[mverta]

David -

We're not ILM or Weta, but we use such passes every single day on every project; that's what you have to do to get images that compete with the best of the best - the audience doesn't care who you are, or how long you rendered... you're competing with ILM whether you like it or not.

That being said, Maxwell is a total departure, philosophy-wise. I'm a long time mental ray user (it's our primary renderer here, and has been for years), and I can tell you that Maxwell can do things right out of the gate that I've spent hundreds of hours learning to cheat in mr with results only half as good.

Maxwell is slow right now, but no slower than GI, FG, etc., were when they came out. Give it time. Search the forum and you'll see a lot of data about the scenes posted next to renders. But if you really want to get the scoop, buy a license and try it for yourself. We're loving it..

_Mike

[oscarMaxwell]

Hi,

David, I don't denny that Maxwell render times are long, but is the price for two main things that makes Maxwell different: render based in complex real physicall laws, and unbiased solution. But try to render very general situations, with lot of emitters, caustics, motion blur, dof, etc, and you see that render time does not grow exponentially. Maxwell is designed to be more competitive in complex situations, and with no user rendering setting parameters. Beside this, Maxwell uses very low memory to render, basically only stores the input data: textures, triangles, etc, and buffer memory.

There is a continous work in rendering optimizations ( speed and memory ), as I think most users will agree. And still more optimizations to come in next versions.

Mike, thanks for your words and interesting point of view.

Best regards.

[oscarMaxwell]

Hi Dave,

There is no specific recopilation with all these data in a concrete place. But this forum is full of interesting users works with Maxwell, where you'll find render times, machine specs, materials settings, tips, etc.. in special, I recomend you to look inside breaking barrier section and the gallery section.

Best regards.

[slipknot66]

Just wanted to say, that im really impressed from what ive seen here, some really good images created with Maxwell.Ive been using mentalray for 3 years now, and i think the speed issue is the same with Maxwell, but from what ive seen, maxwell seems to be faster than mentalray in some situations.Specially when dealing with shaders. Well, just wanted to say that NextLimit is doing a very impressive good work with Maxwell.

[oscarMaxwell]

Thanks slipknot66.

[philipbruton]

It's greeble plugin by the looks of it