v5.2 Next Limit Maxwell | Revit
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High-quality, photorealistic 3D rendering for architecture and product design
The Maxwell | Revit integration, reworked for V4, has significant improvements including the addition of FIRE – our interactive preview engine, as well as a re-designed and reorganized toolbar. Maxwell | Revit has been specifically designed for rendering in Revit with a simple yet comprehensive Maxwell toolbar. It brings you advanced Maxwell Render technology in a simple, self-contained package.
Next Limit Maxwell | Revit Highlights
Ground Truth Quality
Maxwell is all about quality. Period. This has been our sacred mantra for most than 15 years of development. Our secret sauce is a physically-correct unbiased spectral engine, which produces not only beautiful images but also lighting-accurate simulations. In fact, many consider Maxwell the ground-truth in rendering and CGI production. We strive to inspire others, and you inspire us.
Maxwell Integrations come with the full Maxwell toolkit, including the following.
- Maxwell Production Engine
- Multilight™
- FIRE (interactive preview engine)
- Materials Editor
- Real camera model
- Network tools
Next Limit Maxwell | Revit Manual
CORE FEATURES
DENOISER – NEW
Maxwell now easily integrates a powerful denoiser (by Innobright’s Altus), while preserving texture and geometry details, effectively saving a lot of time. You can obtain your images around two to six times faster, depending on the scene for a similar amount of detail. Instead of having to render your images to a high sampling level, keep it low. To put it another way, let the denoiser do the job.
Based on Reality
Reality means predictable, reliable first-time results. With Maxwell Render, you can focus your valuable time and energy on creating your vision. In other words, not struggling with obscure computer graphics terminology and tweaking parameters.
Accuracy
Be confident that your simulations truly reflect reality. So, your materials look like real life with Maxwell Render’s incredible lighting accuracy. Every detail of your textures and models will play a part in bringing your render to life.
Advanced Ray Tracing
The advanced ray tracing technology which forms the core of Maxwell Render’s engine is so powerful that it is capable of simulating light exactly as it is in the real world. No tricks. Just real-world physics. To put it simply, Maxwell Render is the benchmark in render quality.
Physical Sky
The physical sky system in Maxwell Render uses a novel approach, offering a wide range of real-life, physically-correct variables to control the look of the sky and lighting in your scene. You can control your position on Earth (location and time), the sun’s aspect, and the atmospheric conditions.
Fast Scene Setup
Computer time is less important and far less expensive than human time. The entire Maxwell Render approach (real-world camera, emitter, and material parameters) saves you time on your projects. To explain, you get accurate, predictable results. Don’t spend your valuable time endlessly tweaking dozens of parameters. Simply set your scene with simple Maxwell settings. Then, move on to your next project!
Extra Sampling
Often when you render an image, residual noise is concentrated in certain areas of the scene due to 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.
Multilight™
When you need to make light changes, the highly acclaimed Multilight™ feature removes the need to re-render an image. Multilight™ allows you to change the intensities of lights and scene emitters during and after the rendering process. So, you can tweak the lighting set up over and over. In fact, save out as many images of the same scene as you like-all from just a single render.
FIRE: Interactive Scene Preview
Maxwell FIRE gives you immediate feedback in the renderer for adjustments to lighting, materials, and camera settings. And unlike other interactive style renderers, Maxwell FIRE is compatible with ALL Maxwell materials and features.
Intuitive
The Maxwell Material system uses components that can be stacked like layers in an image editing program. Indeed, it’s easy to use. The materials are based on real optical properties, creating unrivaled realism.
Realistic Camera Model
The camera in Maxwell Render has all the parameters you would expect in a real camera – f-Stop, Focal Length, Shutter speed, ISO, film size, diaphragm blades. This means that DOF, bokeh, and the exposure match your live footage – making the compositing stage far quicker and simpler.
Materials assistant
A fast-track materials editor that builds the basics for you, saving you lots of time. Choose a category and the assistant will help you create perfectly optimized materials for your scene in just seconds!
Grass and Fur
The Maxwell Render grass generator allows you to quickly create grass on a selected piece of geometry. Designed to offer maximum control over the look of the grass – from impeccable detail on close-up shots to fast-rendering further away from the camera. Compatible with Maxwell Studio and almost all supported plugins.
Memory Saving Instances
Instances are a great way to save memory when rendering. With 10,000 instances of 1 object, Maxwell Render will consume the same amount of memory at render time as if it was rendering only the 1 object. Instances are great for creating vegetation, bricks, furniture, or any other extensively repeated geometry in your scene.
