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Alpha or Beta?


smeggy
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I was just wondering what people were using and which of the numerous releases was considered best, I lost track over time of what release did what. :confused: Of course, being really clever I deleted all previous versons as we went (that's how confident I was LOL ).

 

Might as well try to get some rendering done while waiting for for NL to pull that rabbit out.

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I'm using the latest Beta version for testing purposes, although it's not much different from the Alpha.

The Beta has a limited form of SSS, which I don't use, and is still slightly faster than the Alpha version. A lot of the initial big speed increases the Beta had over the Alpha were seriously diminished once NL took off the image blurring feature they added to the Beta and which so many people complained about.

 

The only serious issue I have with the Beta (apart from bump and clip maps), is the long standing problem with glass (dialectic) materials. I had a car model that I wanted to render, most of the materials were reasonably noise free within a few hours, the windscreen and side windows were still noticably noisy 20 hours later.

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Although I have reinstalled the Beta, I'm not really using it. There seems little point, no point practicing materal creation, we know that's going to change dramatically, and the RC whilst it was running showed the emitter values will also change dramatically (10,000W bulbs ?).

I think I'm in the same position as several other people. Until Next Limit give us some indication which direction their new rendering technology is going (from the multiple ones they apparently were developing silmultaniously ?), we don't know which areas to reaserch and practice, or what areas will be dopped altogether in the "final" release.

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a while back i remember reading on the maxwell forums of complaints that someone had given out their license to the general public and people were using maxwell for free. if the RC's dont actually work... does that mean that the old, illegitimate copy is actually now the most current?

 

just seems like a weird concept in software development --when the old version is your most usable :)

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a while back i remember reading on the maxwell forums of complaints that someone had given out their license to the general public and people were using maxwell for free. if the RC's dont actually work... does that mean that the old, illegitimate copy is actually now the most current?

 

just seems like a weird concept in software development --when the old version is your most usable :)

 

I'm not sure about the warez issue, but I do think there are a bunch of illegal copies about.

 

The six-month-old beta is indeed the best that NL has to offer at the moment. I can't imagine what they were thinking when they released those RCs. It was confirmed by beta testers that they only tested separate chunks of the RC system--never the integrated program. NL's customers were the first to have that pleasure.

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Have you been able to get any good results from the RCs? The Beta is building a bit of a track record with some users like you. Nice rendering. I am busy atm but plan to play a bit with the beta again. It's s-l-o-w, limited and probably nothing like it will/will not be, but seeing pieces like yours gets under my skin and I must give it a whirl.

 

BTW, nice project, too!

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