Maxwell and Vray / huh?

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

After recently looking at Maxwell in detail, purusing the forums and doing a general recce I am at a loss what the furore is. Maxwell is nice technically but as a professional tool its just so inferior its a joke.

For me 3d is about 3 key things:

1. Control
2. Speed
3. Quality

Where Maxwell has ‘comparable’ quality to Vray it is just so so sloooowwwww - prohibitively slow. Further to this is the 4 cpu limit on the license which compounds the problem. When it comes to control I think people can get bogged down in the physically based approach - but at what expense? Surely this is irrelevant if as craftsmen we can achive similar eye-brain responses in a fraction of the time? I know there are those (naming no names), that get stuck on, say, creating the perfect velvet for example - but seriously if we can achieve ‘similar’ results with a falloff map then surely this is smarter approach? For my part I produce animations and images at a high rate for demanding clients that just need it done in time to a decent quality level - and they dont give a toss about the details.

Maybe ive missed something here but aside from a toy for 3d artists, or an educational tool I cannot see the point in MAXWELL. Its only a viable pro tool for those that can justify spending £10000 on licenses to achive an equivilant speed to a DR’d VRAY setup.

I really want to like it - and the results are great…but…surely?

Have I missed something??

----- rant over.

2

I dont think you’ve missed anything matey, I’ve had Maxwell since early
in the alpha stages and I’ve got to agree with what you say.

When i first got Maxwell I was quiet excited about it, well, at least the
potential of it, but as time has gone on, I’m very dissapointed and that’s
an understatement.

I dont think I’ve used maxwell properly since its beta stages, I gave up,
I grew too used to download updates etc and then having to battle through
god knows what bugs, eventually I got to the stage where I would
download the update, not bother installing it, then going to the forum to
see what problems had occured with that release.

I recently download version 1.1, I have’nt installed cos i knew it would’nt
be worth it, but i have visited the forum to see what the problems are this
time around. To be honest i just dont care anymore, and I dont even use
maxwell as a toy to play with anymore, it’s just to much hassle.

stevec

3

Indeed. I would say that once maxwell was a tool worth of interest, because of the result it has produced. Now, it has become a standart renderer with a very slow everything. No point in it anymore.

4

Transcript from a recent correspondence…
(these guys are laughing all the way to the bank!) - I’m actually really surprised!

Fancy that! creating a renderer that in real terms costs almost three times as much as VRAY, (4 node v 10 node) and on top of that is several times slower!

Thanks for the response -

I think that is a shame and I will have to pass - it is not economic (or
fair) to expect people to spend additional money simply to make use of a
renderfarm. I had understood that the normal ethos with rendering
systems was that additional licenses were required for simultaneous
execution of ‘different’ projects, not just for a single image. This is
the case with VRAY where distributed rendering is normal. I find it
particularly disconcerting given how slow MAXWELL is and how much users
will need to make use of CPU power. Clearly a profit driven motivation,
rather then a fair one!

Best Regards,

Felix Dodd

SalesDesk wrote:
> > Dear Felix,

> > A single license would only allow you to use 4 of your CPU. In case you want
> > to use the 20 CPU you own, you would need 5 licenses.

> > Should you have any further query, please let us know.
> > Best regards,

> > Next Limit Technologies

> > C/ Angel Cavero, 2 bajo A
> > 28043 Madrid, SPAIN
> > www.nextlimit.com
> > salesdesk@nextlimit.com

5

Nice response from Next Limit in that post! Damn, talk about ignoring the point entirely. The person responding sounds like a politician :slight_smile: hehe

6

i think they are too cocky.

7

I’ve given up on maxwell. Got it in beta, and I’ve tried, I mean really tried, but it’s just not practical. Yes, you can get stunning images with it, but c’mon, 84 hours to render a single frame and it still has noise? That’s just silly.

The workflow is just stupid whether you use studio or the max plugin. It forces you to use a different mat editor, I think only because they couldn’t get it to work with max and had to release it. Maybe someday it will work, but it’s still just a beta as far as I’m concerned.

8

as i’ve kinda said before, maxwell is just a little a head of its time. by a factor of too much. I have no doubt that its existence is part of the healthy growing of the cg renderer market.

I have an arch vis magazine that shows results of a survey showing many different aspects of our field. What was surprising to me, was that the # of people using Maxwell for arch vis is greater then the # using Brazil.

9

is anyone still using brazil? :smile:
i can’t imagine using it for archviz…i’d prefer even radiosity if there was no other choice.

10

I actually find brazil’s quality to be just a tad higher then vray. Just at a rather large cost in rendering speed, making it somewhere between vray and maxwell in render times. Which then begs the question, why would anyone use maxwell? lol

11

percy I disagree about brazils quality being higher then vrays. With proper everything vray can produce extreme quality.
:smile:

12

As its been said in the past, its more the artist than the tools that create the art :wink:

Given that reply from nextlimit I would not consider any of their software in the future as I find that reply to be quite offensive and it sounds like this person replying is taking a gamble that their hoping that whoever they are replying to doesn’t know any better and will buy their crap.

