Maxwell pipeline

[pailhead]

Is there a good tutorial, or a "making of", or a project overview that shows how maxwell is used? Something where a non-user can see how the program is supposed to be used. I don't need a click by click explanation, i'd rather like to see something explaining maxwell, something with comments. Like "maxwell has this compared to some other program", "maxwell does this differently so you have to think about this and that" and so on...

 

Besides long rendering times, having a renderer in which you can't preview your shaders make it seem impossible to work with.

I've seen some stunning images, done with maxwell, but i've also seen some not so stunning.

How do you people cope with long rendering times, how do you do your tests and previews, and how do you set up your materials if you cant see them and you have to wait 20 hours to see if the glossy reflection is glossy enough?

[Devin Johnston]

I'm not aware of any tutorials; however the manual explains how most features work.

 

Not having a shader preview was hard to get used to with the Alpha and Beta but after a while you have a good idea what your material is going to do and it really isn't a big deal. With Studio you do have a good material preview so it's not really a big issue any longer, the plugin preview will come soon I hope.

 

Long render times are hard to deal with which is why most people aren't using Maxwell for production. One thing about Maxwell is you can see how your lighting and materials are going to look rather quickly although there is still a lot of noise. I'd say within 2 minutes you will be able to get a very good idea of you over all light levels. This is also true for most materials; say within 5 minutes you will know how your materials are looking, in studio it can be even faster if you only render a portion of the image.

 

Over all the only thing that is keeping Maxwell from being a usable product is speed. That's not to say that not having clip maps or sunlight through glass is a good thing, but there are ways to work around them for now.