Disclaimer: I do work for Next Limit, I thought best to mention that from the beginning.

I love both XSI (pardon, Softimage) and Maxwell and now with the plugin I think the integration has taken a huge step forward. I´ll post just a few examples to show the speed and you can see why I don´t agree Maxwell is slow. Keep in mind also you should take into account the time you spent setting up the scene and testing different settings with other renderers to try and figure out the best quality vs render time for a particular scene. Human time is more valuable than computer time. You have no worries with flickering, splotches etc in Maxwell and in fact, because it doesn´t render in buckets you get very quickly a low sampling level preview sequence which you can then import into After Effects, Nuke, or Photoshop using our plugins and start working on the post production while the rendering continues in the background. When the sequence has reached a higher SL, you just update it. This is really nice workflow I think, you don´t have to wait for the sequence to finish rendering and overlap the postprod time with the render time.

First example is the Dragon scene, I tried to recreate it as close as possible as other examples posted here, because I didn´t have that particular scene.

Render machine: i7 920 @ 2.67 no overclocking
Resolution: 1280x720
Time: 3min 30sec



Again this is practically zero setup time, I just added a plane, applied an emitter material to it, and hit render.

Second example is a 121 frame animation (1280x720) with about 3 million particles, with motion blur and DOF. Export time from SI was 1 second per frame. The particles use the new particle primitive in Maxwell 2.6 which renders a procedural sphere to which you can apply any Maxwell material to. I´m posting two different versions of the animation, one at SL 11, the other at SL 15. This is to show that even if there is a little bit of noise left in the SL 11 render, for an animation it will be impossible to see. The compression itself takes away more than any noise left in the render. (I´ll try to upload them to Vimeo too). Plus there are no flickering problems in Maxwell Render, even at low SL. In the worse case the noise can look like high ISO noise when shooting at night. The noise is not "stuck" across frames.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx9zEiugRD4 (All camera angles)

http://youtu.be/ICkcKVPS8t0 (SL 11)

http://youtu.be/7Mnm1-PkPiU (SL 15)

Still frames

Render machine: i7 920 @ 2.67
Resolution: 1280x720

SL 7 (1min 24sec)



SL 10 (4min 42sec)


SL 14 (23min 41sec)


The whole animation was rendered in cooperative rendering on 4 machines:
2 CPU Xeon 1.6 gHz
2 CPU Xeon 2.3 gHz
2 CPU Xeon 3.0 gHz
2 CPU Xeon 3.0 gHz

The SL 11 version of the animation rendered in 55min. The SL 15 version rendered in 7hours 36min.

Very interesting and it's great to see SI integration! Thanks for posting.

One quick question, does Maxwell support volume particle rendering? Just curious, I use it a lot so I'm hoping...

Not yet, although there are some cool things you can do with the current implementation and there will be more shapes available soon and different UV mapping options. All these rendered shapes interact with all the lighting in the scene with accurate GI and shading. I have to render a few more examples to show because it´s great fun playing with particles

One of the most important things for me is the ability to render smoke and fire. The rest looks great so I'll be waiting to see if volume rendering for these type of effects are ever supported (and even better if they're GPU accelerated somehow).

I have downloaded the demo version. It seems promising ! It is true that the integration in Softimage (custom viewport, materials, pass) is maybe not perfect, but the render engine is not slow. I really like the photographic settings ISO, Aperture, Focus... The glossy/reflection materials are very nice . I just try with few primitives, and will try with a complex CAD model (an helicopter with 20 millions triangles) to see if it can handle such scenes.

cool tests mihaiNL

i did a test with the classroom scene and some basic shader with bump and glossy.
compared to a complete brute force method in mr with ibl and ip's its way slower.
scene setup for shading and lighting is comparable with mr, so the advantage of faster setup is no more.
the light distribution is better in maxwell, but you pay with higher rendertimes. if rendertime is not a problem i would give it a try for arch viz stuff.
at the moment i cant talk about other features like hair or dispmapping, had not the time to test it.
the fire preview is a nice addition for "fast" previews, makes things a bit easier. integration is not that bad, you have to learn a bit the shadersetup, but this take 5 minutes.

I hope I have time to do more renders....I have to finish the plugin manual, I'll let you know when it's done.

Kzin, can you give me a bit more details? Or if you can please send me the XSI scene to test? What were the render times and resolution for both? There is one thing you have to be careful in Maxwell with the materials, it's to not set a too white reflectance 0 color since this will introduce more noise than necessary and also a lack of contrast. A limit I recommend is around 220-225. If you set it at, or close to 255 that means this material will reflect back almost all light it receives so light just keeps bouncing around. Such materials don't exist in the real world (except one called Spectralon but..... )

no white mats, thats right, a rule for all renderers.

the lighting is done with phys sun/sky only.
it is rendering at the moment further so i can decide how long it took to get rid of the noise (a noise level that is acceptable). until here it took 9h 40min on my core2quad@2,667ghz
(forget about the light leeking near the windows, its because of bad geometry, not of false rendering)

This is with Maxwell 2.6? Wondering about the aliasing near the windows. One thing, the bump seems much too strong and this can contribute to the noise. Going to try this scene....

Do you have the Mental Ray render and render time?