Rhino provides the tools to accurately model and document your designs ready for rendering, animation, drafting, engineering, analysis, and manufacturing or construction.

Next Limit Technologies has created a plug-in interface between it´s advanced light simulator Maxwell Render™ and Rhino 3D.  The latest version of the plug-in, for Rhino4 has received excellent feedback.

Impressive features include:

• Complete Maxwell Render Scene creation, management, and rendering without ever leaving the Rhinoceros environment.
• Support for the built-in Rhino Animation Tools.
• Modeless, dockable tool-window inside Maxwell material editor and implementation of an Interactive Color Temperature picker, enable/disable all textures, Material delete/ undelete, pack and go and more.
• Maxwell Material and MXM browsers with fully resizable Material thumbnails, drag-and-drop functionality and more.

Carlos Perez from McNeel Europe said: “The ease of use of Maxwell Render, which works exactly like a camera, and the impressive quality of the lighting, makes it an ideal complement for Rhino users, whether they are jewelers, architects or car designers.” He added: “Next Limit’s team is very sensitive to its users’ requests and has an excellent technical support service. Without doubt Next Limit is one of our partners most in tune with the McNeel philosophy.”

The Maxwell plugin for Rhino 4 aims to offer all functions necessary to allow complete Maxwell Scene creation, management, and rendering, all without ever leaving the Rhinoceros environment. In addition to providing access to all of necessary Maxwell parameters, the new plugin also offers many other user-convenience features, allowing for a smooth and flexible workflow.

- Cameras are automatically synchronized with Rhino viewports. Creating or switching to a Rhino Named View creates a new Camera, or activates the Camera associated with that view
- Image resolution may be automatically kept in sync with the size of the corresponding viewport, set to Manual mode, or to one of several industry-standard resolutions
- Support for the built-in Rhino Animation Tools
- Camera parameters may be saved by name to a user-scoped global Presets, for quick recall during other sessions

- Date and Time may be set using any parameter available.
- If the Sun is visible in the viewport, changes to date and time are shown in real-time in the rendered viewport
- A date/time combination may be saved by name to a user-scoped, global Favorites list, for quick recall during other sessions

- Provides control of Maxwell environmental lighting
- When using Image Based MXI/HDRI lighting, channels may be linked, to avoid the need to redundantly set the various parameters
- Environments may be saved by name to a user-scoped, global Favorites list, for quick recall during other sessions

- Modeless, dockable tool-window
- Fully-resizable Material thumbnails
- Maxwell Materials are embedded directly in the .3dm
- Drag-and-drop MXM Materials to/from the MXM Material Browser (file system) and the MXED Material browser or Material Editor
- Apply Materials to the scene directly from the browser
- Upon import, Material textures are checked for valid paths, and corrected as necessary when possible.
- Materials may be dropped directly on Rhino geometry from the Materials Browser.
- Support for delete/undelete of Materials from the scene.
- Several available modes for automatic selection of objects by assigned Material, auto-selection of materials upon object selection, assignment of materials to Rhino Layers, etc.