Adehus

Yes it is, and it's a point that cannot be overemphasized. Interior rendering speeds vary wildly depending on complexity of lighting, number of windows doors etc for light to escape, and other factors mentioned previously. Even so, at best it'll be merely 'slow', and at worst really 'frick'n slow!' The important thing to take away from it all is that you can't really know how slow a render will be ahead of time- it's much harder to get a 'feel' for than other render apps. IMHO that's a big problem for a professional product. BTW, thanks Maxer, I did not know that... I wonder if using a default of 1 will now speed up my renders? (chuckle..)

Maxer, I thought .254 was correct for feet/inches. Isn't Maxwell set to calculate based upon the metric system? I've been told this for the FormZ plugin, maybe others are different?

You can get really nice results from Maxwell, but you pay dearly for them in render time. In my recent experience, on an 8 core machine, exteriors render out in about an hour to 8 hours (1600x1200) but interiors can take 20-60 hours depending on the lighting. If you're thinking towards doing animations (which is what I assume when you say 'video'), I would seriously advise against Maxwell. I've seen a couple of nice animations done with it, but unless you have some SERIOUS computing horsepower, forget it. I occassionally use Maxwell (though only becase I was sucked into the pre-order deal) but I personally wouldn't buy it now, or recommend it for professional work to others... at least until the rendering speed becomes much more reasonable.

Thanks, or amen brother, or something... I'll go with thanks

This really says it all... NextLimit has conducted themselves in a such a way that the product becomes secondary in many people's minds relative to the attitude of the company that produces it. They've made it clear that they don't really care about their customer's needs and concerns, and they're getting hurt because of it.

'Easier' is fair, 'faster' is utterly ridiculous. I bill by the hour.

Regarding speed, it should be noted that it is possible to introduce bounce control into Maxwell... it was there in the alpha version and it *dramatically* sped up the rendering speed, with a seemingly imperceptible loss in light quality, etc. However, NL has refused to introduce it into any subsequent versions, stating that it's not 'unbiased'. This seems ridiculously academic to me... ever had a client request an 'unbiased' rendering? Of course not. Now, have they ever asked for it yesterday? You bet! NL rejects our reality and substitutes their own.

I've always been really bothered by the idea that quick setup time makes up for long render times. Think about it like this- how many times do you model your entire scene to your satisfaction, map it to perfection, and then perfect your render settings without actually, y'know, rendering? I know I don't. So, you render, see 20 things you need to change, and then re-render. And re-render again, right? At this point, any time you've gained from a relatively quick setup on one small part of the entire process (that never struck me as being too painfully difficult anyhow) has been utterly obliterated by literally hundreds of hours you could be waiting for your renderings to clear up enough to evaluate them!

Maxer, you may be right, but for the sake of comparison consider Fry. From what I gather about Fry's development, the sole developer is Chema. He may have some help, but his team is certainly no larger than NL's... and it seems like he's adding new functionality every time I visit his site! Fran's render with the 'bloom' feature is sweet! And look at the sss renders, Fry is still capable of adding features that make me think, "I want that". Low sales and resulting low morale may be part of NL's problem, but I think it has more to do with the personalities of the management and just a general lack of competence. NL's development of Maxwell has never been smooth or efficient (and it may not have moved forward at all in any significant sense- I still think the beta was the best version for my purposes), and IMHO any expectations of NL getting any better are simply a result of daring to believe that they *can* do better.

Wong Tien- This is my problem with Maxwell also, and the only answer is to let it render longer. Your scene is the worst case scenario- lots of artificial illumination and no windows. Maxwell will always be extremely slow in this situation (at least until processor speeds increase significantly). You might be able to speed things up a bit by minimizing the polygon count of your emitters and make your whites less white, but the results you are showing look pretty much as expected for 7 hours in my experience.

No, not serious at all. Just a bit of satire related to a previous thread. In all honesty, I find both features to be essential (i use FormZ's sketch module constantly)

Two things I could never ever (EVAH!) imagine anyone wanting in an unbiased render engine are: -An illustration/toon render option -The option to isolate an area for further noise reduction These are clearly of no discernable benefit to any user in any circumstance. However, being the open-minded guy I am, if you feel differently, you can see an example of these technologies in action here: http://www.fryrender.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=1925 http://www.fryrender.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=1940 Don't say I didn't warn ya, these things are useless!!!

I suppose misery is supposed to love company, but I'm mostly sorry to hear that my experience is so widely shared (with some apparent exceptions) Maxer, did you install 1.5 on all of your render nodes, or just test on one or two of them? Hopefully you can get by with 1.1 until they get everything else sorted out on 1.5 (or will that be 2.0?) In happier news, this is my first forum post using my iphone. So far, I'm loving it. There is sure a huge gap between the best of products and the worst of them, isn't there?

I think that you are making a perfectly valid point.

Markus- I appreciate your help, but I just can't justify spending any more time trying to get things working anymore. Even with my new machine, I can't get interior renderings completed in a reasonable time (primarily because they're almost exclusively retail environments lit with artificial light). This project I was working on was a rare one- a simple display on a plain backdrop. Should be a piece of cake with MWR. It was, too, till the upgrade. So it goes...