Bongo51 Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 I just am flabberghasted at what they are trying to pass off as a finished product. It's slow, unsophisticated, and downright unusable. I am officially fed up. I have uninstalled V1 and now will be using the beta exclusively until Lightwave 9 comes out with its modal texturing system... then put maxwell where it belongs. at the bottom of my junk software box. sorry, but after two years of waiting WE GET THIS? it's an absolute joke. (sorry, I didn't know c*** was an objectionable term) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 Lets be fair its only been 18 months. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 (sorry, I didn't know c*** was an objectionable term) Who knew that 'Maxwell' would become an objectionable term. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 I just am flabberghasted at what they are trying to pass off as a finished product. It's slow, unsophisticated, and downright unusable. I am officially fed up. I have uninstalled V1 and now will be using the beta exclusively until Lightwave 9 comes out with its modal texturing system... then put maxwell where it belongs. at the bottom of my junk software box. sorry, but after two years of waiting WE GET THIS? it's an absolute joke. (sorry, I didn't know c*** was an objectionable term) Can we use this as the official CGArchitect Maxwell review? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 I just am flabberghasted at what they are trying to pass off as a finished product. It's slow, unsophisticated, and downright unusable. I am officially fed up. I have uninstalled V1 and now will be using the beta exclusively until Lightwave 9 comes out with its modal texturing system... then put maxwell where it belongs. at the bottom of my junk software box. sorry, but after two years of waiting WE GET THIS? it's an absolute joke. (sorry, I didn't know c*** was an objectionable term) Ian, what kind of problems are you having? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 Maxer- I could be wrong, but I suspect that 3DMax users have a much easier time than users of most other apps. For example, the first v1.0 plugin for FormZ didn't even allow for the use of custom MXM materials. They fixed that, but there are many other serious problems, including big geometry handling issues. C4D and Lightwave users are reporting similar issues and plugin quality. It's as if they did almost no work on these plugins at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 Well if that's the case I don't blame you for going back to the beta, it's a shame what we have had to put up with. I forget that other packages haven't been given the same development time as 3D Max, but wait aren't you so very happy with Studio, isn't it the answer to all of your problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHE Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 C4D and Lightwave users are reporting similar issues and plugin quality. It's as if they did almost no work on these plugins at all. I totally agree. The 3dsmax plugin is not by any means production ready neither. However, I have successfully incorporated some of the "workarounds" suggested my A-Team members for some of the mayor issues into my workflow. I can say that it is somewhat usable if one is willing to put some extra time and effort into it. Yes, it is terrible that we have to go thru all of this after waiting for so long but at this point in the game either you use what you got or loose your investment. I don't know about you all but I rather get as much as I can out of it. Who knows, it might be worth it to give Maxwell Studio a try after all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bongo51 Posted May 10, 2006 Author Share Posted May 10, 2006 Maxer, my experience last night. I opened a scene which I was using for a client. I was using the beta to render the background plate, then animating with LW for comp over top. I deleted and recreated all of the materials for my scene. (about 40 different textures) This took about 2 hours. It would be faster now, since I saved out the MXMs. Of course, the plugin could never remember where I was saving, so I had to burrow there EVERY TIME. Also, it didn't remember any of my other settings either, so every single new texture I had to change the preview options again. Ok, everything is textured... but I'm still getting an errror... 'twas telling me the mxs was in error. The renderer would launch but it would just sit there with the error. So... I thought... hmmm maybe there is something left over from the previous use of beta. So I recreated my LW scene FROM SCRATCH. Mind you... I started one object at a time... but Maxwell still was giving me an error. About another hour of frustrating head scratching and I figured out what was doing it... Maxwell didn't want to read the mxi from a network mapped drive!!! My whole freaking operation is based on a server/network... It's all gigabit and my workstations don't have any local data, but once I saved the mxi locally maxwell finally rendered. Ok... I'm on my way I thought. So I started adding more objects. I finished tweaking the textures (another hour... this aint no beta). Everything is looking good. It's 1am and my eyes are very tired at this point. I need to get these background plates rendered... this is due... oh... NOW... i REALLY shouldn't be writing this... so, I'm ready to render so I decided to save out the objects separately so I could use the old objects for LW rendering or beta. I hit render... and maxwell proceeds to render without any textures!!!. What? I then check all the textures... they are all apparently still linked to the right mxm files. At this point I just want to get this thing started.. so I click the 'studio' button, and studio launches... the LW scene appears... but voila NO BUTTONS... they are missing. Of course that functionality doesn't appear to be mirrored in the dropdown (as standard GUI protocols suggest). So I quit studio... quit LW and load the MXI directly into studio. Oh look... buttons.. well that worked... I click render. the maxwell textures are STILL missing. They are listed on the right so what gives? I open up the texture browser and notice that my textures are all gone. Studio FORGOT where they all were. More time wasted. I restored the textures. Then I found that all of my textures were 'blank'. So I tried to drag the textures and dropped them on the right spots on the model... oh look, this texture was applied to all the geometry! eradicating all the other textures. Ok I thought... I tried rendering... still no maxwell textures. At this point I had spend FIVE HOURS and had not a single pixel to show for it. This is when I decided that Maxwell Studio was incapable of being used for anything on a deadline and uninstalled it. I was willing to accept this nonsense with beta. but this is a $1000 finished product? Not likely. I've been reading up on fPrime, and it appears that it actually works as advertised. Maxwell beta is worth using... but honestly to spend money more then a year ago and to end up with this? I purchased the alpha in June of 2005, and that was only a few days before the beta was released, the alpha had been around for at least a year before that. No. I don't know what they have been doing over there, but if they were on the ball, the plugins would have been the first to be stable and operating before they wasted a year on a huge stand-alone app. If you remember the hype on their website at the time? It was ALL about the plugins, they wanted you to get excited about the plugins, they were offering plugins for 20 different programs and MORE were promised! What happened to THAT promise? In any case, this experience takes it's place as the shoddiest experience with a company in my life. Thanks Next Limit. So long and thanks for all the fish. