Next Limit

Shibui, Please follow the troubleshooting instructions provided above: https://forums.formz.com/topic/7248-maxwell-52-released/?tab=comments#comment-29233 Also, as others have said, formZ 9.1 does not require macOS Big Sur.

The installer contains the correct versions of Maxwell, so it must be something particular to your system. It sounds like the plugin could be finding your backup copy of the Maxwell Render 5.1 application. Copy the backup to removable storage, remove, and delete the backup from your computer. If that does not work, make sure that among ALL your formZ extensions search path locations, that there is only ONE copy of MaxwellRender.fzp. If there is more than one, formZ's load order is undefined. For example, if you have an old (version 5.1) copy of MaxwellRender.fzp at one extensions search path location, and MaxwellRender.fzp version 5.2 at another, formZ may not be loading the one you intend. Of course, also make sure that this is the latest Maxwell 5.2 plugin.

What is the full path of the directory you copied the 5.2 plugin folder to? And what version of formZ are you running?

The Maxwell for formZ installer can be downloaded from the Next Limit customer portal.

For Maxwell 5 users, this upgrade is provided at no cost.

If you are an existing customer, download Maxwell for formZ at the customer portal. If you'd like to try Maxwell out, please download a copy here. https://maxwellrender.com/features/ https://maxwellrender.com/products/maxwell-for-formz/ 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 strenght. 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. Less 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. 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. formZ Plugin Version 5.2.0.5 - 09 Mar 2021 COMPATIBILITY: Built for Maxwell Render 5.2.0.45. Now Compatible with MacOS Big Sur Important: To use Fire on macOS Big Sur, formZ 9.1 with Maxwell plugin 5.2.0.5 (or greater) is required. IMPROVEMENTS: New Denoiser implementation in Maxwell Render. Only one pass is needed, the denoiser information is now stored in the mxi file as another channel, better memory management for the denoising process, and more consistency in general. New Denoiser options in Display Options > Maxwell Render Options > Denoiser tab: New Tiling option with maximum tile size option. New fine-tuning options: Color Influence 1 and 2, Feature Influence, Final Pass, Filter Radius and Firefly Remover options. Check this link for more information: denoiser documentation page. FIXES: Material Preview is no longer overexposed when preferences are set to metric on some installations. Embedded texture swatches created by Renderzone procedural materials for the "Shaded" renderer now also render in Maxwell (formZ 9 Windows version only).

Hi palarsen, The problem with Fire not displaying on Big Sur has is fixed in formZ 9.1 + Maxwell for formZ 5.2.0.5 (it required updates to both products).

Version 5.2.0.5 - 09 Mar 2021 COMPATIBILITY: Built for Maxwell Render 5.2.0.45. Now Compatible with MacOS Big Sur Important: To use Fire on macOS Big Sur, formZ 9.1 with Maxwell plugin 5.2.0.5 (or greater) is required. IMPROVEMENTS: New Denoiser implementation in Maxwell Render. Only one pass is needed, the denoiser information is now stored in the mxi file as another channel, better memory management for the denoising process, and more consistency in general. New Denoiser options in Display Options > Maxwell Render Options > Denoiser tab: New Tiling option with maximum tile size option. New fine-tuning options: Color Influence 1 and 2, Feature Influence, Final Pass, Filter Radius and Firefly Remover options. Check this link for more information: denoiser documentation page. FIXES: Material Preview is no longer overexposed when preferences are set to metric on some installations. Embedded texture swatches created by Renderzone procedural materials for the "Shaded" renderer now also render in Maxwell (formZ 9 Windows version only). If you are an existing customer, download Maxwell for formZ at the customer portal. If you'd like to try it out first first, download a trial copy.

We generally only post update and sale notices here, though we did see your post above and respond to it, as this issue is already on our radar. (This forum is for Maxwell for formZ customers to exchange tips and ideas.) If you have found a bug in the Maxwell for formZ plugin, please submit a help ticket through the Maxwell customer portal, with a file and steps to reproduce the issue. Thank you.

Best Price for the Best Rendering This Black Friday sit back, relax, and get your rendering on at the best price all year! Only now can you upgrade or crossgrade with an additional discount of 30%. This offer lasts until Cyber Monday, November 30th, included. Add a new license seat, try a different workflow in Maxwell | Studio, or explore another plugin integration to make the best of your rendering experience. Coming soon - Substance Designer, Multilight™ on GPU, and a revamped Denoiser, all included in a free update for V5. How to get Maxwell at the best price? Log in to your Customer Portal Go to Upgrades / Crossgrades on the left Choose the license you want Enjoy DO MORE WITH MAXWELL

We are happy you are enjoying it! 😀

from formZ tech:

Hi, The formZ SDK is not working correctly for Generate Object 360, so we cannot support this feature at this time. We have written to the formZ developers asking that this be fixed, or the Maxwell be removed from the pulldown menu. (The best way to contact us with a problem is to submit a help ticket through the Maxwell Portal.)

