[sandykoufax]

recorded session
http://vimeo.com/77637411

[photomg1]

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.

+1 on Martin's thoughts

Whats irking me about it is that the speed increases as stated so far are not throughout maxwell render , just in certain circumstances . So it seems very likely that I could load a scene and get 0 speed increase from v2 to v3 unless the scene falls into the category of the aformentioned special cases .

Thats the disappointment on my part. Cpu's dont seem to improving quick enough to offset the speed issue .Is Gpu support on maxwell's road map ? virtually everyone else has made strides in that direction.

I still love the render engine but I also still find it painfully slow .

[kami]

I really liked the webinar and am looking forward to the update!
I don't expect a strong speed increase as I am not sure if that is really possible with the way Maxwell is working.

But I like these new features very much:
- volumetrics
- deep data (even though I can't use it at the moment)
- procedural textures
- new lenses
- re-voxeling only of changed items
- easier material system
- custom alphas
- changing the sun radius

the other ones could come very handy as well, not sure if I need them often though
- sea
- light projectors
- back-face materials
- maxwell scatter
- overlay text

and I am really, really hoping for smoothly working and 100% reliable network render

The only new feature I did not understand were the exclusive lights. I know that it is a feature that all the other engines have, and I really did miss it in the beginning. But somehow it is too much of a 'cheat' for me

[l1407]

I saw the webinar, I am very very disappointed, I think upgrade to Arion is a good choice for Maxwell render user!

[mixepix]

I thought that there were some really nice features, some nice big ones but also a lot of small stuff that will make at least my life easier. The only thing that I'm not sure of yet is the new licensing method. I hope that it will be as easy and flexible as the current one.

[kami]

What is the new licensing method? I liked the old one (although it is a bit painful to update every machine, once you got one more license) ...

[Polyxo]

From what I've seen in the Webinar partial revoxeling is the most significant improvement for me - this will help incredibly
in lighting setup. Interactive post effects preview - with the rendering is running will be very useful in this respect too.
Switching to Open Subdiv was a clever move: It assures compatibility with the latest tech for those users sitting in front
of DCC packages - moreover it will give all users of CAD apps access to useful displacement from low res meshes too.
To my knowledge no other render plugin offered for CAD programs gives its users this option. Thanks!

When it's so that this release can't offer great advantages in overall render speed I had welcomed pragmatic tools to deal
with current limitations which don't even have to compromise the unbiased pardigm: Such as user input driven importance
sampling.

[AlexP]

Mihai, where can I find answers to questions asked during webinar?

[Mihai]

What is the new licensing method? I liked the old one (although it is a bit painful to update every machine, once you got one more license) ...

I mentioned at the end of the webinar that we are switching to RLM licensing. This is ment to adress many issues of the old licensing system, one of which you pointed out - it was a bit of a pain to make sure every machine was licensed with the correct license. With RLM, all machines will get their license from a main license server. It will also make it a lot less error prone. You wouldn't believe how many emails we get in tech support because people copy paste wrong parts of the license, or not all of the info, or characters that are not supposed to be there etc.

Alex, I think it's supposed to show up here: http://blog.novedge.com/
Once all the questions are filtered.

[Mihai]

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?

Yes, it depends on what Blender lets us have access to. The volumetrics in Maxwell can already render voxel data, which it can get from Maya or Softimage for example. In the near future though we will also support a storage format for this data, either Fields3D or OpenVDB.

[kami]

I mentioned at the end of the webinar that we are switching to RLM licensing. This is ment to adress many issues of the old licensing system, one of which you pointed out - it was a bit of a pain to make sure every machine was licensed with the correct license. With RLM, all machines will get their license from a main license server. It will also make it a lot less error prone. You wouldn't believe how many emails we get in tech support because people copy paste wrong parts of the license, or not all of the info, or characters that are not supposed to be there etc.
[/quote]
Unfortunately I did skip the last few minutes
Does that mean they connect to a web server you set up, or would that mean, that every user would have set up its one RLM server?

[Mihai]

Well it's quite a standard procedure used by hundreds of other apps. It does not mean you need to connect to our servers every time you run Maxwell, people would probably go berserk if we did that. You set up the RLM server on one of your machines, which will be the RLM server machine. More details will follow but you can also read up on the RLM website to get an idea. Many people actually have an RLM app installed already, cracked or not

[jfrancis]

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

About speed improvements:

For this new version we worked a lot in optimizing and improving render times. Those speed optimizations have been performed in different independent scenarios (scenes with instances, scenes with heavy motion blur, etc), so the obtained gain depends strongly on the scene.
You will find scenes that will render x3 times faster than today, while other scenes will render in a similar speed.

But in most cases you will experience a gain compared to v2 engine. The amount of the gain is what depends on the scene.

Great, no?

Dario Lanza

from page 10 of this thread

[pipcleo]

Does the new scattering tool allow density/placement control by alpha ?
....and with new instance controls , can groups now be instanced and modified (rotated,moved,scaled) as groups , rather than just the objects within that group ?

[mixepix]

Well it's quite a standard procedure used by hundreds of other apps. It does not mean you need to connect to our servers every time you run Maxwell, people would probably go berserk if we did that. You set up the RLM server on one of your machines, which will be the RLM server machine. More details will follow but you can also read up on the RLM website to get an idea. Many people actually have an RLM app installed already, cracked or not

I’m sure that the RLM will run smoothly but the nice thing with the current licensing system is that it’s easy to move Maxwell between computers so I can have it on my laptop and on the render server at my office. Autodesk has a Home License that you can get for free beside your network license that makes the process a bit easier and some companies make it possible to activate or deactivate your license on the fly (like Adobe) which I personally find much better than to be completely locked in on a specific computer.