User manual

© Next Limit Technologies 2010
Maxwell Render 2.5 User Manual
Chapter 12. Maxwell Studio | 109
Commands available from the “Items” section in the right-click menu:
• Group: Select more than one object and select this option to group the objects.
• Ungroup: Select one or more objects in the group and use this option to remove the
objects from the group. The objects will be placed outside the group, they won’t be
deleted from the scene.
Sorting options:
• Expand All: Expands all the groups in the object list.
• Expand Selected: Select one or more groups and select this option to expand the
group(s).
• Collapse All: Collapse all the groups in the object list.
• Collapse Selected: Select one or more groups and select this option to collapse the
group(s).
• Ascending Order and Descending Order: Sort the objects alphabetically in
ascending or descending order.
Creating Hierarchies
Besides creating groups of objects, Studio also offers the following functionality for
organizing your scene objects:
• Placing objects under other objects
• Placing groups under other groups
• Placing groups under other objects
The hierarchy depth is unlimited. You can for example have a group under an object and
that object can be part of another group and so on. You can organize the scene hierarchy
by drag & dropping objects and groups.
12.03.06 Working with Instances
Instances can be selected and manipulated in the viewport just like regular objects. Use
Object Selection mode to select the object that has instances attached to it. Then click the
Instance Selection mode button and select the instance(s) in the viewport to manipulate
them. By default an instance inherits the material of its parent object, but you can apply
another material to instances by dragging and dropping a material from the material list
to the instances in the Instances panel.
The following options are available when right-clicking in the Instances panel:
• Rename: Rename an instance.
• Remove: Delete the instance.
• Display Proxy (%): Specify how many instances should be displayed in the
viewport, by percentage. This is useful if you have an object that has thousands of
instances attached to it, and displaying all of them in the viewport will slow it down
considerably. If you set the Display Proxy to 10% and you have 100 instances, every
10th instance will be displayed, still allowing you to get a good idea of where the
instances are placed.
• Display Mode: “None” will not display any instances, “Selected objects” will display
the instances of only the selected objects, and “All” will display all instances in the
scene no matter the object selection.
• Shading: Set the viewport shading for instances. By default it is set to Bounding Box.
It is possible to remove material assignments in instances by selecting the material in the
Instances List and clicking the “Del” key. Keep in mind that when an instance does not
have a material applied to it, it inherits the material of the original mesh.
12.03.07 Merging Objects
Select two or more objects, right-click in the Object List panel and choose “Merge Objects”.
The separate objects will be merged into a single object. This is useful to simplify your
scenes (merge for example all objects that share one material), or to merge emitters to
reduce the number of Multilight sliders. Please note that instances attached to the objects
that are merged will be deleted.
12.04 Cameras and Camera Parameters
The Maxwell Render camera is designed to work like a real camera so it is important to
understand some photographic concepts. If you are unfamiliar with photography, please
read the chapters “Focusing the Camera” and “Depth of Field” to get an idea of how these
concepts will affect your render.