Is Maxwell a viable option?

[lebbeus]

You have to actually model the light emitting entities and apply the emitter material (there's been interesting experiments with actual fresnel lenses, dispersion set-ups, LCD panels recreations, etc). Non-maxwell materials don't work, so yeah, you'd have to have two sets of things or probably two separate files. The maxwell set-ups need to be based on actual photography set-ups as well. . .I'm more interested in the potential to use M~R as a design tool (since everything has to be modeled, including lights) and it's been said (ha! ) that M~R will have analysis tools sometime in the future, but by then we'll probably all have 32-core processors and none of us would be able to afford that kind of multi-license for M~R.

 

I'm really bummed it's not working now--it's such a cool program, rather, IDEA for a program. The new material system alone has a lot of potential--you can specify coatings in nm and can easily setup multi-layered shaders. Or you could if the darn thing was actually working.

[AdamT]

The Cinema plugin is rather unique in that it takes the material/map information from Cinema's native shaders. It still takes extra work to convert a scene to Maxwell rendering and v.v., but it's not quite as bad as starting from scratch.

[Ernest Burden III]

The Cinema plugin is rather unique in that it takes the material/map information from Cinema's native shaders.

 

The same is true for Finalrender2 with Cinema. We can use the existing C4D mats and mapping (with a few exceptions like camera mapping) if we don't want to use the special FR2 shadertree mats. So the workflow is quite like Maxwell, not a complete re-do of all your setup work.

 

I am happier about my choice to base my work on Cinema4D every day. Max who?