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I am fairly new to Maxwell and am having pretty good success with it so far. However, I have been having alot of trouble successfully rendering the different channels of a scene. Basically, the alpha channel comes out all skewed and not in grayscale as I understand it should. The shadow channel does not come out at all, all white. The idmesh and material id channels look as though they render properly (although I am not sure if this is how they look for everyone else). I am following the basic instructions on how to render these channels, such as turning on the 'accept shadows' property on all the materials in my scene, etc. I wanted to attach some images of these problems to this post but I couldn't figure that out either, lots of problems for me all around. Instructions on how to attach images along with any ideas regarding my channel problem would be super. Thanks for the help and patience.

Hey, welcome!
Post images by first hosting them on a photo hosting site like photobucket or imageshack. Then copy and paste the url to the reply box.

Here are my images. Now you can see what I am talking about.
http://s624.photobucket.com/albums/tt328/koolhaas/

Thanks Bubbaloo.

Read the manual pdf regarding the channels and what options (matte etc) will have to be turned on for them.

Regarding the alpha channel: Make sure you dont have a background like a wall or a backdrop, you will need to see the horizon/hdr in order to use alpha.

What I normally do for alpha rendering:

Save your scene and reopen it. Save it to xxxx_alpha.
Now get rid of all opaque materials (dialectrics will have to remain if you want transparent alpha!).
Change environment to none and remove all lights and other stuff you wont need.
Now change the channel to alpha in the render tab and save the xxxx_alpha again.

I have been experimenting with some of the settings to try and work out this alpha channel problem. I finally figured out that the output file can't be a .BMP (at least when using the Rhino plugin). I changed the output to .HDR and it worked great. I am not sure what other file types will work, need more experimenting.

I like to work with png and hdr, and I don't seem to have any issues with those formats