Maxwell Render 2.7

Altair Forum User

Hello and thank you for making an incredible product. My question is as follows: is the newest version of Maxwell Render 2.7 compatible with Solidthinking 9.0? I select the render correctly inside Solidthinking,

and then proceed to make a very simple scene setup, like a ball and a plane. I click render scene and Maxwell does open up full screen but it starts it render time saying it has 2 hours left. 2 hours for a ball and

plane? It may be something on my end but it shouldn't be, most 3d programs have a small window that pops up and allows interacting rendering between the 3d app and Maxwell. I was wondering if there was a

dedicated plugin for Solidthinking, and if there is, where can I get it? Not that it is a huge issue because I think that the renderer inside Solidthinking is good, I just want to explore some more options.

Also, when can we see some more tutorials for this awesome piece of software. You have a lot of old ones on your site that really need to be updated. I'm really hoping to see more soon.

Thank you as always.

Shaun.

Altair Forum User

Hello Shaun,

maxwell 2.7 is not supported by solidThinking Evolve 9.0, you should use version 2.6.1

Maxwell is a rendering engine that works differently than most of other rendering engines like mentalray, or lightworks (the main rendering engine in Evolve), it use a tecnique that generates an infinite number of samples each one is a little better that the previous, and there is no end to this process.

You have to decide when to stop it and you can do this in two ways: set the time or sampling level (iteration) limit.

By default Evolve uses a two hours and a 25 sampling level limit, when one of the two is reached the rendering stops. If you have a simple scene like the one you did you will reach the iteration limit first, with a complex scene probably the time limit will be reached.

To modify those settings you can use the shading manager (ctrl+3 or command+3), select the Global tab then Engine. In the center column you'll find all the parameters that affects how the engine of maxwell render works.

The interactive rendering between Evolve and Maxwell it is not supported. What you can do is to export the scene in the mxs format and then use maxwell studio to do an interactive rendering.

To do this please follow these steps:

1. open the shading manager
   
2. select the rendering tab
   
3. activate the Export MXS option
   
4. click the Browse button and chose where to save the scene
   
5. run maxwell studio
   
6. load the exported scene
   

Please note that the modification you'll do inside maxwell studio can not be read back in Evolve.

Hope that helps for now.

Cheers,

Zeno