Maxwell Render | Official public forum

When will it be ready?

Cheers, Florian

It should be ready in a couple of weeks.

How's it going?

I'm looking forward to installing Maya 2016.

It is out for six days now - http://www.maxwellrender.com/betas/plugin/12

T0M0 wrote:It is out for six days now - http://www.maxwellrender.com/betas/plugin/12

"The latest beta will render [volumetrics], but unfortunately they're prohibitively slow to render at even very basic / light settings."

http://maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopi ... 01&t=43539

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That's what I've found as well, so I hope there is an official Maya plugin coming soon that improves on this beta.

The performance of the volumetrics is not influenced by the plug-in, it's strictly an engine thing. I don't think there have been major changes in that area since 3.1 was released, but the settings you're using can have a big impact on noise and render times. I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm sure you will get some useful advice if you post some renders or a scene in the main forum. I know that Ryan (the author of the post you've linked) has spoken to Dario by email and they found some settings which provide the look he was after with much better rendering times.

Mihnea Balta wrote:The performance of the volumetrics is not influenced by the plug-in, it's strictly an engine thing.

Volumetrics don't seem to work at all when launched from the latest official release, so there is at least that much influence.

So I take it I may as well upgrade Maya, then, based on this early build of the plugin.

Okay. Will do.

kudos for the quick 2016 support!
It would be useful to have fire show up as an option inside the new hyper shade material preview.
as of now it shows the material with a maya hardware preview, which is kinda limited...
thanks

Yeah, I wanted to do that, but it's not straightforward so I postponed it to be able to release a working version as soon as possible. It's on the todo list for a future build.

Mihnea Balta wrote:Yeah, I wanted to do that, but it's not straightforward so I postponed it to be able to release a working version as soon as possible. It's on the todo list for a future build.

Great!
thanks

I also noticed that graphing a shading network doesn't show connections (files connected to specular etc)
i guess that will be addressed too?
thanks

Different from earlier releases, for Maya 20XX, XX < 16, I experience a problem when I use Maxwell
in the viewport. That is, when I switch from Viewport 2.0 to Maxwell.
The viewport turns black, although it does not crash Maya and I can return to Viewport 2.0 without
any problems.
Are there any new adjustments to make before it works ?

The Maya viewport has changed significantly in 2016, and these changes broke our implementation of the "high quality" viewport mode. We therefore decided to remove it, since it wasn't adding much value anyway (it's possible to make it work in 2016, but it's not worth the effort). The "normal quality" mode, where you got normal mapping and specular highlights, is available when using the regular Viewport 2.0 renderer, without having to switch to Maxwell.

The "Maxwell" entry in the Renderer menu is not related to the old Maxwell viewport (the old option was under the "Panels" menu). It represents a custom render override that we use internally for the FIRE and image preview windows. It's not intended to be accessed directly by users and it's not a replacement for the Maxwell viewport. It would be nice if we could hide it from the Renderer menu, so that it doesn't cause confusion, but unfortunately there's no way of doing this with the current API.

Thanks, for your explanations