[superbad]

The topic says it all. I find myself increasingly frustrated by unsolved critical bugs in the plugins and studio. I bought in after the whole beta / RC debacle, so I don't have that baggage with me. The current product is certainly better than the RC5 I originally got, but I really expected basic, repeatable, serious bugs to have been addressed by now. I just spent $3000 on a Mac Pro expressly for the purpose of using it with Maxwell, and after installing the brand new improved universal binary, Multilight, a core feature, crashes every time I try to use it. I have to seriously question WTF is going on when something like that makes it out the door.

So, is anyone really happy with this thing right now? If so, why?

[ricardo]

Yep, I am. Rendering is a side effect of my work and I set things up in no time, materials are sooooooooo easy and predictable most of times. Come back tomorrow morning and fix things with multilight. Job done.

Ricardo

[w i l l]

I have to say that I don't really have many bug problems. I get a bit annoyed with the lack of features in Studio and the Solidworks plugin but the results that I get from this software has actually made sitting at a computer quite enjoyable for me.

[Mihai]

Multilight can be a very memory hungry feature if you're rendering at high rez and use many sliders. A solution is in your modelling program to merge all the geometry of light sources that can share a single slider.

[superbad]

Multilight is not crashing for me because of memory issues, it's crashing because it's broken. This has been reported by other OS X users. I find it incredible that something like that could ship. It's like shipping a car with non-working headlights.

I don't mean to complain about the results- the renders I am getting are great. But the Solidworks plugin crashes Solidworks every second time I use it (also reported by others). Studio crashes every time I try to replace existing objects (also reported by others). And now multilight crashes every time I use it, at least in OS X, which means I need to spend all day tomorrow installing XP on my new computer. All these things together are sucking up hours of my time, and time is money for me. This is not a hobby for some of us.

I'm not a chronic complainer, and I don't take glee in reporting problems. I don't care about features that were "promised" and not delivered. I don't even care that the software is slow as molasses- I can (and did) spend the money to make it as fast as I need it to be. But I do expect serious problems to be addressed promptly when they come up, and I don't see that happening.

[ricardo]

Multilight is not crashing for me because of memory issues, it's crashing because it's broken. This has been reported by other OS X users. I find it incredible that something like that could ship. It's like shipping a car with non-working headlights.

I don't mean to complain about the results- the renders I am getting are great. But the Solidworks plugin crashes Solidworks every second time I use it (also reported by others). Studio crashes every time I try to replace existing objects (also reported by others). And now multilight crashes every time I use it, at least in OS X, which means I need to spend all day tomorrow installing XP on my new computer. All these things together are sucking up hours of my time, and time is money for me. This is not a hobby for some of us.

I'm not a chronic complainer, and I don't take glee in reporting problems. I don't care about features that were "promised" and not delivered. I don't even care that the software is slow as molasses- I can (and did) spend the money to make it as fast as I need it to be. But I do expect serious problems to be addressed promptly when they come up, and I don't see that happening.

Ididn't meant to lessen your compalints, but I worte just what I feel as of now. The Rhino plugins is poor, but I found my way around it and Maxwell is indeed delivering it for me.



Ricardo

edit: Just a question: How do you manage to have problems on both Mac OsX and Solidworks at once? AFAIK they do not mix...

[superbad]

I didn't think you were lessening my complaints, no worries.

I'm using Solidworks on an XP machine, and I bought a Mac Pro pretty much just to do rendering. The Solidworks plugin is extremely limited, so I have to use Studio to apply textures. Because of that, it's just as easy to do it on another machine. I was hoping I could use OS X, but since the OS X version of Maxwell is 20% slower than XP, and it crashes when you use multilight, it looks like I'm going to have two XP machines.

[b-kandor]

Hi Superbad, I also use solidworks and even with bugs etc I'm very happy with maxwell, yes the addin crashes every second use, so I only use it once in a row. With multilight and much more predictable lighting in general the setup is much much faster. I used to struggle for literally hours to get something reasonable in photoworks - it was such a struggle. Bugs are frustrating but don't bang your head. Although I'm windows only so I know nothing of your osx frustrations

[noseman]

So, is anyone really happy with this thing right now? If so, why?

I am a Mac - C4D user, but the C4D plugin, after one and a half year, still doesn't work, and the mac version is still not optimised.
So no, not happy at all.

I bought in after the whole beta / RC debacle

Sorry but at least I didn't know what I was walking into, since I bought it back in February 2005.

[glypticmax]

Ditto Ricardo's comments.
I render in Studio. The quality of my renders has been significantly enhanced and they are created with predictable results, far greater ease, and control after the render.
I bought after the release of V1 and never thought I'd be able to use a plug-in even though I model in Rhino and C4D.
I can only hope the issues that plague some users can be resolved soon, so they can benefit from the images this engine is capable of producing.
Personally, I've found most of the problems I thought were Maxwell inspired were actually modeling/meshing issues or hardware related.

[-Adrian]

I pretty happy with it, as ricardo said it's very predictable and the quality is very hard to beat. I don't get much work done anyway, so most problems i have to blame on myself, can't speak for users with ambitions

[thomas lacroix]

while the lights quality is there i found the cinema plug in a pain to work with, and the rendering speed not production friendly

we'll see if theres some update sometimes...

[Fernando Tella]

Despite the bugs, I'm happy, very happy.

[Leonardo]

With maxwell I have render my best images by far... ever!
SketchUp which is my favorite modeling application for the things that I do daily. and yes it has some frustrating bugs when exporting to Maxwell.... BUT exporting to maxwell, is a lot easier than exporting to any other application...... So I'm happy with it.

(BTW I have never used V-ray)

leo

[hyltom]

Maxwell is a great tool. I'm only using Rhinoll (maxwell pluin for Rhino) and it work great. Nothing special to say about it. My only concern for this software is the config requested to get decent rendering in acceptable time...Quality have a price!