Accurate 3D Motion Blur
Maxwell Render’s accurate 3D motion blur can now handle unlimited sub-steps and can be set for both a still camera to mimic long exposure effects such as trails of light, and a film camera to show the motion blur effect of fast-moving objects. Control the amount of motion blur directly from the camera, by either the shutter speed or the rotary shutter angle.
Hair
Maxwell Render’s hair rendering tool is compatible with many of the most popular hair systems (Maya Shave and a Haircut, Maya hair, 3ds Max hair, CINEMA hair, or Ornatrix). Hair systems are automatically converted to the Maxwell primitive – which is highly optimized for memory consumption and speed. The hair primitive has an actual thickness so any Maxwell material can be applied to it, including transparent, refractive materials.
Volumetrics
The volumetric feature in Maxwell can work in several ways: as a constant density volumetric object – useful for large atmospheric haze effects or thick fog, it can work with particles files in several formats including RealFlow .bin, and also with density fields/voxels directly from Maya or Houdini.
RealFlow Integration
Maxwell Render is compatible ‘out of the box’ with Next Limit’s RealFlow™ software, giving RealFlow™ users the option to use Maxwell Render as their render engine of choice. Render your RealFlow™ particles directly with Maxwell Render, meshing the point cloud at render time.
Maxwell Sea
Maxwell Sea creates realistic ocean surfaces and waves based on the Ocean Statistical Spectrum from RealFlow. Various parameters such as water depth and surface dimensions allow you to produce a convincing water surface, from swimming pools to open ocean. The meshing is only done at render time, meaning it takes up almost no extra space in the .MXS file.
Alembic
The Alembic file format allows for very efficient storage of geometry and other scene data, which can now be referenced directly in Maxwell. Support for Alembic includes static and animated geometry as well as particles. It also works with the Exocortex CRATE suite of Alembic plugins.
Deep Compositing
Maxwell can render in ‘deep image’ format, which stores color as well as depth information per pixel, making it much easier to composite rendered objects together as well as eliminating troublesome edge artefacts. You can save the deep info in either .EXR or .DTEX formats, in rgba or alpha.
Pixar Open SubDiv
The Subdivision feature allows you to subdivide low-polygon objects into smooth surfaces, by implementing Pixar OpenSubdiv. Because it’s subdividing the geometry only at render time – your scene files take up far less space and can be transferred much faster around your network. OpenSubdiv is owned by Pixar. Copyright (C) Pixar. All rights reserved.
Python scripting
Maxwell Render has a Python SDK with online documentation. With Python you have access to almost all the features of Maxwell Render, allowing you to write custom tools such as extracting certain channels from an MXI sequence, rendering a turn-table animation of all your scene assets for easy referencing, creating materials on the fly, network renders management and much much more.
Networking Rendering
Maxwell Render’s powerful networking capabilities are multi-platform, allowing for a mixture of Windows, OSX, and Linux in the same network. You can set Maxwell Render to render one image using all of your computers, or set each computer to render one animation frame. Complete control and flexibility.
Post-production plugins
We offer plugins for NUKE, After Effects, and Photoshop which can load Maxwell Render’s high dynamic range format (MXI).
Channels
The Alembic file format allows for very efficient storage of geometry and other scene data, which can now be referenced directly in Maxwell. Support for Alembic includes static and animated geometry as well as particles. It also works with the Exocortex CRATE suite of Alembic plugins.
Custom Alphas
Create unlimited ‘layers’ of alphas and add any object(s) to those layers, which allows you to isolate the exact objects you need.
Ready to use
Finally, get free access to hundreds of ready to use materials online in our community-based library.
Description
System Requirements
Compatibility
- Revit 2015 – 2020
The minimum system requirements for Maxwell Render V4 are as follows:
Windows
- Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, all 64 bits versions.
- 2 GHz Intel® Core2 processor, AMD Athlon 64 or better
- 1GB RAM minimum. 4 GB of RAM memory is highly recommended
- 400 MB available hard disk space for installation
- Accelerated OpenGL drivers
- 3 button mouse recommended
Macintosh
- Mac OSX 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 and 10.12
- 1 GB RAM minimum. 4 GB of RAM memory is highly recommended
- 400 MB available hard disk space for installation
- 3 button mouse recommended
Linux 64
- x86_64 distribution with a 2.6 Kernel and glibc 2.5
- Tested in Debian GNU/Linux 7 (wheezy), Fedora Core release 6 (Zod), CentOS release 6.5 (Final), Ubuntu precise (12.04.2 LTS)
- 2 GHz Intel® Core®2, AMD Athlon 64 or better
- 1 GB RAM minimum. 4 GB of RAM memory is highly recommended
- 400 MB available hard disk space for installation
- 3 button mouse recommended
GPU engine
- Graphics cards that support CUDA platform (Nvidia).
