So, this past Monday Next Limit released Maxwell 2.5 which, just as every Maxwell user had hoped, included “Fire”. Fire is the new integrated interactive preview render engine fully capable of all the features within Maxwell which is built to conveniently run within your host 3D application via plug-ins or withing Maxwell Studio itself. Since the first sneak peek video of Fire showed up online just before SIGRAPH this year, all us Maxwell users have been itching to get our hands on it.

Just think, quickly previewing emitter settings, camera exposure, depth of field, daylighting, material settings etc. and interactively to boot! It certainly is a welcome boost to what is known to be not exactly the faster work flow in town. The few demonstration videos Next Limit has out there at the moment are a little basic to make a serious evaluation of how Fire will perform under stress. So with that in mind I thought I would take Fire for a little spin through a few scenes of various size and complexity to see how it holds up. At the moment with there being no demo download available of the 2.5 update therefore making it only available for licensed customers, I think it’s important to give it a more in depth look.

A few key points about Maxwell’s “Fire”:

My test drive is using the Maxwell plug-in for 3D Studio Max 2011 and is split into 3 parts with a look at a different scene file for each. All of the scenes are of an architectural visualization nature and contain various levels of complexity.

Test Machine Specs:

Win 7 x64
Core i7 940 3.2 Ghz
16 Gigs of RAM
Nvidia GTX 295
2.5 TB Raid 0 (Quad array)

With that, here’s the videos.

In Conclusion:

Overall I am impressed! Though lacking a bit in speed when it came to artificially lit interior spaces, this is where you would expect a slow down. It’s clear Fire has great potential to speed up the typical Maxwell Render user’s work flow. Making tweaks interactively on the fly is something I can get used to not to mention the ability to save off progress shots that take only seconds to generate. Additionally one can feel more confident submitting jobs to the queue after working them through Fire. I first questioned the decision to go CPU only but after loading 6+ million poly scenes with 4K textures without a hiccup I now see the light. I think this is a job well done and I look forward to seeing how Fire develops in future releases.