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Sorry if this has been addressed...
Can we see transparency (dielectrics) in viewport without the use of FIRE, or will we have it for v3? What about shiftlens?
Cheers!

Yes, it would be so nice!
A.

Shift lens is impossible. Max has a skew modifier which you can apply on the camera to get a sort of shift lens effect, but it doesn't correspond to what Maxwell does, so it would just be misleading. On the other hand, Maxwell doesn't support skewing the camera, so we can't render the Max hack.

We will look into transparency, but the problem is that when Autodesk made the Nitrous viewport, they forgot about plug-ins (or ignored them on purpose). Plug-ins have very limited options when it comes to changing how materials are displayed in the viewport.

For the shift camera, would it be possible to create a new object type, a Maxwell Camera? Like what VRay does with the VRayPhysicalCamera - I think the Max SDK exposes a 4x4 transform matrix for the viewports that plugin cameras can set and should allow the skewing. It would be such a huge improvement to the plugin.

You can't set the full projection matrix when you make a plug-in camera. You can only set the FOV. It is stupid beyond belief - they had to write more code to get less out of it. Look here, it's the set of parameters that plug-in cameras can control: link.

I think VRay supports skewing the camera, to emulate the hack that Max is using (so it's not doing a "true" shift lens). The engine would have to support that internally, and we don't at the moment.