- Maxwell and Pascal architectures are supported (for reference you can check this link); it could work on older architectures but it could be unstable and the experience won’t be good.
Change Log
Maxwell v5.2.0.45 Update – March 9, 2021
Maxwell
Improvements
- Denoiser’s new approach. Better integration in the render engine. One-pass render, multi-layered MXI, the Denoiser image is treated as another channel and is included in the MXI file, so its information does not get lost; better memory management because of tiling options and new fine-tuning options to control the Denoiser strength.
- Denoiser parameters exposed:
- Tiling.
- Maximum Tile Size.
- Color Influence (kc1).
- Color Influence (kc2).
- Feature Influence (kf).
- Final Pass Strength (kc4).
- Filter Radius.
- Firefly Remover.
- A new modal panel shows up while the render is being re-denoised.
- New “refresh” controls in the render viewport to refresh the render, the denoiser channel or both.
- New option for Channel controls positions in Preferences > Appearance (Bottom-Left and Bottom-Right). Shortcuts on Windows: Ctrl + Alt + NumPad 1 and 2. Shortcuts on MacOS: Option + Command + NumPad 1 and 2.
- New option for Refresh controls positions in Preferences > Appearance (Top-Left, Top-Right, Bottom-Left and Bottom-Right). Shortcuts on Windows: Ctrl + Alt + NumPad 4, 5, 7 and 8. Shortcuts on MacOS: Option + Command + NumPad 4, 5, 7 and 8.
Changes
- Command line parameter -denoise removed. To activate the denoiser through the command line the user must enable the denoiser channel. Example: -channel:denoiser,on,8,png
- The Denoiser image output path field has been removed from the panel as now it’s treated as any other channel; thus, the denoised image will be saved next to the main render and with the same name plus _denoiser.
- Denoiser auto-configuration now sets Position channel in world coordinates, and Normals channel in camera coordinates by default. If the user enabled any of those channels, denoiser auto-configuration will respect the channels’ configuration set by the user.
- The Denoiser will be applied in “preview quality” for intermediate SLs until SL 12. For SL 12 and beyond the denoiser runs in “final quality”, as well as for the last denoiser update when the render ends, no matter the final SL.
- Default Priority set to “Below Normal”.
- The mximerge application -coopdenoiser command-line flag has been removed.
- The Draft engine disables extra-sampling and continues instead of failing when extra-samping is enabled.
- Process Priority becomes an application setting, still overridable by command-line parameter -p or -priority.
- Deprecated command line parameter -channels removed.
Fixes
- Wrong data issues with TIFF images and LZW compression on Linux and Windows platforms (including Maxwell Cloud nodes).
- Maxwell Render never ended in nogui mode if the denoiser was active, and a forbidden denoiser parameters combination was set by mistake in the MXS: auto-configure:fast + shadow-denoiser:on.
- BSDF blending proportions of materials could not be accurate when the material was applied to an object with object opacity different than 100%.
- Intensity correction was not correct for some additive materials.
- Crash with reflectance channel + material with reflectance textures with no tiling.
- The License Activator on Mac was copying the floating licenses in the wrong folder.
- (MacOS only) Quicklook had a memory leak.
- In FIRE CPU (CPU Draft engine) Spot Lights in projector mode were not working.
Known Issues
- MaxwellScatter extension removes MaxwellScatter extension from the scattered objects (if they have).
- Benchwell stops sometimes before the benchmark test has finished. We don’t allow uploading the results in that case.
Maxwell GPU
New Features
- NVIDIA Ampere graphics cards support.
- Multilight is now supported by the GPU engine.
- Multi-GPU dynamic balance. Fewer samples are expected from cards that had less performance in past rendering passes.
- Emitter + BSDF now works in GPU. It is restricted to one emitter per material.
- Samples rebalance: Threads of one pixel can help other pixels if they need to. This helps that the image sampling level is more homogeneous. This can make that, in some scenes, Maxwell will require more time to reach the same SL, but more complicated parts of the image will have less noise at the same SL. Also, less computing power will be invested in easy parts, like the sky. In general, the computing power will be used more efficiently.
Improvements
- Speed improvement in multi-gpu.
- Improved the way in how certain calculations are done within the GPU engine that should help minimize certain precision issues regarding two surfaces being too close to each other and far away from the camera. (i.e. putting an emitter too close behind an AGS could make the rays skip the emitter if they are far from the center of the scene).
