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This release is just sad, logo, design, licence model, feature set (no GPU on Mac), lack of LightWave support...

Know... educate self

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It's more like I'm not going to buy Maxwell 4, and will start to look for alternatives. Maxwell was almost too good to be true, a fantastic render-engine and a fantastic tool-set, unfortunately it seemed like other PBR systems got more traction, and I guess NL needed to change something in order to continue to have a product that makes economic sense?

Btw: GPU-rendering, why is it made so that it's only CPU or only GPU? Is it really not possible to use both?

mikkelen wrote:Btw: GPU-rendering, why is it made so that it's only CPU or only GPU? Is it really not possible to use both?

This is the idea in future releases to have GPU and CPU running at the same time

I agree
- No more houdini support
- Extraterrestrial license politics
- Not a single progess on the nodal part for shading / lookdev
- Advertising / Targeting on CAD / Product Design / Architecture market only

Well all the huge progess and effort done to make maxwell a great VFX engine looks to have find an end with Maxwell 4.
Fortunatly there are a LOT of alternative for the VFX market.

If have i know the direction NL would take for V4 in regard of licensing and target market i wouldn't have buy V3 which is still a great release !
Farewell Maxwell !

Thea > Nvidia CUDA
Arion > Nvidia CUDA
Octane > Nvidia CUDA
Mental Ray > Nvidia CUDA
Bunkspeed > Nvidia CUDA

Vray > Nvidia CUDA/Open CL
Indigo > Open CL

Arnold > CPU (Nvidia CUDA after change from CPU to GPU)
Corona > CPU

Obvious development path was likely: Maxwell > Nvidia CUDA

AMD at the moment looks on its way out, unfortunately, ZEN architecture or not. We threw out OSX equipment finally. Sad but necessary. Since Windows 10 and probably well before, the sweet spot between price/performance is not to be found in Apple land. Apple is no longer a computer company, instead concentrating on mobile products and data-centre driven online services.

sebkaine wrote: Well all the huge progess and effort done to make maxwell a great VFX engine looks to have find an end with Maxwell 4.
Fortunatly there are a LOT of alternative for the VFX market.

I also find it strange. Maxwell is a really good VFX-render-engine. One of my projects for the last couple of years has been to make a tool for set-reconstruction, automatic camera tracking and metadata acquisition. Combined with a good PBR engine, such as Maxwell, I though this to be one of the best future-proven vfx & set-extension systems for film production. Unfortunately it seems like VFX is off the road-map?

I hope VFX focus can come back:
- LightWave support is needed for many previz, indie & television workflows
- A better licensing deal, I switch to and from Modo, Maya & LightWave, and I belive many production groups do
- ACES documentation and support
- Post plugin for Fusion (starting to gain momentum after BMD acquired it)
- Post processing in the plugins needs to be GPU accelerated (this was the biggest frustration of v3), maybe it has been fixed in Nuke with v4?

I think that unfortunatly the equation is quite simple.

Competition in the VFX sector is ferocious with engine like Arnold / Vray / Renderman / Clarisse / Octane / Redshift.
I guess all the effort done by the devs team to push Maxwell in VFX hasn't pay enough in term of part of market taken.

So they just see where most of the money come from : Archi / Cad / Product Design ... and focus only on this in order to stay competitive
in front of V-Ray / Octane / Corona / Redshift.

So some excecutive at the selling division must have decide to make some radical choice
- stop focusing on VFX where we make no money
- focus at 100% to stay competitive in front of the competition in area where we are making money

I can understand that but i would have love that their dev roadmap and plan was more clear i would have switch to octane sooner,
especially for the great houdini support and the nodal shading workflow.

Personally I think it's way too early to deduce anything. It looks like porting Maxwell to GPU has been a very difficult task which has taken all dev resources for a very long time. No time was given to further develop coming features but hopefully now there will be. And it's not like all the features added in the last 2 years are now gone. All the extra channels added, exclude from lights, nested priority, great motion blur, volumetrics, improved SSS, etc. etc. - this hasn't suddenly disappeared, just all of these features were not yet ported to work also on the GPU. The release itself....not much more can be added to that discussion....but I think it will take at least a few months to get a clearer picture of what the V4 release actually should have been.

@Mihai: Did you actually leave the Nextlimit team? Not mentioned in your signature any more.....