[krotala]

That's very dissapointing guys.......if indeed there's no speed increases in final product then no upgrade for me either....

[photomg1]

through gritted teeth I'm not sure either .. I suppose I'll make a judgement when I see the upgrade cost . There where lots of new features but quite a few just brought it up to parity with what is already in modo. The projectors did stand out for me though , maybe I just need more time to assess what will be useful.

Speed improvements on images like interiors was my number one need. Ahh well


On reflection you could have added no new features bar a decent speed improvement or support for gpu rendering plus cpu like Arion and it would have been a no brainer purchase for me .

[numerobis]

Some very nice features, like 2-sided materials, maxwell scatter, procedurals, sea, rendertime subdivision, gpu-glare, and FiRE voxelisation, but... did i miss the part about caustics behind dielectrics and overall speed improvements..?!? Still no news here? Really? After 10 years of development?!?

And i thought procedurals would finally include a dirt solution... this is really bad that there is still nothing available for maxwell.

Btw... it seems that it is not possible to switch back to the new simpler mxed mode from the full version. Is this true?
(Finally a bigger preview for the mxed! )

[Mihai]

You can't switch back to the simplified version because the full editor has all the parameters visible, which you can change, while the material types only affect some of them. So if you change a parameter that's not visible in the material type, and you could switch back to it, you would not get the same material anymore.

Kevin from Novedge is going to filter through the 100 or so questions asked during the webinar and post them on their blog. I'll answer them once it's up.

[Mihai]

Why the veil of secrecy guys?

Damn, somehow, the news that this webinar would happen has slipped out....must have been all that talk on this forum about it. And our social media channels posting several times about it. And Novedge reminding people......damn. Next time we will be more careful.....

[krotala]

Ooops sorry I missed it bro....
Mihai can you comment on any render speed improvements? Is there maybe an improvement in final render speed/noise that was not covered in the webinar?

[jfrancis]

so no real speed increases?

Big speed increase in certain circumstances involving instancing and motion blur, as I heard it.

[Mihai]

I mentioned the additive fix in the webinar because it IS a very important fix not only to the look of additive materials but also to situations with bright additive materials and noise that doesn't disappear even at high SL. This issue being fixed now (you can have as many additive layers as you want, even at 100%, even with a bright base), it can help save time in many scenes.

I can't say though in a difficult interior scene you will suddenly see it rendering 5 times faster. The speed improvements in this version have mostly to do with animations, where motion blur is used and especially in cases where you have many objects, such as millions of hairs or blades of grass, or particles. By improvement, I mean here up to 100x faster for the most extreme cases....But also scenes with motionblur with a few objects will be faster.

[itsallgoode9]

just watched through the video and I am quite happy about the new features! personally the scatter and custom alpha are HUGE. So much of my time has been wasted in doing multiple layer render passes using only RGB object or material maps. Lots of cool stuff, I'm excited to check out the new stuff!

mihai, you didn't mention it in this video but I believe it was mentioned earlier that rendertime booleans was a possible feature that would be added in. I was really hoping for this feature to handle water drops on objects much better....especially now that maxwell has a scatter feature this would be great. Did this feature make it in?

[jfrancis]

Can motion blur and displacement be on at the same time?

I think motion blur currently disables displacement.

[Mihai]

That's an old limitation that was removed in 2.7 I think. MB + displacement or MB + instances works now.

I forgot to mention the boolean objects, yes So it lets you use any objects bounding box, or bounding sphere, or plane as a cutting object. Although in your case I'm not sure how much it would help because it doesn't use the actually shape of the object.

[itsallgoode9]

That's an old limitation that was removed in 2.7 I think. MB + displacement or MB + instances works now.

I forgot to mention the boolean objects, yes So it lets you use any objects bounding box, or bounding sphere, or plane as a cutting object. Although in your case I'm not sure how much it would help because it doesn't use the actually shape of the object.

gah! that's a bummer but it's still a nice feature to have regardless. I'll hold out hope for future updates

[Asmithey]

The Webinar was great! Awesome new additions in v3.

Also, I know the question I asked about Blender and volumetrics was vague as I do not full understand all the technicalities involved. But what I meant to say was more attune to this.

Inside Blender, you can create smoke, clouds, fire, etc. using voxel data. So, what I understand is that Maya and Softimage will be able to render out voxel data with Maxwell v3, correct? So, this will also be able to be done with Blenders voxel data as well. Pending the author of the add-on, B-Maxwell to script it, correct?

Thanks

[Rafal SLEK]

Somewhere (??? pages ago) it was mentioned that new version is 2-3 times faster depending on scene complexity...

[MartinBrinks]

Rafal, that would be wonderful. If that is so, they really should push that as the main story.

Another small wish I had was the ability to dumb down the renderer, like limiting the amount of gi bounces on individual diffuse/specular/refraction/scattering level. Prove me wrong but there's no way of doing that now - which makes my stomach hurt when trying to reach an ok level before a deadline.

But if there's a 2-3 times speed increase going from v2 to v3, that would be great!

And this is not to counter the impressive work done by the MW team. It's a beautiful, stable and workhorse like renderer - but it's also painfully slow.