- Render Region and Blow-up Region are not supported in the GPU engine, now the region is reset to Full Frame before the render starts.
Changes
- Upgrade to CUDA 11.1. Minimum NVIDIA drivers required:
- Windows: 456.38.
- Linux: 455.23.
- CUDA 11 drops support for the following operating systems:
- Windows 7.
- Windows 8.
- Windows Server 2012 R2.
- CUDA 11 drops support for Kepler 3.0 and 3.2 graphics cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA):
- GeForce GTX 770, GeForce GTX 760, GeForce GT 740, GeForce GTX 690, GeForce GTX 680, GeForce GTX 670, GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GeForce GTX 660, GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST, GeForce GTX 650 Ti, GeForce GTX 650, GeForce GTX 880M, GeForce GTX 780M, GeForce GTX 770M, GeForce GTX 765M, GeForce GTX 760M, GeForce GTX 680MX, GeForce GTX 680M, GeForce GTX 675MX, GeForce GTX 670MX, GeForce GTX 660M, GeForce GT 750M, GeForce GT 650M, GeForce GT 745M, GeForce GT 645M, GeForce GT 740M, GeForce GT 730M, GeForce GT 640M, GeForce GT 640M LE, GeForce GT 735M, GeForce GT 730M, Quadro K5000, Quadro K4200, Quadro K4000, Quadro K2000, Quadro K2000D, Quadro K600, Quadro K420,Quadro K500M, Quadro K510M, Quadro K610M, Quadro K1000M, Quadro K2000M, Quadro K1100M, Quadro K2100M, Quadro K3000M, Quadro K3100M, Quadro K4000M, Quadro K5000M, Quadro K4100M, Quadro K5100M, NVS 510, Quadro 410, Tesla K10, GRID K340, GRID K520, GRID K2.
- In order to keep compatibility for the GPU engine with Windows 7/8/Server 2012 R2, for Maxwell Render 5.2.0 and future Maxwell 5 versions, Maxwell Render, Maxwell Studio and the plug-ins will be available in two flavors for Windows:
- Windows 7 installer. CUDA 10 based, which supports the following NVIDIA architectures:
- Maxwell.
- Pascal.
- Volta.
- Turing.
- Windows 10 installer. CUDA 11 based, which supports the following NVIDIA architectures:
- Maxwell.
- Pascal.
- Volta.
- Turing.
- Ampere.
- Windows 7 installer. CUDA 10 based, which supports the following NVIDIA architectures:
Fixes
- GPU statistics did not show correct render progress.
- GPU stopped at a much higher SL than requested.
- GPU crashed when having more than one emitter per material.
- GPU ghost bsdf (Transmittance white + Nd = 1 + K = 0) was rendering as opaque if the material had more than one bsdf and the attenuation was set to 1 nm.
- BSDF blending proportions of materials might not be accurate when the material was applied to an object with object opacity different than 100%.
- Intensity correction was not correct for some additive materials.
- MXI files generated by the GPU engine could not be merged.
- Tiling X or Y with global map did not work properly in the GPU engine.
- Maxwell froze with instances to nulls with emitter materials.
- The GPU engine couldn’t find some textures on some pack & go conditions.
- The GPU engine could crash using multi-gpu with IBL on consecutive renders with different resolutions.
Maxwell Studio
New Features
Added the new Denoiser options to the Attributes panel > Render Options > Scene tab > Denoiser section.
- Tiling and Max Tile Size
- Fine-tuning options: Color Influence 1 and 2, Feature Influence, Final Pass, Filter Radius and Firefly Remover.
Improvements
- Improved the readability of the text fields when editing them.
- When activating the material preview auto-update, the preview is refreshed (FIRE will be stopped to avoid conflicts).UI minor improvements.
Changes
- FIRE default parameters changed to Quality 4 and SL 12.
- Default Priority set to “Below Normal”.
Fixes
- Crash with random uvs extension and displacement.
- The Global map did not show properly in the viewport.
- The Lat-Long Stereo camera creation triggered an error: “separation_map.png” not found.
- The Fish Stereo camera creation triggered several errors: “separation_map.png/turn_map.png” not found.
- FIRE did not update properly on Lat-Long/Fish Stereo parameters change.
- Studio installer was not able to detect and uninstall a previous Maxwell Render installation.
- Channels Output Mode “Separate/Embedded” option was not being written to the MXS file.
- Random crash starting Studio on macOS.
Known Issues
- Resources Browser makes Studio crash on widget resize in some rare cases.
- Studio won’t work on a remote desktop (Linux host).
