[feynman]

When you're designing body protection, sport shoes, jet skis, cars, truck interiors, aircraft cabins - and multifarious other things, like thousands of industrial and transportation designers do (using Alias, Creo, Catia) - you naturally expect to either have a top-notch plug-in or to use Studio. My colleagues at Apple, Nike or Airbus rarely need to render mobile phones, shoes or 1st class seats jumping off ramps ; )

Remember that architectural visualisation and virtual photography for advertising and catalogues is only one part of Maxwell Render's audience.

[Mihai]

Simply my opinion but I think no matter your visualisation needs you should try to find the most efficient workflow. The priority of the people working on Maxwell is to make a render engine, and it would take at least as many people to develop and maintain a more fully fledged/general 3D app, and still not be as capable as ones that have been around for 10+ years. Also at some point the 'why' would also play a part when there are so many very capable 3D apps out there which cost 1/10th of Catia/Alias (my point is if your studio affords those apps, adding C4D or Modo won't break your yearly budget). Why re-invent the wheel when your main purpose is making a render engine. Plus there are many more benefits and time savings to using Modo or C4D than just having nice animation tools. I wouldn't recommend Maya or Max which in terms of ergonomics are ancient monsters and also more expensive.

[andyjacobs]

Simply my opinion but I think no matter your visualisation needs you should try to find the most efficient workflow. The priority of the people working on Maxwell is to make a render engine, and it would take at least as many people to develop and maintain a more fully fledged/general 3D app, and still not be as capable as ones that have been around for 10+ years. Also at some point the 'why' would also play a part when there are so many very capable 3D apps out there which cost 1/10th of Catia/Alias (my point is if your studio affords those apps, adding C4D or Modo won't break your yearly budget). Why re-invent the wheel when your main purpose is making a render engine. Plus there are many more benefits and time savings to using Modo or C4D than just having nice animation tools. I wouldn't recommend Maya or Max which in terms of ergonomics are ancient monsters and also more expensive.

There is something to that argument. However, maxwell made studio and there are many of us that use it, and it is great. I don't want to have to use a full blown modelling app for composing a scene. Studio is great its stripped back and everything is just where you need it. Im not asking for a huge investment in studio, but a few simple workflow issues would make it perfect for product vis.

[feynman]

Sorry, but this is not how it works in the design industry. It's about learning yet another software as a go-between - a total waste of time, adding another layer of complexity.

With 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, Modo, etc. you cannot seriously develop industrially manufactured products. No solid modeling. No NURBS modeling. No assembly tree management. No tolerancing. Ask Samsung, Audi or Electrolux designers.

Maxwell Studio is the best solution for those using product design and development software for which no plug-ins exist. With only a few improvements, mainly pertaining to co-ordinates and positioning objects in space, it would be even more complete.

[eric nixon]

You can model wherever you want to, but tweaking the model will require direct polygon control.

Why is it harder to learn modo/c4d/etc. to a very basic level, than learning studio, and then being held back by it.... Its not just about animating trucks, its about having control and precision when working, and efficient tools, which can benefit texturing or designing emitters, etc.

[Mihai]

Of course I didn't mean to use those apps to model in, but use them for the purpose you are trying to use Studio for now. I think it's becoming rather the norm now that the product or thing of industrial design needs to be set in a more or less complex scene setup, be it splashes of water from RealFlow, or assembly animation, or particle effects....not to mention the tools in those apps for scene management, layer management, asset management....This is not to say that Studio will stay always the way it is, but rather that it is a good move to make in your career as a modeler/visualizer in learning an app dedicated to assembling, organizing and animating a 3D scene. Just as these days most photographers are also getting into video and doing both, while learning the required apps.

[andyjacobs]

Of course I didn't mean to use those apps to model in, but use them for the purpose you are trying to use Studio for now. I think it's becoming rather the norm now that the product or thing of industrial design needs to be set in a more or less complex scene setup, be it splashes of water from RealFlow, or assembly animation, or particle effects....not to mention the tools in those apps for scene management, layer management, asset management....This is not to say that Studio will stay always the way it is, but rather that it is a good move to make in your career as a modeler/visualizer in learning an app dedicated to assembling, organizing and animating a 3D scene. Just as these days most photographers are also getting into video and doing both, while learning the required apps.

