[davidhard]

I am new to Maxwell and I admit I'm fairly naive in general when it comes to the 3D rendering world. I barely know what specular or diffuse means and forget about attenuation or anisotropy. Yes, I am one of those kinds of software users who can get around just fine half the time using my own intuition and just simply trying things out to see what they do and reverse engineer things to figure out how to get something to work in my own project. However, I'm starting to get a little frustrated with Maxwell because there aren't enough resources for users like me. No offense to people who use this forum, but I'm not really getting anywhere cause many of the posts talk about things that are WAY over my head and no one answers my "stupid" questions because they are probably to simple for anyone here to bother with (Thanks to those of you have have taken the time to help ':)' ).
My biggest frustration lies with the manual that is available for download from the Maxwell site. It really doesn't go into much detail about how to actually use the software. It kind of generally describes what is on the surface of each piece of software in the maxwell family and generally describes what the tools are but not how to use them. PLEASE please please someone write a thorough manual that is easy to index and is written in a language that ALL users can understand. It IS a lot to ask but at the same time it's not. ''

[JTB]

I agree, although I own Maxwell since it was a beta... The manual is a very nice book for those who know and understand how to do things... it is more like a feature discription...
I must say that this is not so unusual, I've seen it before sometimes.
There should be a step by step discription there because I guess this is what you need.

I believe you will have to go through the tutorials forum and
DON'T BE AFRAID TO ASK!
Newbies are always welcome here and you will find a lot of guys willing to help...

[davidhard]

I guess I'm spoiled by the FormZ set of manuals. I only have to pull them out every once in a long while when I have to do something I've never done before. But they are so useful and are written in a way that is very easy to follow. I like the FormZ manuals because the step-by-step aspect is feature specific rather than project specific like tutorials tend to be. Don't get me wrong. tutorials are great and I have learned a lot from the tutorials I have done on the maxwell site so far. But I don't want to have to go back and watch a tutorial and have to find the part about a feature I'm trying to use. I would much rather have a printed book that very succinctly explains how to use specific features of the software so that I can quickly remind myself how to do something.

About those tutorials.
Some of the video tutorials on the maxwell site don't have sound. Does anyone know why this is?

[w i l l]

Try the Think! site - its quite useful.

[beatriz]

Some of the video tutorials on the maxwell site don't have sound. Does anyone know why this is?

They just don't have sound. We didn't plan them with sound.

Think! site is intended to become something useful for everyone, and you can find tutorials of any level in there, there are still few documents, but they'll be more.

And as a quick reminder: you all can participate if you like (click on the tutorials writers tab to know how).


cheers,