A new version of Maxwell Render was released a couple of days a go with a new nifty grass feature. Free for 2.x users.

http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php/maxwell_render_suite

Hmm, their new Maxwell Render Learning Edition makes this very interesting to me as one of The Last of the Hobbyists™. Do you foresee any problems with the Softimage plugin version still on version 2.6, while the Renderer has evolved to 2.7? And if so, do you perhaps have any idea how long it generally takes for them to update their plugins accordingly?
And another thing, while we're at it: do you perhaps know how this is licensed, does it require a constant internet connection?

It's not a huge problem except you can't use the grass feature which of course is annoying but they've promised that there will be a new SI-addon in July. I haven't tried out the Learning Edition so I don't know how the licensing works on that one but the ordinary version is extremely flexible without any need for a constant internet connection though.

Thanks for your reply.
I just sent a question about offline activation/licensing to their support team.
Here's hoping they have a good system in place...

Best of luck. Btw if you buy it before tonight's soccer game you'll get a 30% discount.

Wow a Learning Edition price for non-students - great that someone is still doing that! Now that is the best way to beat piracy imo!

I'm not one of the Last Hobbyist but i am of the Wannabe Artists on a Non-Profit Project Tribe so that pricing is interesting.
But being on a severe NPR bend and Maxwell being very Physically Accurate focused it might not be for me... on the other hand a quicker cleaner GI pass is always welcome!

I'm gonna think about this one, maybe see how spain does tonight - if they bump the discount to 50% i might just have to buy it!

No regular goals in this game, but spain won by penalty shooting, so it's 10% base discount + 10% winning discount = 20% discount right now until 1st of July.

This might be a bit lazy of me but can any of you give me an impression of Maxwell?

- Is it easy to use? I read in the manual a bit and the integration in SI is a bit different (custom viewport) but seems fairly solid...

- Is it fast?

- And is it stable and give clean flicker/splotch free GI renders?

If the answers are all "yes" i'm very tempted, i also still have Octane but the fact that i have to fiddle with mesh emitters and it makes my workstation run hot enough to fry bacon on makes it less ideal

EDIT: hmm okay decided to be less lazy and read 2 reviews and although they were very positive they both said that Maxwell is quite slow (didn't say how slow exactly) - i might be wrong about this but i get the impression that Maxwell is a stills renderer for ArchViz work with animation as an afterthought?

I've tested Maxwell for a long time.

lets see:

- workflow is amazing, the intergration within Softimage is the best i've seen so far regarding a render engine. Everything works flawlessy.
You have total control of shaders within the render tree, you can pick any type of shaderball preview which comes with maxwell, and set the quality into prefernces.
Also you have preview of textures when you are shading/textures models.

- You have the maxwell camera attribute on your camera, so just open it and play with the parameters ( this is the only little thing they could make it better but i guess was a limitation on Softimage side, since the camera inside Maxwell studio is more advanced, has a little more parameters and presets) but its still amazing.

- When it comes to setting up the scene, i dont think there is anything faster than maxwell, you have FIRE interactive preview on its standalone mode, or if you want in a Softimage window.
You can lighting/shading a scene in few minutes compared to hours in other engines. It really does make a difference here, also a pleasure to work with it.

- Once you hit preview or render the export phase is really quick and opens instantly maxwell render, i've tried time ago with milion polys and instances and the exporting was just blazing fast.

- Regarding the render itself, is it slow? I dont feel it is. It really depens on what you doing, every render can be slow or fast depending on the task.
What i noticed when i was using it is the time i spent to setup the scene, finding a good final gather solution, shading/lighting with mental ray then wait for the actual render on complicated scenes was really time consuming, with maxwell you setup the scene in 20 minutes top and then launch the render.

- Maxwell light is amazing, unbiased and GI is just perfect. As every other render engine it has its trick and things you need to learn to speed it up. But for example on product shots environments its a beast. If you want a render ala evermotion vray style you can have it in the same amunt of time vray takes.

I honestly dont have a single negative thing on this engine, to me is probably the best out there. Considering the quality and what it gives you out of the box (caustic, perfect gi, excellent materials, lots of presets, Dof).

Support is amazing, plugin gets always updated with new features that actually works and you dont have to wait 1 year cycle for a bugfix or some update like Mr.

Its used in animation too but i have no experience in this so i cant say good or bad things.

edit: i tried octane too back then, but i cant stand its interface and workflow. When softwares go too far from whats called "Standard" and clean interface and ease of use, to me is just no go. Also i'm not a fan of GPU mode, i still think Maxwell is on another level totally. Exporters/plugins/interface/workflow mean a lot for me, and Maxwell wins on everything here.

I will make some introductory videos for the SI Maxwell plugin (and Maxwell in general), as soon as a new plugin is released for 2.7. The current one still works with 2.7, just there may be some new stuff in the new plugin

In my perhaps not so objective opinion, many render tests I've seen are done in skydome environment and 'easy' scenes, comparing with Mental Ray especially. In these cases Maxwell is fast, considering also scene setup and no problems with flickering in animations (no interpolation), it IS fast. Also there is no question of quality. The longest render time is usually in interior scenes, then again any renderer will take a long time here.

Rendering in general I think is going towards capturing the most of what you see in nature, not toon rendering or compositing 40 render passes just to get the mediocre rendering to look acceptable. Try to add accurate DOF, motion blur, GI with realistic color bleeding and feel of light, rough metals, shadow detail......then render times and quality (and total time it took to make the final image) should be compared.