http://www.maxwellrender.com/

By RichDJ

*WHO?

Maxwell is the child of Next Limit Technologies, founded in 1998 by Victor Gonzalez and Ignacio Vargas. Their first product, Realflow was released shortly after.

*Opening it up:

The first thing you notice when opening up Maxwell is how clean the UI is. There is a list of different UI's to choose from. However, you can customize the interface to suit your needs by moving the dockable palettes. Finding a pleasing set-up if you do not like the default should be easy for any user.

*Different parts:

Maxwell is split into three main areas. Studio, Material editor and Renderer.

*Studio:

This will feel relatively familiar to any 3D software user. Selecting / moving / rotating and re-sizing are, like all other aspects of Maxwell, easy to work out and work with. Like the selection tools, the viewport is easy to work with. Whether you want single or multiple views, bounding box or render preview, Camera, perspective or orthographical views are easily at hand. With a heavily populated scene, you do notice Maxwell slowing down, both loading and moving around the viewport can feel sluggish. However, NextLimit have addressed this and have vastly increased the speed in version 1.2, which is due out shortly. Magazine and Newsletters.