[zparrish]

This may sound like a crazy idea, but I'm confident that it wouldn't actually affect profitability or sales of Maxwell licenses, at least not by anything even remotely substantial.

Essentially, the idea is to be able to launch the Maxwell Render UI without a license, and have it only check for a valid license if you ask the engine to actually render an MXS file or if you need to build an MXS file. The plugins for 3D packages would also require a license validation step for MXS build purposes, whereas plugins for post tools (like Photoshop and After Effects) would not to simply open and interpret an MXI file. What this would do is allow someone to setup a Maxwell monitor / scheduler on whatever OS they wanted as a separate machine, while still leveraging the Maxwell executable for exporting MXS files from there primary workstation, as well as rendering them (if needed).

In a separate post, I mentioned an issue that I was having that had a high likelihood of being an i/o issue between MXI files and Windows explorer. If I created a VM using Linux to run my Maxwell Monitor for scheduling render requests of MXS files on my farm, and I could view the MXI files without the need for a license, this would let me preview them, export their channels to various bitmaps, and even batch process them without tying up my existing floating license, which is usually being used by my Windows environment in 3ds Max. Essentially, I could offload all of the MXI stroage and viewing to whatever platform I wanted while keeping the MXS generation and processing associated with my current 3d content creation platform, which is often more complex and harder to setup than devices used to actually render over a network.

I'm approaching this from the understanding that the "bread and butter" of Maxwell is entirely based on its ability to create MXI files, because honestly, if you can't do that, there's no functionality really. For instance, Multi-light is truly an amazing feature! However, you can't use that (or any of the other kewl MXI manipulation tools you guys come up with) unless you have an existing MXI file. In light of that, why not make the viewing and processing of MXI files 100% free without the need for a software license? I suppose it would decrease license dependency on a shop where one person sets up the MXS file for rendering, and another person has to review the MXI output, but I would think that the person who created the MXS file would also be the one to make sure the resulting MXI file looked like it should before passing it off to another person for post production. Not to mention the fact that the Maxwell Render UI already lets you export the image data into many different formats that are natively compatible to mainstream post production tools. I mean realistically, how many situations could this reduce the sales potential of Maxwell? I think it's almost none (but I could be completely wrong).

I apologize if this stirs up some deep seated issue as I'm sure it's been discussed at some point, but my intention is to add flexibility and freedom to the people that are consuming and using these tools while also preserving the intellectual property rights of the talented individuals and companies that make them. In a world where software and hardware are constantly changing, it's nice to have options that don't monetarily change the intended usage of such tools and allow people to elect the best possible setup for their needs.

Just a thought. Thanks Next Limit!

[T0M0]

Just speculations, but this should work like that - http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 52#p391552

That multilight app was announced to be free. So you can send the app and mxi to customer and let them play with the render.