[Mihai]

and maybe WeekEnds could be some rendertime (for very cheap) for you Maxwell users

hmmm......interesting.....

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[mgroeteke]

Am I reading these posts right, is Next Limit planning on not allowing unlimited use of Maxwell for the purposes of network rendering? I don't know about you but the idea that Next Limit might actually charge for this when every other software provider just gives this to you is making me sick!

as long as i know vray is the only renderer which allow you unlimited render nodes with one license (and 10 for DR if i'm not mistaken). others renderers such as brazil, mr, prman will give you a limited number of cpus per license.

unlimited render nodes: this is also true for lightwave and electric image animation system (EIAS).

markus

[thomas lacroix]

maybe should they propose an unlimited netrender licence such as maxon with net render ( wich is a 3 nodes per default), mostly if maxwell cant speed up that much

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[Maxer]

Yea, the news is you will only get 4 CPU licenses for every copy you buy, there is no network rendering license scheme and no plans to add additional CPU's to the current license. My company has been in discussions with the sales department at NL and their attitude is if you want the software buy it, if you don't then don't buy it. I've been amazed how few people are paying attention to this, as if this is a trivial matter. Does everyone understand that Maxwell is priced way above every other render engine that is available in terms of its render node usage?

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[Mihai]

Maxer, my take is the prices aren't really outrageous. I mean with one license you can render on TWO dual Xeon machines for example. You get your money back after maybe 2-3 images right? Plus if you actually have 8 machines were you work, or can afford to buy 4 dual boxes, then you're not such a small studio and will probably get back that 2000 (or 800 if you buy them now) in 1 or two months time.

What's the price of mentalray standalone? Can't find any good info on that...

[Maxer]

The price is outrageous if you consider that Maxwell is about 4 times slower than the slowest render engine that is currently on the market. Let's just say that it's going to be twice as fast when it's released in it's final version than it is now, your still way behind the curve in speed. So you've got a slow render engine and it costs 7 times more than Max its self when you compare how many machines you can put Max on and how many you can put Maxwell on. By the time you recoup the money you've spent on Maxwell's licenses and add in the money you've lost in render time and time spent waiting you've got a significant handicap there.

[Mihai]

You don't take into account what can you do with Max render engine, and what you can do with Maxwell. If you don't need what Maxwell gives you, then you don't have any professional need for it.

I agree for now Maxwell's speed is a handicap which makes it usable professionally in special cases where it offers what others don't, or perhaps it's still usable if you factor in the setup time and scene debugging time, for some scenes. Or it can be used as a previz tool for the actual renderings so you can match up the lighting you get from Maxwell

How many computers (good render boxes) do you have where you work?

Are you telling me that if a Maxwell license was half the price, your company would immediately go and double their computers? I just would like to understand your reasoning a bit, because you can have unlimited render nodes, but you still need to buy computers to render on right? If your company has 8 computers they can render on, and they don't want to buy anymore computers, how does that change the situation if Maxwell had unlimited nodes?

[Maxer]

Are you saying that I shouldn’t compare Maxwell to other render engines in terms of production capacity? How am I to evaluate it in terms of being an effective production tool if I don’t compare it to the system that I’ve already got in place?

It depends on what you mean by render boxes, I have 7 dedicated dual processor machines and an additional 120 machines that can be used at night for network rendering. My reasoning is this, all the programs that we have purchased until now have come with unlimited network rendering licensing. That means I can buy one copy and put it on as many machines as I want. I'm only able to use these network rendering copies to network render, they don't actually function as full programs. This practice is industry wide with very few exceptions and as a result people are able to create things that would have otherwise been cost prohibitive if they were forced to pay for more than one network rendering license. By limiting network licensing to only 4 CPU's per license you've effectively halted a firms ability to take advantage of network rendering unless they are willing to fork out large sums of money to do it. Now I'm not saying NL should give away their software for free but I do think there should be a different pricing scheme for network rendering licenses.

[Mihai]

What renderers do you use which have unlimited render nodes?

[Maxer]

3D Studio Max
Final Render
3D Studio Viz
Vray
Lightwave
Cinema 4d
Maxon
Electric Image Animation System (EIAS)
Dream Scape
Speed Tree

[Mihai]

Well, lets just compare render engines, not 3D software, and compare render engines that allow the same functionality as Maxwell. Dream Scape and Speed tree are out. It's not like you're going to do an architectural visualisation using the renderers provided in Dreamscape or Speedtree.


I was looking at Brazil, and they have 4 rendernode licenses for 750. They say 4 computers. I don't know if by that they actually mean cpu's. If they mean computers then you would have twice the available cpu's to render with Brazil if all you have are dual machines.

About Mentalray, I don't understand anything about their license schemes, it's so complicated and mixed up....and I can't find any price quotes either...

I think Vray offers you ten computers per license for distributed rendering (several computer working on ONE image), so you could have 20 processors per license, 5 times more than Maxwell.

On the other hand, if I had the money to buy 10 dual machines, and I thought Maxwell offers an edge, and less headaches than other renderers, I would still consider it at it's present price...

Final render gives you 10 cpu's, so 2.5 times more than Maxwell.

It's difficult to tell how developers price these things, what markets they think it will be used in and so on...

Obviously to become somewhat productive with it you need at least 2 dual machines, and that is what Maxwell is offering at the moment. With 8 processors working on an image you would certainly be productive with it. Plus in a few months we'll have dualcores.

jackb602, can C4D's renderer do network distributed rendering? That is, each computer in the network works on one part of the image? Or can it just assign different frames to different machines? I've seen that it can split up a render between the available cpu's on one machine, but I don't know if it can do it over a network.

[Maxer]

Ok, I think there is a little confusion about the differences between the licenses here. Final Render and Vray have two different kinds of licenses that come with the programs. One is called distributed rendering which is similar to cooperative rendering in Maxwell, Final Render has 10 licenses per software and according to you Vray has 20. These programs also come with a network rendering license which is unlimited. Distributed rendering (Cooperative rendering) is used when you want more than one machine to work on a single image. Network rendering is used for instance when you want to render out an animation and each computer on your render farm is sent a different frame. These are two different operations, one is used to speed up the rendering of a single image; the other is used to speed up the rendering of a large number of images like in an animation.

I don't think you’re considering animations in your equation. Still image rendering is one thing, and with 8 CPU's you may become productive, animations are a completely different thing. If you have 8 CPU's working on a single image and it takes 5 hours to finish the rendering how long will it take to do a 10 second animation......1500 hours! This is the reason why network rendering is so important.