[Jozvex]

Such a great announcement, can't wait for 1.5.

[misterasset]

Vignetting:
Vignetting is the darkening effect that happens on real-world lenses, especially wide angle lenses. The amount of vignetting is controllable from the MXCL interface.

Is there any chance that this will be a feature that is controllable from the plug-ins? I for one like to do panoramas and I just use 3DS Max to export all 6 frames and it goes.

[lllab]

"I wonder how they'll top multilight, glare, z-clip, vignetting control, shift lens, etc. in 2.0?? Shocked )"

yes actually they made 2.0 very hard for themselves;-)
...but i am sure NL already has next ideas....

great update!
cheers
stefan

[big K]

so how exactly is THAT unfair?

When I bought MWR it was planned to run on 2 PC; now only on 1.
This is less.

Ciao, Gio

jo, i think what you are saying here is not quite true. (what i mean is your thoughts are going the wrong way) (this is not supposed to be rude, just in case there is a language barrier here)
when you bought maxwell you were able to use 4 cores (which were in your case 2pc). now with the new license you are allowed to use 1pc no matter how many cores it has. this is in your case less.
BUT you get 4 of those licenses for your old one which leaves you with 4pcs which are actually more then 2.
this is not the case if you buy a new license, but you were talking about your old license. you do not end up with less than you had !

for the upgrade to version 2.
hey guys, i mean it would be awesome to get some special conditions for the upgrades, but if not, then only upgrade one or two licenses. nobody told you that all following upgrades for your extra licences would be free. i am sure you are allowed to refuse the extra licenses and stay just with two if you think an upgrade would be too expensive.
i mean, if autodesk would give you one additional 3dmax license, would you complain what about the upgrade, will this be for free as well?

just my thoughts on this topic.
i think it is a good new policy. thanks NL

cheers
michael

[Robert Cervellione]

does anyone have some insight on "blowup"

does this mean i can render a "hero object" at 3x the resalution while rendering the background sceen at 1x. or is it like drag a square window around a section and render it at 3x. like a render region but with resalution control.

[Rickyx]

I think more ray will be shutted in an area or object more difficult to get noise free (a glass part vase in an interior view...).
But this is what i suppose...

[Hybaj]

"I wonder how they'll top multilight, glare, z-clip, vignetting control, shift lens, etc. in 2.0?? Shocked )"

yes actually they made 2.0 very hard for themselves;-)
...but i am sure NL already has next ideas....

great update!
cheers
stefan

Maxwell's own procedurals (noise, falloff, mix-map), fish-eye lens, better skydome scheme with manual controls over gradients, multilight with the abbility to change color/temperature, displacement, instancing, more sophisticated SSS model, glossy refraction, opacity mapping, light analysis tools, volume shaders (with a more sophisticated cloud-noise model for all your cloudy needs).

Thinking of good features for 2.0 is easy... implementing some of them is quite easy too.. but doing the rest... well... who knows

[Mike Scola]

There seems to be some confusion about whether the new licensing scheme is going to result in higher upgrade costs once V2 is released. I don’t think we can really answer this yet because it depends on several variables.

Why would I want to buy or maintain more licenses in the first place? For me, the obvious reason is for more speed combined with the ability to render more than one image at a time.

Rendering speed as I understand it, is a factor of how fast your hardware is combined with how fast the code is. If the software code becomes bloated and you are running it on faster hardware you may not see as big an improvement in speed. My understanding is that MW has made the code more efficient in V1.5, so we should see an improvement, but who really knows what V2 will be like. The bottom line is that it's got to be faster the more cores you run it on, right?

The ability to render more than one image at a time, I believe has been impacted. Now my tendency is to set up fewer machines richer with cores, this means that I have to be careful of how much memory I have on each machine if I want to run multiple renderings in parallel. You can still run as many as you could before, but if they are of higher resolution, you may max out on memory.

Essentially, because of the licensing scheme, MW has influenced me towards using it on machines rich in cores. The down side is that it just doesn’t make sense to run MW on a network of my old single core machines anymore; it would cost too much to upgrade. Unfortunately, this is exactly the opposite of how I wanted to build up my render farm. I wanted to buy new multi-core machines for our staff to use and re-appropriate the old single core computers into a render farm. I guess eventually the trickle down theory will get me to the performance I crave, just not as fast as I had hoped. This speed thing is an obsession!!!!

Overall I’m happy with the announcements and I am anxiously awaiting the release of 1.5!!!!

[iandavis]

No, personally I have genuine confusion. Either way I'm fine. I'll be happy with maxwell either way. It's more curiousity.

Do I now have two unique 4 machine licenses (plusone) or do I now have 8 brand new standard single machine licenses?

Either way, I'm happy. I mean, who wouldn't be?

Just looking forward to getting my hands on 1.5

[nicole]

Hi everyone,

I'm very happy to see most people are pleased with the new licensing policy.... I'm also very happy to see such a happy thread going for 8+ pages .
Anyway, to clear up a few things:

- The new licensing scheme also applies to educational licenses, so if you currently own one edu license it will be transferred to four licenses. These licenses are valid per machine (so four machines), regardless of number of cores.

- For those of you who got the plus one license, this means you now own two licenses, which will be trasferred to eight licenses, valid per machine (so eight machines) regardless of number of cores. If you have not yet taken advantage of the plus one offer, I would advise you to do so even if you don't plan to get more machines at the moment. You only qualify for the plus one offer if you purchased Maxwell Render before April 7, 2006

- So, to be clear, if you have the plus one: we are talking about eight Standard Licences, not about two special licenses valid for eight machines. If you don't have the plus one: we are talking about four Standard Licenses, not about one special license valid for four machines.

- Regarding the release of Maxwell Render 2.0, we are currently discussing what the upgrading policy is going to be, what the prices are going to be, etc. I'm afraid it is still to early to give more details. We are really focusing on the 1.5 release at the moment.

- Blow-up.... not like I really know anything about it but someone explained to me:

Render a specific region of an image at full camera resolution, very useful for checking out one specific area of a scene, without having to move or create a new camera just to enlarge that area.

- I will see if I can grab some images to showcase the features we have already announced. (no promises though.... )

Thanks!

Nicole

[Maximus3D]

Cheers Nicole thanks for the info and i hope you get permission to post some screenshots and rendered examples.

Blow-Up ..hehe, it sounds like somthing completly different and not really related to Maxwell.

/ Max

[Fernando Tella]

I guess blow-up works just like in 3dsmax: like a "region render" but with specified resolution.

[iandavis]

thanks for the expanded info Nicole, 'preciate it.

[jo]

Hi everyone,
I'm very happy to see most people are pleased with the new licensing policy....

Thank you Nicole.
Can you please explain what is difference between a (standard or full) license and a "render node" license?

Ciao, Gio

[lllab]

the standard license is with interface and studio, the rendernode is for netrendering....

also the price id a difference as the rendernode is much cheaper. so you save a lot of money when you need to render via network, cause you doesnt need full licenses for that anymore.

cheers
stefan