I have been able to get great results with water splash effects from blender, using the b-maxwell add on. Studio is perfect for me and what I do and I don't expect it to compete with modelling apps that cost more than the entire maxwell package, but it would be great to see some basic workflow attention.

[feynman]

You can model wherever you want to, but tweaking the model will require direct polygon control.

Why is it harder to learn modo/c4d/etc. to a very basic level, than learning studio, and then being held back by it.... Its not just about animating trucks, its about having control and precision when working, and efficient tools, which can benefit texturing or designing emitters, etc.

In industrial, medical or transportation design, you can't work with polygons. You need two software packages, as it has always been: a modeller (Creo) + a renderer (Maxwell).

You can almost work well with textures and emitters in Maxwell Studio; there are only some quirks to be ironed out for it to be just perfect : D

[feynman]

Of course I didn't mean to use those apps to model in, but use them for the purpose you are trying to use Studio for now. I think it's becoming rather the norm now that the product or thing of industrial design needs to be set in a more or less complex scene setup, be it splashes of water from RealFlow, or assembly animation, or particle effects...

Hardly ever seen designers needing any of that. These kind of things are predominantly executed by external visualisers that prepare marketing material, advertising imagery, online catalogues, etc. I have educated hundreds and know hundreds of industrial designers working in/with top-tier brands over the last two decades - your potential customers, whose departments can easily pay for a top renderer, isn't that nice... : D

I still believe that Maxwell Studio is a boon, if some of its remaining quirks would be ironed out. What you want is either full integration or a ping-pong workflow; not a third software interfering.

[feynman]

...but it would be great to see some basic workflow attention.

Yep. All that's needed

[eric nixon]

They say you can lead a feynman to water, but you cannot make him drink, esp if he cant read.

[andyjacobs]

So one unhelpful comment and this thread is dead again. Maybe Ill check in in another 3 years, or maybe by then I will have found a company that listens to its passionate users and made the change.

[feynman]

Any comment is helpful, if it pertains to the topic.

Snide insider- and backslapper-attitudes show a lack of maturity and willingness to see beyond one's own horizon, instead relying on anecdotal evidence and a good dose of presumptiousness.

[Polyxo]

I think that the greatest limitation in rendering inside MCAD and Surface Modelling programs is not the unavailability of render engines.
The great majority of these products have a half way capable third party engine hooked up, but what's missing in most of these tools is
infrastructure to build scenes and to create believable texture assignments. One simply can't create images which match the level of what
can be done in digital content programs, just by using simple primitive based projectors or using real scale material (= box mapping) alone.
In a variety of Solid Modelling apps, one has nothing of all this available. Therefore it's not surprising that renderers in MCAD programs are
typically advertised with a carpaint shader and untextured mirror like metal materials assigned. Just go to Euromold and have a look at the
crap images blown up to posters on the booths of major MCAD brands...
One needs microfillets, which one rather should not model as parametric features but generate procedurally direcly on the rendermesh.
Again a feature which is broadly unavailable – and a feature which would not work very well on a vanilla auto-generated patch-based rendermesh.
To create a suitable rendermesh for smoothing edges one needs fine grained control over all its parameters, again something which is rarely exposed
to the user. Meshes in engineering apps clearly are second class citizens, but control about meshes is what one needs for rendering.

Rhino as a Nurbs modeller certainly does not offer everything doable in dedicated DCC apps in terms of mesh /UV optimization, but in the mentioned
fields it no doubts beats program CATIA which costs 20 times as much, and is considered High End.

[andyjacobs]

I agree entirely with you on a technical level. However in the real world of running a design agency, where there is a reduced return in creating incredibly detailed renders, I find most of my clients are very impressed with the quick results I can achieve in studio. With maxwell and studio I can create very realistic renders of the products I have designed or of MCAD files other designers have provided me with in a short time. I have found that most of my clients find the cost of creating whole detailed scenes prohibitive and given the amount of time it takes to produce them, IM happy to leave that to CG specialists.

For furniture, bottles, packaging etc, box mapping can get you surprisingly far with the odd triangle selection. I have done some texture mapping in blender, but the workflow from MCAD to blender is not great. As mentioned above I don't have a need to spend more than the cost of maxwell on something like modo just to add this functionality.