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I would like to understand what were the reasons to add that option in general settings. What does it do different than setting it in traditional max's "render output" box? (One thing is that it doesn't warn about overwriting a file)

Just out of curiosity.

Thanks!

When using the default render output, the process is this:
- maxwell.exe runs and writes the specified output image file
- after maxwell.exe is closed, we load the image file and pass the data to Max
- Max saves the image file again with the data we gave it, overwriting the file created by Maxwell

This is a bit redundant, but most of the times it works fine, so you can just use the render output box. However, if you try to create EXR files with embedded channels, Max will break them. Maxwell writes the file correctly, but Max overwrites it with a version containing only the color channel (we give it all the channels, but it doesn't know what to do with them).

When you use the override setting, we never give the image back to Max, so it doesn't re-save anything.

Thanks for the explanation Mihnea.

It would be nice if it warned about overwriting an existing file.

Fernando, one way to avoid worrying about overwriting an existing file you can simply add macros in your output settings.

For instance in the "Overide Image Output" box as well as the "Enable Text Overlay" you can dump things into a working directory using macros to collect various results:
works the same for mxi output....... it would be nice if the macros worked for mxs output as well and I think the output macros documentation page needs an update... #Mihai

here's an example

We're planning to do some improvements to the handling of macros in file names, but it will take a while longer because there's some work being done on the engine side as well, and we want to sync with the changes happening there.

Hey, thanks! Sometime ago I thought it could be useful, but never made a work rutine on that because... I get shivers when I hear the word "macro".

No, seriously, thanks for the tip.

Cool! I dint know about the macros!
to bad there is no frame number macro, at least not in the list in the documentation