Version 5.1.1.1 - 16 Jul 2020 Plugin Additions: New Substance Painter Material type (Select the Base Color texture and the plugin will automatically locate all other Substance textures.) Built with Maxwell 5.1.0.33 SDK Plugin Fixes: Scene Name included in ouput MXS and image filenames, when autonaming is enabled Multilight group name saved for Translate Shaded -> Emitter type material

Hi Craig, The Realistic Trees Components issue was fixed in plugin 5.1.0.0 (embedded textures not rendering). Please test again with this version. Regarding the TIFF issue in your first post, as this is not a formZ plugin issue, can you report this on the main Maxwell forum so the right people will see it? https://forum.maxwellrender.com/viewforum.php?f=166

RELEASE DATE: Thu, 14 May 2020 Maxwell for formZ Plugin Changes • Built with Maxwell 5.1 SDK Fixes • Embedded texture swatches created by Renderzone procedural materials for the "Shaded" renderer now also render in Maxwell (formZ 9 only) • Plugin Roundover Modifier working again Maxwell 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. 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. 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. Maxwell GPU New features Benchwell tool. Coatings are now supported in the GPU engine. 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. 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. Known issues Dielectrics materials don’t behave as intended in some scenes. Maxwell Studio New features New search boxes to filter the content of the object, camera and material lists. This helps to find particular items by name in these potentially long lists. New button next to the object search box to restrict the viewport selection only to the items that match the search. The rest of the objects won’t be selectable until the search is cleared or the button un-pressed. New Substance Painter assistant; now you can easily create a Maxwell material from the textures generated by Substance Painter. Improvements Now, when pressing the Maxwell Cloud button, Studio checks which is the active camera so that’s the one rendered. Fixes The CPU priority was not loaded properly from the MXS file. Cloned objects that had blocked emitters broke the blocked emitters' behavior (the emitters could not be unblocked). Adding or removing blocked emitters to an object was not refreshing FIRE. Random crash starting Maxwell Studio. When you created a new MaxwellGrass modifier, the existing ones were reset to default values. The Studio animation tool should add padding to the output files too (image name and MXI name). Studio move/rotate/scale gizmos didn’t highlight the active axis on mouse hover. The hidden camera and locked camera icons were wrong. Projection properties in the texture picker were not showing in the preview anymore. In some cases, it was not possible to change the Field Type of the MaxwellVolumetric. Studio could crash opening a scene when the current scene has a camera selected. Wrong FIRE update when moving the UV set. Known issues The Resources Browser can potentially make Studio crash on widget resize. Studio won’t work on a remote desktop (Linux host). MXED New features New Substance Painter assistant; now you can easily create a Maxwell material from the textures generated by Substance Painter. Network Improvements Now the users can override Extra-sampling and Denoiser parameters before sending a job to Maxwell Cloud. The login dialogue had a dark background that made it hard to locate the different fields; now it is improved. Now the users can set Maxwell Cloud to save outputs only at the end, saving render time. Changes Some warning messages changed in MacOS for clarity’s sake. Fixes Getting dependencies of a MXM reference failed if the MXM was not found. The “request preview” button in mxnetwork local mode didn’t work. When sending a job from a Mac to a PC the job showed on the node as received but nothing else happened. Maxwell Cloud spent too much time saving intermediate results in some heavy renders. SDK Improvements The following C++ SDK methods clamp input RGB values to a valid range: Cmaxwell::Cmaterial::setColorID Cmaxwell::CmaterialEmitter::setPair Cmaxwell::Creflectance::setAttribute Cmaxwell::Cobject::setColorID Cmaxwell::Cenvironment::setSunProperties Cmaxwell::Cenvironment::setSkyConstant Changes Python module pymaxwell5 returns MXparamListRef instead of MXparamList objects in the following methods: CmaxwellCamera.getCameraLensExtensionParams CmaxwellMaterial.getMaterialModifierExtensionParams CmaxwellObject.getGeometryLoaderExtensionParams CmaxwellObject.getGeometryProceduralExtensionParams CmaxwellObject.getGeometryModifierExtensionParamsAtIndex CmaxwellObject.getCustomDataChunkByName CmaxwellObject.getCustomDataChunkAtIndex New MXparamListRef class has the same functionality as MXparamList, plus getCopy(), which returns a MXparamList copy of the MXparamListRef object. MXparamlist create/set methods’ input parameters updated to const. Python module pymaxwell5 callback mwcallback now is mwcallback_cb.

