support for showing the main color and texture of the assistant materials in the viewport.
  • Added support for showing any other texture of the assistants through “Enable Viewport Override” with support for Invert, UV Rotation, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Hue from “Maxwell Image Controls” and Repeat UV and Offset from “place2dTexture”.
  • Added support for showing environment viewport preview for Windows and Linux (in Mac it’s not working as it is based on OpenGL 2.0 and in Mac it’s only supported from version 3.2 and up. We’ll try to add support for this in future updates).
  • New Maxwell Material Preview area in Attribute Editor; bigger, more useful, collapsible and detachable).
  • Added a bigger material preview area that can be set to three different sizes.
  • Added engine selection options for the material preview (drop-down and right-click menus).
  • Added controls for Sampling Level (SL) and Time limits as well as the number of threads for the Material Preview.
  • Added a drop-down menu to be able to select the preview scene from the ones available at the Maxwell installation preview folder.
  • Added a text box where to store custom information about the material.
  • Added a toggle button to change from On Demand preview update mode to Automatic.
  • Added a button to edit the material in Maxwell Material Editor (MXED).
  • Added buttons to detach the material preview to a floating window.
  • Added update preview button.
  • Added new buttons to create embedded, referenced and assistant materials (new).
  • In the case of MXS references, we added new object ID options, so you can choose between Container (it will show the one of the MXS reference itself, so it will be one single color), Content (it will show the object ID of the individual objects inside the reference, so it will show several colors) or Recolor (this will generate new random colors for the objects inside the reference which will be persistent between renders).
  • Reorganized assistant materials’ options and default values so they match the ones in MXED; also added some missing texture chips and fixed some problems using textures.
  • Added Hair assistant material.
  • Added an alternative custom saving folder for the Online Gallery downloads in Preferences.

Fixes:
  • Launching a region render crashed Maya when the image was returned to the image frame buffer.
  • When using “Export selected” from File menu with Pack and Go, all the materials of the scene and related files were exported, instead of only the ones related to the selected objects.
  • The plugin was ignoring Maya lights and MXS references when exporting under certain circumstances.
  • Maya crashed if the plugin could not find the right version of Maxwell. It now informs of the problem and disables the plugin.
  • MXS references were not displaying correctly in the viewport in the case of grouped geometry that had transformations applied to the group (although they rendered fine).
  • Some of the fields were showing a light grey background while Maya default color is dark grey.
  • Instances with negative scales exported from Maya were not opened in the right place in Studio (although they rendered correctly).
  • Maya was crashing when trying to open another file after saving one.
  • When Maxwell was set as default renderer, Render Settings panel showed empty.

Version support changes:
  • Dropped support from Maya 2012 to 2015 (included) as some of the new features were not able to work on the old versions.
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