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 WOW, I really feel for you that's just horrible. I think were all beyond frustrated and were sick of messing around with broken software. If there were another option I'd probably go with it, Vray is looking better and better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 Yeah, that does sound awful... I've heard lots of things like this about Studio, and so I've been avoiding it completely. It never made any sense from a workflow perspective anyhow, IMHO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodka79 Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 WOW, I really feel for you that's just horrible. I think were all beyond frustrated and were sick of messing around with broken software. If there were another option I'd probably go with it, Vray is looking better and better. I'm using Sketchup and the pluggin is way out. What we expect from the pluggins are something that would not use Studio at all. It will disrupt the work flow of having to do it in studio. Vray never fails to impress me, and i've been waiting for the plugin for Sketchup since the announcement.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 If there were another option I'd probably go with it, Vray is looking better and better. The vRay/C4D bridge isn't ready yet, but you could be using vRay already. I hope that the Maxwell A-Tem will adopt this line as an answer to user issues: "there is a workaround--use vRay" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bongo51 Posted May 10, 2006 Author Share Posted May 10, 2006 someone on the maxwell forum just pointed out that maybe I forgot to triangulate my geometry. I was all prepared to rip his head off.. but then I thought... DOES studio work with LW subD geometry? Lightwave triangulates everything before it passes it off to render... but does the new plugin still get freaked by that? The beta worked fine with it. anyone have experience with LW, SubD and studio? Ernest... for LW users Next Limit should give (for the plusone) a license of fPrime... it's the same price as the alpha/beta maxwell. "yes, when studio fails to function properly just fire up fPrime as a workaround" HEHE Vodka79... I WISH I could even start thinking about considering Vray. However my musings about dumping LW have changed to dedication since I've seen what V9 can do. fPrime is Lightwave's Vray I guess... so either I start on a new path with 3ds and Vray. (not cheap) or I settle for fPrime. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHE Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 The vRay/C4D bridge isn't ready yet, but you could be using vRay already. I hope that the Maxwell A-Tem will adopt this line as an answer to user issues: "there is a workaround--use vRay" LOL. I am also sick about A-Team members coming up with mediocre "work around" solutions for everything that is not working properly. Hopefully, we will get something a bit more useable with the 1.x patches. In the meantime for me, Modo 201 is being released this month so it will definitively give me a break away from Maxwell and its drama. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 I haven't asked yet but I wonder how long were going to have to wait for the 1.xx updates, anyone want to venture a guess? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 This is pure speculation of course, by I'm wondering *if* we're going to see any updates... as in... can a company that has alienated this many people and generated so little interest in their v1.0 release stay afloat? It would shock me if NL has sold more than a handful of full-price licenses... what's keeping them going? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHE Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 Judging from previous promises made by NL, I will be surprise if they have something done by the end of the year... Victor wrote this in the announcements section of the forum: Dear community, thank you for your patience downloading and testing Maxwell 1.0 in the last week. We are working on the most important issues now in order to provide a more robust Maxwell 1.x update very soon, plus other 1.x promised features. We will be releasing 1.x updates more frequently. Your technical reports in the forum are very valuable; it helps our team to evaluate the problems better. As you can imagine, our technical support and sales department are overloaded these days. Please be patient, we are trying to answer all your petitions. Meanwhile, we are working in new tutorials to explore the Maxwell features and learn faster. Best regards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 ... what's keeping them going? pride Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 pride Yeah, that's probably the most accurate answer to the question. I guess what I meant was- how much longer can they pay the bills? Nobody knows for sure, but I can't imagine the financial situation is good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 Well I thought the same thing about Cebas and Final Render, they can't sell that many copies of it and they haven't come out with a new version for a couple of years. I'd say that NL is either using profits from their other more profitable software, or there borrowing money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 "like a bunch of trust-fund babies" was the way one A-Teamer described the owners to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leoA4D Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 Now that SGI has gone belly up (filed for bankruptcy), Tom, speculating the next tech company to follow SGI, said, "Who will be the next, mac?" http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15444 V1.0 is in intensive care on life support, the forum is nearly devoid of life and they are kidding about SGI. Keep up the optimism over there, guys. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bongo51 Posted May 10, 2006 Author Share Posted May 10, 2006 OK, after an additional couple of hours I have FINALLY got the quirks firmly in hand. Lightwave=>maxwell has some pretty nasty bugs. Nothing that brings the software down... but "render failed" is a very common result of pressing the 'render frame' button. very frustrating. I have learned a couple valuable points... which I will share: for LW: - No remote drives for textures. Moving all the textures (including HDR) to a local folder solved 90% of my problems - SubD objects SEEM to work OK - plugging % textures into the LW texture channels doesn't seem to do anything any more. I have yet to find an easy way to do that simple control step in the materials editor. - The archi-glass that Next Limit came up with can be used as a base to make convincing clear plastic... but changing the first layer ND to something like 1.05 More soon. If they EVER get the bugs out... this will be a cool product. Ian.. (calmed down now) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
buffos Posted May 12, 2006 Share Posted May 12, 2006 Maxwell is the best renderer of its kind in the world... Hopefully its the only renderer of its kind... Of course i am the only one to blame for such a bad move. Maxwell will never be a decent renderer. Even with infinte time given to it.. the results are not always good. It has some nice features, but in the general mess, they get lost... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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