kjverine

I just want to talk about something that is just mind blowing to me. I think maxwell produces stunning images and the accuracy of the lighting is true to life. With the release hype of 1.5 many of us could not wait to see what next limit had in store for us. Thanks to nicole we got weekly updates to the new features such as Simulens, Shift Lens, Z-Clip Planes etc.. These are some really cool features with the shift lens being my favorite. The networking function were also tweaked to perform better. I have to question next limit's direction as a company because i would hate to see such a nice product fall short of its full potential. I have observed post by users and still it seems that the rendering times are still around 10-18hrs for render times. When dealing with an unbiased engine you would expect that. So the next option a user may look into is network rendering. I think i speak for many of the users when i say that the new features of 1.5 could have waited until version 2.0 or 3 or 4. What should have been a very critical do over was to the network rendering. Many user still complain about not being able to merge mxi's and strange error messages just to name a few. If speed is a weak area to the software don't you think you should at least work on fixing network rendering so it could have releived us of huge render times. Ask any user who does not use maxwell and the first thing they say is, "Its useless in production because of its speed". User don't really care about the Simulens feature because its not all that big of a help to render times. I wonder how long it took for the Simulens to be tested and implemented into 1.5 while other pressing known issues were at stake. I'm just wondering if I'm making a valid point about what i think should have been one of the things to focus on when planning to release 1.5

Adehus

I think that you are making a perfectly valid point.

Maxer

Speed is Maxwell's single biggest problem, network rendering was supposed to fix that problem and after two years I'm still waiting for it to work properly. If you go onto Maxwell’s forum and post what you just posted here it will more than likely be deleted before you get to the second page. It won't be deleted because anything you said is untrue, it get's deleted because they don't want people knowing just how slow it really is until after they purchase it. This question has been asked before by my self and others and the answer from most of the Maxwell fan boys is that Maxwell is fast enough and it's unreasonable to expect it to be any faster than it is now. To be fare you can't really compare Maxwell to Vray or any other GI engine because they are using two different approaches. The problem according to NL is that the code can't be tweaked any more than it already has so their solution to the speed problem, and I'm not making this up is to either buy more computers or wait for the hardware to catch up with the software. That in no way excuses the fact that network rendering still doesn’t work properly, in fact I was the first one to prove to NL that it didn't function as it should. The fact that it took me all of 10 minutes to discover this and report it after they had a year between updates to fix problems and test says to me that they don't test these updates at all, they simply release them and let the customers discover the bugs. For those who have been around from the beginning please recall that we were told by NL before and during the RC debacle that we were no longer beta testers and there was no need to send us any updates. It seem they have reversed that policy but have unfortunately neglected in tell us that we are still beta testing their buggy software and when we have the nerve to complain our posts are locked or deleted.

Sorry about that rant but I'm just sick of this whole mess.

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AJLynn

There are speed improvements that could be made. For example, Fry uses sky portals to speed up anything that has sun/sky light going through an opening or gap - if NL added that to Maxwell it would make many scenes render a lot faster. There must also be other "find the light source" optimizations that nobody's doing.

Maxer

The problem is I think NL would consider sky portals as making Maxwell more biased and it wouldn’t be as "physically accurate". However I think most of the customers would welcome it if it meant keeping the same quality but boosting render speed.

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u.biq

Devin, understanding what Chema said, portals are *totally* unbiased : they must be understood more like an optimization of the core. My .02

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Maxer

Don't get me wrong I'm all for optimization or anything else that makes Maxwell faster. I only said that because whenever anything has been suggested like some kind of noise reduction algorithm to clean up images, or a quality adjustment setting that would allow for quicker but more biased rendering they have been against it.

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markus groeteke

about network rendering: a patch is on it's way and will be out very soon which improves, among other areas, network rendering. you will appreciate this, especially if working on macs

markus

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Maxer

I hope they test it this time and I think I'll wait a few weeks before installing it just to see if it actually works.

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