Maxwell Render™ is a physically correct, unbiased rendering engine. By calculating complex mathematics, Maxwell Render is capable of simulating light exactly as in the real world. Unbiased means Maxwell Render™ does not use tricks to imitate real world behavior like other renderers – everything is reproduced as it is through governing physical equations..... Maxwell Render™ connects via plugins to the major 3D design and CAD applications like 3ds Max™, Viz™, Maya™, LightWave™, Rhinoceros™, SolidWorks™, Archicad™, CINEMA 4D™, form·Z™, and SketchUp™.



Maxwell Displacement
Displacement is a powerful texture-driven tool that can help users to create real geometric detail on objects on-the-fly while rendering. As opposed to many other displacement solutions currently available in the industry, Maxwell Render offers you its very own, unique displacement technology which is capable of simulating any detail without extra memory consumption.
Many of the other displacement methods presently offered, pre-tesselate the given geometry and displace the vertices of this new cluster, which wastes a lot of memory resources before and during the render. Maxwell Displacement does not use triangle tesselation methods and does not prepare subdivided/tesselated geometry before rendering. Even when rendering, this technology has nothing to do with additionally created triangles.
Maxwell’s powerful infinite surfacing technology is capable of rendering very fine displacements even beyond texture resolution. With its seamless precision control, users can easily customize surface accuracy/ability and optimize the performance depending on your needs. In addition, Maxwell Displacement has very few parameters and is very comfortable to control.


Instances
Support for Instances means that you can have thousands of high polygon objects in your scene and Maxwell Render will render them using the same amount of memory as if you only had one of those objects in the scene. Instances are extremely useful to reproduce objects such as plants, bricks, stones and furniture.
Matrix 50x50x50
125,000 objects
370,000 polygons per object
Over 46 billion polygons total
MXCL memory used: 230 MB
Pre-voxelization time: 28 seconds
Machine: P4 2.8HT with 1GB RAM


Voxelization multithreading
This can potentially offer great time savings for those with multi-core systems, especially when enabling motion blur. Memory usage during voxelization has also been optimized, which will be most noticeable on 64-bit systems and to a lesser extent on 32-bit systems.


Network improvements
Users now have the option to set a global sampling level (SL) for cooperative renderings so they no longer need to set the SL of each node separately. It’s now also possible to set more than one manager and users can specify managers also by machine name, not just IP.


Sun in Sky dome
It is now possible to use the sunlight from the physical sky together with the Maxwell Render sky dome.


Free Dosch Design HDRIs
Maxwell Render 1.6 comes with a package of eight free HDRIs from Dosch Design. Previews are included in Maxwell Render 1.6, and the high-res HDRIs will be made available as a separate download, exclusively for clients, shortly after the release of 1.6. More details will be provided to clients by email.
64 bits multi-core bug fixed
Some users experienced slowdowns on 64-bit multi-core systems. These issues have been solved so that the 64-bit performance is no longer below
expected. The fix applies to OSX and Linux as well. These fixes have led to speed improvements and some scenes will now render remarkably faster depending on scene set-up. Speed improvements of 15 to 20% have been reported by the testing team.


Motion blur
Motion blur has been reactivated and is available from all plug-ins that support motion blur.


Alpha channel
The Maxwell Render alpha channel has seen several bug fixes and enhancements. Now, the alpha channel doesn’t generate sampling noise in empty areas, and it matches with the render channel without edge issues

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