Version 5.1.0.0 - 13 May 2020 Plugin Additions: • Built with Maxwell 5.1 SDK Plugin Fixes: • Embedded texture swatches created by Renderzone procedural materials for the "Shaded" renderer now also render in Maxwell (formZ 9 only) • Roundover Modifier again working

Version 5.0.2.4 - 09 Mar 2020 Plugin Fixes: Worked around issue where Maxwell was unresponsive or crashed upon rendering on some MacOS systems. Fixed issue where searching project resource paths could crash in some circumstances.

Maxwell 5 plugins are now available for formZ 8 and formZ 9. Maxwell 5 Features are outlined here. Plugin Additions: Added toolbar icons for launching the render to Maxwell, exporting to Studio (if installed), exporting to the Network and exporting to the Cloud (under Display Options > Maxwell) Added multi-GPU support. You can now control the GPUs that will be used at render time (Extensions > Maxwell Render > System > Selected GPUs or from mxgpuprefs app in Maxwell's installation folder.) Added Multilight Grouping of Emitter Lights and Emitter Materials via group names (Lights > Light Type > Parameters > Multilight Group). If you are an existing customer, download Maxwell for formZ at the customer portal. If you'd like to try it out first first, download a trial copy.

This issue has been fixed in Maxwell for formZ version 5.0.2.4

Help For Assistance From Next Limit Maxwell Portal (Submit Help Tickets, Generate Licenses, Download Purchased Products ) Maxwell User Forum (to post, use the your Maxwell Portal credentials) For Assistance from Other formZ Users AutoDesSys Maxwell User's Forum Help Topic Shortcuts Installation and Licensing Problems and Solutions Speed Bottlenecks in Maxwell Photography Techniques for Interior Rendering Full Documentation Maxwell Render 5 Manual Maxwell 5 for formZ Plugin Documentation Video Tutorials Maxwell Render Fundamentals Cameras Lighting Materials Workflow Before You Begin Maxwell for formZ GetMethod Maxwell for formZ Tutorials GetMethod Maxwell for Bonzai3d Tutorials Rendering Services Maxwell Integrated Cloud Renderer Render Farms

On Macs running Catalina 10.15.3 (but not 10.15.2), which also have an existing copy of Maxwell 4 installed, we have experienced a hang while rendering in Fire and exporting a scene. If you experience this issue, please try the following steps to fix the problem, and post back below with the results: 1. Rename “/Applications/Maxwell Render 4/” to “xMaxwell Render 4” 2. Launch and then quit formZ 3. Change the folder name back to "Maxwell Render 4” 4. Launch formZ again.

Maxwell 5 plugins are now available for formZ 8 and formZ 9. Maxwell 5 Features are outlined here. Plugin Additions: Added toolbar icons for launching the render to Maxwell, exporting to Studio (if installed), exporting to the Network and exporting to the Cloud (under Display Options > Maxwell) Added multi-GPU support. You can now control the GPUs that will be used at render time (Extensions > Maxwell Render > System > Selected GPUs or from mxgpuprefs app in Maxwell's installation folder.) Added Multilight Grouping of Emitter Lights and Emitter Materials via group names (Lights > Light Type > Parameters > Multilight Group). If you are an existing customer, download Maxwell for formZ at the customer portal. If you'd like to try it out first first, download a trial copy.

We are happy to inform you that after considering your requests, we have decided that we will continue supporting and developing the form·Z plugin. We estimate that Maxwell 5 for form·Z 8 will be released before the end of the year, and when AutoDesSys launches form·Z 9, we will start developing this plugin for Maxwell 5 too!! Thank you for your patience, understanding and trust. LEARN MORE Now, Maxwell 5 is yours. Now, the time is yours. Be Maxwell 5's campaign image! If you would like to be Maxwell 5's campaign image, send your Maxwell 5 render to: maxwelldesk@nextlimit.com The contestants will be featured on our Social Media every week! Finalists will be featured on Fridays and the winner will be the image of one of Maxwell 5's campaigns! Don't miss this opportunity and send us your work now!