superbad

The only explanation I can imagine is that NL's core business is something else, like Real Flow, and they just pull people off of that to work on Maxwell once in a while. That would explain why right around release time they are able to put out several quick patches for a few days, then it all goes quiet again, even when it comes to fixing important but simple problems- because they had to go back to working on something else. And they clearly have little or no organized in-house testing program. Volunteer beta testers are meant to be a backup, not the sole means of finding bugs. Feversoft appears to be just a small handful of people. If you look at Chema's posts in the forum, he spends all his waking hours at work. And he doesn't sleep much. He's driven, obviously highly skilled, and 100% of his attention is focused on one product. As soon as they support my software, I'm game for trying it out.

In their defense, I do have to say they have become better at chasing down all the bugs that pop up after a release. We've had two OSX patches, and several plugin patches since the release. I still think they could do a better job of pre-release testing though.

I had to use a download manager program to get it to go at all- in Firefox it goes for a little bit then craps out. It's averaging about 10K/sec now, and the server is timing out every few minutes. At this rate I'll have it in a couple hours.

Nicole just locked down a thread where people were enthusiastically talking about displacement, and asking for technical details (maps used, etc.). They may as well just close the forum entirely if they don't want people talking about anything. And I can't wait to see how 1-2 months will turn into 10-12 months. All this clumsy damage control in advance of Fry going to v1 is not really doing it for me. It's kind of a gamble to wait for 1.5 and see whether it sucks or not. I just hope they get 1.5 out before Fry closes the preorder period.

Testing? You think they test? "It's done, ship it."

I think a lot of people are waiting to see what new disappointments 1.2 brings.

It seems the projectors in Studio are wonky if there is UV mapping already present on the imported objects. They often switch scale at random while editing materials, and sometimes they render differently than they display, as you describe. If you create the projectors completely within Studio (as I usually have to do because my native software has crap texture mapping), they are fine. If you're using Max anyway, you should probably avoid Studio.

The comparisons seem to have died out, and it seems most people accept that the current version has the "same" quality as the beta. But if you go back and look in the gallery at the beta images, there is a huge amount of stuff that blows away almost anything that's been posted in the last 12 months. Maybe it's that all the really good users have left, or maybe it's that the software is different, I don't know. Some of the images done for that interior contest a few months ago were really good, but stuff of that quality seldom gets posted these days.

Maxwell's network rendering is crap slow because of how it merges the output like a daisy chain. It also transfers data across the network very slowly for some reason. However, its multi-core operation seems pretty efficient. I run it on a 4 core Mac Pro, and it's about 4 times as fast as a comparable single core machine. Of course, they need to update the licensing scheme yesterday. Making people pay per core is totally missing the point- licensing should be per machine, whether it's one machine or two or 100. It's my business what I put inside those machines.

Hey there, welcome. Another familiar face. Or name I guess.

They must have all their people on RealFlow. There is no way they have more than a couple people working full time on Maxwell, if that.

There are a couple ways. The easiest in this case is probably in the material editor, open the dialog where you load the map and change the Tile values. Higher numbers make the texture smaller. Remember to do this for all the maps if you are using more than one (eg, for bump or reflections). Also, I would make double sure your models aren't actually coming in at the wrong size, rather than the textures being wrong. Scale problems will affect your results in a big way. The material editor isn't that bad once you get used to it. Most common nonmetallic, nonglass materials use two layers, one for the base color and one for reflections. The only thing I usually vary is the amount of roughness on the reflective layer and how the two interact. The best way to figure it out is to download a few that you like and see how changing parameters affects things.

The thread didn't stay up very long, but mverta essentially accused them of having stolen code. If true, there is surely pending litigation on the matter and letting someone run their mouth about it on a public forum would be extraordinarily stupid. If untrue, libel is just as actionable in the EU as it is in the US. The whole thing is a tiresome mess. NL needs to focus on developing their product. And if they are going to run a forum at all, they need to moderate it themselves. As it is they have unpaid (?) representatives possibly getting them into legal trouble. I have no idea if there really is some kind of shenanigans behind the development of Fry, but I'd certainly like to know before I possibly buy it. Of course, I'd have no reason to even consider buying it if NL did a better job of developing Maxwell. I sat through half a dozen crashes yesterday, which added at least an hour to the project I was working on. My patience for software that continually costs me money is very low.

And while we're comparing, I find it really interesting you can get an answer on the Feversoft forum to just about any question within a couple minutes. They're not afriad to tell people "no" either. The guy even knocked out a feature in a couple hours that Maxwell still hasn't managed to get in. And I haven't seen any customers called morons or competitors called scumbags either. As a latecomer to the whole Maxwell party I never really understood all the animosity that surrounded them, but I'm starting to get it now. Thank god for competition.