Ive lost clients cause some idiot at an ad agency saw a couple renders produced from Maxwell and tells my client about it and the client wants me to buy the renderer for their particular product, and of course I refuse actually knowing the past and present history of the product, which in turn I can try to explain it till I’m blue in the face to the client but they just don’t get it. On average I think that they think there really is a “make cool render” button and trying to tell them different is like trying to explain quantum physics to a rock :wink:

/rant_off

13

Maxwell has proven itself to be a useless renderer. Look at how the developers treat their customers and how our developers (Chaos) treat us, like gold!

Why pay more for something that can’t do as much, as good, as fast as Vray?

I think Vray has really taken the crown as top renderer! :smile:

14

I think the introduction of maxwell to the plugin renderer market has been great, all the debates going around about which renderer is better etc is healthy for all industries.
I like the result of maxwell renders but rendertime vs. quality is an issue.

I am incredibly biased towards vray, but I am always interested in seeing the new technologies that are coming through.

15

just to add 2 more cents…

Who knows where renderers will end up, it would have been good to go to siggy to see some white paper presentations on emerging technologies

16

what kind of siggraph presence did have maxwell have? or brazil for that matter?

17

Cebas had a small booth in a corner. I think they were showcasing their other products more than FR. I met Edwin - as soon as I mentioned that I was a Vray user and knew nothing about FR, I think he blew me off. And I was genuinely interested in what they had to say - not a very good sales tactic.

As for Maxwell, I ‘heard’ they were in the other corner showcasing their other Nextlimit products with Maxwell more or less subdued. I didn’t see them there.

Brazil - I didn’t notice but perhaps someone else can chime in.

And after meeting Vlado, Peter, and the other members of the forum, I would have to say that the Vray programmers and users are the best group. They are very friendly, caring, provide great tech support, and have a great sense of humor. Not only that - they have a great renderer. Vray has been the best purchase I have ever made and I am happy to support them.

18

Ya, I’m interested in where Brazil has gone, because it seemed to be huge a couple of years ago and has now seemed to have slipped. Were the Splutterfishes there at SIGGRAPH?

19

their “1.5” is version 2.
Announced a long while back, fo a siggraph.
Released the main informations on the site, then procastinated to infinity.
There’s always that damnable hard choice to make: do i match up competitors for features, clean up my code to have less bugs and a bit more speed, or do i wait until things settle (that push to +inf)?
An excerpt from the new features page is in order, i think:

"Brazil r/s 2.0 is due for release in fall 2005. So what’s included? Here’s just a partial list:

* Advanced, flexible shaders allow for creating everything from photoreal to highly stylized cartoon renderings
    * Seamless integration in 3ds max/VIZ, which offers the most natural and efficient artist workflow of any renderer available
    * Production proven, scalable, full-latitude, and reliable core that delivers on jobs large and small
    * Complete lighting system including area lights, ambient occlusion, and 2 methods for full GI
    * Rendertime displacements, 3d motion blur, and implicit surface rendering
    * Core-level caching and on-demand buffer generation for irradiance, baking, and nearly infinite data handling
    * Enhanced workflow and comprehensive settings management tools for further streamlining artist workflow
    * Improvements throughout the system resulting in reduced memory footprint and better performance when combining disparate features
"

1 ) sure, we have that too.
2 ) i’d have to object, but sure, we have the same if not better level of integration with max
3 ) arbitrary BS, but we’d trust them. and we have proxies for very big numbers, they don’t…
4 ) Lol really? Area lights as well? They forgot to say that instead of leaving it to the sampler, they ask the USER to figure out where to put samples, which i find fairly boring.We have just to set ONE subdiv for the arealight, and use a quasi-universal settings setup. And i lost count of the GI methods combinations available (that refinement thing on irmap has just blown me away)
5 ) we had this from when Vlado was at the youth school, and not yet 12…
6 ) more incomprehensible BS. Do their chests ever stop heaving and hurling?
7 ) it’s BAD english to repeat a wordtwice in the same sentence, BAD english :lol:
8 ) Sure, and we got faster and more efficient too. Only we already were :slight_smile:
9 ) what, no number 9? And the unified QMC architecture? Oh, didn’t think about it back then? awww. Stuck with adaptive under-oversampling? aaaawwww! Well chaps, it’s been fun for the first 10 or so meters of the race.

I don’t know, the forums are just as bleak…
And i was taking some pleasure in comparing where they SAID they were two years back, with the lack of any announcment as to their partecipation to siggraph this year.
I’m guilty as charged :wink:

Lele

20

In fairness brazil does do a lot of things nicely - their area lights for examples have a really intuitive interface where you drag the size of the light and then use further mouse input to define the spread of the area light whereas with vray you make a light and can’t know how much of an area it’ll affect straight away - Again its a minor thing but the set up of brazil stuff is a little more intuitive. Also having support for nearly every max map and setting means its maybe a little easier for new users to get into - theres no problems using raytrace materials / shadows and so on.

That said though vray beats it in every other area and it’s been ahead for years in terms of speed, quality and features.