Maxwell Render | Official public forum

I don't normally worry too much about viewport previews, but wanted to see how the new Maxwell material previews looked. When I right click on a viewport though, the Maxwell Shading Quality is greyed out. I looked in the preferences under the Maxwell tab and noticed that the Viewport Preview option is also greyed out.

I'm using Max 2012 Design, 64bit, with the Nitrous Driver and a GTX 580 card. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

thanks /b

The preview doesn't work with Nitrous. Autodesk didn't really care about plug-ins when they wrote that, they just wanted to make it look good with their own materials. They broke a lot of things with it, and now they broke them some more with 2013 (some stuff that was introduced in 2012 is deprecated in 2013, I guess they hired a guy with ADHD to do their APIs).

You can get it to work if you switch to DirectX 9, but don't expect too much from it. Since FIRE was introduced we've abandoned that line of development (and it wasn't going to go very far anyway, because it's not possible to do shadows, local reflections and other important effects with it).

Yeah, that makes sense. I never used much in the way of viewport previews because they seem to mislead more than they help, but thought I'd check it out with 2.6 just to see.

Thanks for the quick reply.

b

I am also finding that textures look much rougher/lower res when viewed in a Maxwell material than they do in a Standard material. Is there a way to at least get those looking better? It makes it hard to visualize adjust for details.

I can send a screen cap if you are not aware of the issue already.

Thanks /b

As far as I remember, we don't have much control over that, but we'll check again.

Ok - thanks. It's quite a big difference actually so it would be great if there's anything for it.


/b

In the mat editor, click on the map you want to display, and check the "Show in Viewport" box.

Hey Brian.
Thanks, but I can see the map in viewport it is just really blurry/pixelated looking when in a Maxwell material. The same map in a Standard material looks way better for some reason.