MXED
New Features
- New Substance Designer assistant. It allows loading .sbsar files and editing their parameters directly from Maxwell. The material is automatically translated internally to a Maxwell material or you can permanently convert it to a Custom Maxwell material.
Network
Improvements
- The Cloud jobs now show in the Name field how many renders it has.
- Cloud jobs rows with one render show the current/target SL data of the render.
- The Maxwell Cloud ignores Search Paths in the MXS to improve dependency search time.
- Cloud job wizard now allows the user to set channels in the render parameters panel.
- The Network Monitor shows a “New Version” message on Maxwell Cloud updates when the user logs in.
Changes
- The “forgot password” link wasn’t working properly, now it opens portal.nextlimit.com/login/remember directly in the default internet browser.
Fixes
- Cloud job resolucion with locked pixel aspect was not taking into account the original output resolution of the scene and used 4:3 always instead.
- Linux: Wrong file type filter on missing dependencies dialog when sending a cloud job.
- There were some missing render parameters in the network job wizard UI: Render Engine, Motion Blur, Displacement and Dispersion.
- The user couldn’t log-in in Maxwell Cloud through Network Monitor if the password contained the character “%”.
SDK
Changes
- Cmaxwell::getRenderParameter/setRenderParameter new signature. The old one remains for backward compatibility.
- New maxwellcommon.h header.
Maxwell 5.1 – What’s New
New features
- New Benchwell tools for CPU and GPU benchmarking with online live charts. You can access them from the Tools menu from Maxwell Render.
Improvements
- Asset Reference extension object: assimp library upgraded to 5.0.0 so it gives better support for all the file formats.
- Upgraded Xrite SDK to 1.7.1 so it gives better support for the latest materials.
Known Issues
- Wrong data issues with TIFF images and LZW compression in Linux platforms (including Maxwell Cloud nodes).
- MaxwellScatter extension removes MaxwellScatter extension from the scattered objects (if they have).
- On Mac, Xrite AxF materials make Maxwell close if they are used in the scene.
Fixes
- The bump map and the normal map were being affected by geometry’s transformations in some situations.
- Crash computing denoised image in intermediate steps during render.
- Launching a render with CPU, stopping, changing to GPU and restarting produced an error when starting the voxelization.
- The RLM could not be installed on MacOS Catalina.
- The Random Color procedural texture always returned the same color if the object ID color saturation was 255.
- The command line parameter -mintime was not only setting a minimum time between each time Maxwell saved output images to disk but was forcing a maximum time too.
- Maxwell CPU failed to render correctly texture channels higher than 0 if channel 0 was not used.
Maxwell GPU
New features
- Benchwell tool.
- Coatings are now supported in the GPU engine.
Fixes
- Wrong textures could be accessed on materials in different circumstances.
- Several fixes in dielectric (transparent) materials.
- Bad interactions between emitters and clipmaps who could make light rays turn black (with all emitters) or generate extremely intense fireflies (IES).
- The bump map and the normal map were being affected by geometry’s transformations in some situations.
- Some scenes with hidden emitters rendered to black in FIRE GPU and could eventually crash. In general, this affected the scenes with hidden objects.
- The GPU engine rendered black if no channels were selected (including the Render channel). This has been forced to behave as in the CPU engine and render the Render channel anyway.
- The MXI file was saved twice after the render ended.
- The time between SL updates eventually became extremely short.
- The scenes with procedural geometry (grass, sea, etc.) did not render, even if they were hidden.
- The command line option “-removegpus” didn’t work as intended.
- No tiling texture option still produced tiling in the negative direction of the UV axis.
- Non-coherent shading on 2 BSDFs on the same additive layer.
- Maxwell crashed if Fire GPU was active when we apply a material with a coating.
- A spotlight rendered with GPU could show a black hexagon in the light direction.
Improvements
- The maximum number of ray bounces is now set to the same as the CPU production value.
- Much better support for transparent materials:
- The attenuation color and behavior now matches the CPU engine result.
- The transparent materials now produce caustics.
- The transparent materials now do not produce incorrect white fireflies.
- Improvements in memory management.
Known Issues
- Dielectrics materials don’t behave as intended in some scenes.
Tutorials
Maxwell 5.2 - New Denoiser is Kicking SSS
Artem Paramonov explains the new denoiser in Next Limit Maxwell 5.2 and how it works with Subsurface Scattering, or SSS. Try Maxwell for free.
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Learn how to create a lovely Wet Asphalt Material, complete with puddles, in Episode 1 of the Next Limit Maxwell TV webinar.
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