Maxwell V3

[Rez007]

Hello,

I came across this today (Maxwell Version 3) and it seemed very impressive. Has anyone used the new version, and if so, what are you thoughts on it? Currently, I use Mental Ray as my main renderer, but I always like to keep my eyes open to other options.

http://www.maxwellrender.com/V3/feature

Thanks!

[Bullit]

I only used long ago, V1 i think. At time was what can be expected from a brute force render: slow.

I would say from distance that if you make mostly stills - unless you have a renderfarm - and want to achive realism it seems an option.

[Maximus]

In my opinion Maxwell is one of the best engine out there. Its slow only on certain environments like interiors since it is unbiased.
But for example for product shots, or HDRI renders, and many other scenarios like outdoor, its blazing fast and it produces a very high quality with few time spent on scene setup.

material editor is very well designed and fast to use, the integration in Softimage is one of the best if not the best. It always comes down on what you need to render and what are your kind of works.

Saying that Maxwell is slow is just reducing it a little too much. Workflow especially is very very fast, materials are extremely accurate and great looking with few efforts, lighting setup is very fast. I'd give it a try.

The moment they will implement a GPU acceleration on Maxwell, it will be a game changer for a lot of artists in my opinion, and i believe they are working on it.

[Rez007]

Thank you both for the replies and your thoughts.

I heard in the past it might haven been slow, but when I just saw the new videos for Version 3 - it looks a lot faster. Not to mention, the quality is very, very impressive. I think the "multi-light" feature is awesome. I spend a lot of time tweaking lights in Mental Ray, and being able to fine-tune it after is very nice. I am one of the few "fans" of Mental Ray, but with the lack of improvements I have seen over the last couple of Softimage releases - it gets disappointing.

OT: I was thinking about the GPU thing as well - I think a hybrid version with a CPU might work best, if they might plan on doing that. When I was looking into buying a new computer recently, I saw that Intel has a chip with built-in graphics i4770R (only available for Ultrabooks right now). Who knows, maybe with future generations it might get very powerful.

I am going to keep an eye on Maxwell and give it a test run.

Thanks.

[Bullit]

Intel has chips with built in graphics since some years. Every i7, i5, not sure about i3 have an Intel GPU.
It depends on laptop/desktop builders to expose or not.
I would not expect any big computing capability from them in near term.
There is also some restriction on what code use the GPU rendering, for example the often praised Redshift needs a Nvidia since it is only CUDA compatible.

[Mathaeus]

a bit off topic, but.... how Maxwell render speed compares to Arnold. I didn't even try any of two, but from what I've gathered form internet, it seems it doesn't differs, significantly. Should be fair comparison, both are CPU path - tracers.

[Maximus]

i always spend some time on Maxwell gallery, so many stunning works

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... e7aebf3ae1

i dont know about Maxwell vs arnold, probably arnold is faster in some things but i'm not really sure.