What’s New in V3.1?
Spot Emitters
This emitter type projects a conical light beam, mimicking the spotlights used by photographers and cinematographers. You can control the shape of the beam by adjusting the cone angle and the falloff of its borders. They can also work as image projectors, projecting the map you input just like a slide projector.
Extra Sampling
Often when you render an image, residual noise is concentrated in certain areas of the scene due their particular lighting and material characteristics. With the new Extra Sampling feature, you can now define a specific area of your image to be rendered to a higher sampling level than the rest – putting all the render power to the areas where it is most needed, rendering smarter and saving a huge amount of time.
OpenVDB
With the 3.1 update, Maxwell can now read and render OpenVDB files directly. This file format can efficiently store very detailed and large volumetrics based on a 3D grid of voxels instead of individual point particles, which makes it more efficient for storing and rendering detailed volumetrics where otherwise billions of individual particles would have been needed.
Animation tool in Studio
Maxwell Studio now includes an animation tool which makes it very easy to generate simple scene animations such as turntables or time-lapses, directly from Studio.
Improved performance in Windows
Maxwell’s performance on Windows architectures with over 64 cores has been optimised – taking advantage of even more machine power, and speeding up rendertimes.
Camera Response / White balance
The new white balance tool can come in handy when mixed temperature emitters are used, or for artistic purposes. White balancing directly in Maxwell means more accurate results because you are directly adjusting the spectral information contained in the render MXI files, giving you the widest possible color gamut to work with. Additionally, the new camera response curves give you a standard set of film and digital sensors to choose from, to quickly provide you with a certain look to your render.
Floating Shadows
Maxwell FIRE (preview engine) is now able to display Floating Shadows and Floating Reflections of your objects on the ground, even without a geometry ground plane in the scene. This feature is very helpful during the design stage or even for presentations of your products, as it quickly provides a decent preview of your models even at an early stage.
UDIM Textures
Maxwell 3.1 supports UDIM textures (developed by The Foundry’s Mari) which allow you to vary the mapping resolutions over different parts of a model, and apply high resolution only in the areas needed, helping to keep file sizes to a reasonable size.
Improved Shadow Channel
Prior to 3.1, the Shadow channel produced knocked out shadows, which caused unwanted white borders when composed (so an extra shadow pass was usually necessary). Now, the Shadow channel can produce a full shadow, that produces no white border when composed.
Custom Alpha per material
In addition to the Custom Alpha per object, you can now define Custom Alpha channels per material, producing accurate masks of the items you choose without any extra render cost, providing more flexibility and information for the composition stage.