I just happened to see that Maxwell 2.6 came out. I was curious to see if anyone has used it with Softimage. I personally have never used Maxwell, but looking at it, it looks really impressive, especially the multi-light feature. I see there is a plugin for Softimage, but the feature list looks less than that of 3DS Max and so forth...so I was curious on how people like using 2.6 for Softimage. I am going to have to try out the demo here shortly when I get some extra time.

http://www.maxwellrender.com

I've tested quite a few of the various renderers on the market. Maxwell is extremely cool, and extremely slow.

I don't think it's really cost effective for animation unless you've got a massive render farm.

The material database is a very neat feature and could save a lot of time setting up shots.

If you do a lot of stills, it can do some very impressive work. Just be ready for render times measured in days, not minutes or hours.

Right now they've got a deal where they're including 5 render nodes with each purchase, so for the money it's a decent deal.

Paul

In my opinion is the best integrated render engine in Softimage.
They did an outstanding job, FIRE works in viewport too, you got all render tree support for all maxwell shader network. Its really unbelievable.

i'd recommend to give it a try.

So this version supports all SI procedural textures?
How about ICE instancing?

No idea if this version support procedural or ICE instancing.
I tried the demo months ago but never came to my mind to use Maxwell for those 2 stuff.

lets see some renders or it didnt happen!

Thanks for the feedback guys. I will have to give the demo a shot...some images would be cool to see if there are some available.

New 2.6.4 version is out that supports ICE instancing.
Maybe I am not using it correctly or because I am using demo, but it does not work for me.
Can anyone with full version check?

Did you specify a model as an instance? Because the current plugin doesn't yet take into account child objects so you have to specify an object as a particle instance. The next version will have support for child objects as well.

Yes, I did try with objects.

I figured out that is working only with factory compounds like Emit from Geometry. But if you generate points using 'Add point' node and using 'Generate sample set' it does not work. So creating your own emitters will not work. I did not dig more to figure out why.