Maxwell Render plug-in question

[cottonsan072]

I would like to ask if anyone has experience with the Maxwell Render plug-in for Maya. Does it have real advantage over Maya or Mental Ray rendering engine for CG still images? I need some comments or feedback please.

I saw the gallary in Maxwell's website and the sample images are very photorealistic indeed.

Thanks a lot!

[h2o]

but it's very noisy..... i still havn't time to try the newest version yet.

so I dunno the render time in new version. In beta version.....it's very slow

[cottonsan072]

I kind of notice the noise issue in some of the sample images in the site. It looks like 800 or up ISO photo grain. But I couldn't see it very clearly.

I assume the render time will be even slower for the Mac version.

[sobig]

although i have not tried maxwell(MW) for maya version, i play around with the 3ds max version.

to me, MW is only for single frame. sure. it can produce realistic image by very simple setting. but, it takes very long time for rendering.

i think it is quite expensive for rendering animation...

[cottonsan072]

Yes, I'm thinking about using it for CG still only.

So, in comparision to applications build in rendering engine , how much longer is teh MW rendering? twice or triple?

[h2o]

twice render time to MR with much & much noisy

triple render time to MR with much noisy

[stantang]

The only good thing about Maxwell is the semi "set it and leave it" approach... If your setting is ok, meaning that your lights color/intensity, texture and material are ok, you can left it render for a long time and come back looking at a fine picture.

[sobig]

yes...even you need to sleep for a couple of days for a single frame.
but it is valuable

[h2o]

..... it's hard to explain to your clients that the ouput is real enough, but u need to accept the noisy too

[cottonsan072]

I finally download the demo version for Mac this morning. I'll try it out on next week's 4 days holiday weekend.