Maxwell Render 2.5.0 Fire interactive engine tutorial.
Tim Ellis.What is Fire?
Fire is the latest edition to Maxwell Render's studio component. It allows a realtime interactive preview, which is rendered and updated on the fly.This means you can see updates to your scene in realtime, in an additional viewport, without the need to export and wait for test renders to be ready.
Lets get started.
The default layout for v2.5 places an additional button in the top render buttons bar, the 'Fire' button.
There is also an additional viewport which is a floating window over the studio layout called the Interactive preview window.
Fire can also be started from the Render drop down menu at the top of the screen.
Ok lets open a scene to see Fire in action, then we'll go over the options.
Load the Simball scene from the File menu>Library>Scenes>Simball_v2. Select 'Open' when the option box appears.
When the scene has loaded, select the Main camera in the camera list. Uncheck the 'Locked' function, so you can move the camera.
Make sure the interactive preview window is visible and press the Fire render button at the top of the main viewport.
Firstly the interactive preview has a progress bar at the bottom. This will show the progress of exporting objects and then secondly voxelization of the scene.
Immediately you should see the scene being rendered.
If you move the camera in the main viewport, the interactive preview will update.
Similarly if you move the Simball object, the interactive preview will update.
Changing the preview material will update the interactive preview and so on.
In fact just about everything in studio will have an effect and cause the interactive preview to update.
You can navigate in the interactive preview window as you would in the normal viewport, all controls are the same.
If you need to reset the Fire camera back to the position of the standard viewport, then just right click in the standard viewport.
Right click in the interactive viewport will bring up the Fire menu, this is the same as the main option menu at the top of the interactive preview window.
'Set camera view', will align the active camera in the normal viewport to that of the interactive preview window.
'Isolate selection' is self explanatory, as is 'Save image' which will snapshot the interactive preview window for you.
'Settings' allows you to control the Sample level, time amount and quality of the interactive preview window.
The camera list at the top of the interactive preview window will allow you to switch cameras, alternatively you can do the same in the standard viewport.
Adding new cameras in the usual manner, will add them to the interactive preview window's drop down camera list.
Selecting a camera from the drop down list will update the interactive preview window to that camera.
Nb:- If you don't have the same camera selected in the main viewport, the 'Set camera view' function will reset the position of the
interactive preview camera and won't update the Standard Viewport camera. Make sure the standard viewport & interactive preview have the same camera selected
if you wish to use this function correctly.