Maxwell Render™ has been acclaimed as a landmark in next-generation rendering technology, having produced the best photorealistic images to date. It represents the end of the traditional CGI rendering philosophy, and ushers in a future far more creative, inspiring and fun.
With the launch of Maxwell Render™ in 2006, Next Limit Technologies changed not only the philosophy and expectations towards the quality of CG rendered images, but also revolutionised the way rendering technology works behind the scenes, and brought new ways for users to bring their images and scenes to life.
Maxwell Render™ was the first to introduce a number of important milestones in the rendering market, and other products are now copying our lead.
We are proud to share the “Maxwell Firsts” with you here. Many thanks to all our supporters especially those that have been with us from the start – the revolution continues.
In the coming weeks and months we are going to expand this section with details about other innovative features we have, or will be introducing.
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| Image courtesy of Mihai Iliuta - www.iliuta.com |
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.
Maxwell Render was the first to provide a single system of advanced controls over camera effects such as diffraction, lens scattering, vignetting and lens obstacles. This system is called SimuLens™.
Users can now simulate lens diffraction effects (glare) by determining the shape of the camera diaphragm which models the pattern of light reaching the film. Users can also add a second pattern which defines obstacles such as dust, fingerprints or eyelashes in the lens. Another parameter of SimuLens™ is Lens Scattering, which simulates the scattering of light inside a lens system. This effect is typically called “bloom”.
SimuLens™ is the first system of its kind to bring such a high level of quality and realism – and control over it – to Maxwell Render users. It provides you with numerous new options to vary and diversify your images, to give them that final touch of reality, under one easy-to-use system.
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| Video courtesy of Yusuke Okaue - www.photonworks.com |
Maxwell Render™ is a physically correct, unbiased rendering engine. By calculating complex light interactions, Maxwell Render™ is capable of simulating light exactly as in the real world. One of the principal characteristics of Maxwell Render™ is that the rendering technology is strictly based upon the real physical equations of light transport.
Maxwell Render™ is the first commercial unbiased renderer. Unbiased means Maxwell Render™ does not use tricks to imitate real world behaviour like other rendering engines do. Maxwell Render’s incredibly realistic illumination results are based on the purely physical and unbiased laws of light interaction.
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Maxwell Render™ was the first renderer to introduce the concept of being able to vary the intensities of multiple light sources and emitters in real time while rendering. This feature was, and remains, so unique and powerful that we trademarked the name - Multilight™. Others are now copying this feature disguised as other names.
Multilight™ allows the user to change intensities of multiple scene emitters individually right after and/or during the render. This feature was the first of its kind in a commercial render engine and it is extremely powerful.
Multilight™ is extremely useful because it eliminates the need to run various renders to tweak the lighting set up. You start rendering the scene and meanwhile you can modify the intensities of your lights individually and interactively. This gives you infinite possibilities and you can save numerous different lighting versions of the same scene without rendering it over and over again.
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| Video courtesy of Yusuke Okaue - www.photonworks.com |
Maxwell Render™ was also the first to introduce the concept of a standard material test object – the Standard Illumination of Materials ball - or as we call it the “Maxwell SIM-ball”.
The objective was to provide a common illumination reference point for all Maxwell Render users when presenting their materials. The Maxwell SIMball allows users to produce materials and apply them to a standard object to check quality and compare with other materials..
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| by Thomas Anagnostou |
Maxwell Render™ was the first renderer to promote the shared use of materials to use in images and scenes – we do this through our ever popular online Maxwell Materials Gallery mxmgallery.maxwellrender.com. Users can create their materials, apply them to the SIM-Ball, and share their work with other users. Other users can provide feedback and scores for realism and complexity, and can download these materials for their own use.
The MXM Gallery continues to grow and now has over 46.000 registered users and over 2.400 materials which are available for free to all Maxwell Render™ users.
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Maxwell Render™ is still in the early stages of it´s lifecycle and the revolutionary development continues every day. We have more ground breaking features and methodologies waiting for the right moment to be made public.
The Next Limit philosophy is to provide cutting-edge simulation technologies. We will continue to innovate, and others will continue to copy.