I just noticed on their web site that 'Maxwell Render' support for Bryce 5 is in progress. Now that's quite fascinating... I wonder how thay plan to make it work; maybe by exporting a whole bryce scene into Maxwell Render and let 'Maxwell Render' do its thing? And will it use it's own textures? The samples I've seen look amazing beyond belief.

only thing i've heard about it is that it's even slower than bryce. but yeah.. drac

Dont hold your breath just yet. NL have just release Release Candidate 5 and still people are experiencing crashes and other errors with the existing plugins. Right now the scene must be exported to the standalone studio to create a decent render. Problem is that the studio, imho, is a total f**ck up for a program. :)

Geez Rochr,..........tell us what you really think. Maxwell Schmaxwell,.....will it do proper justice to a NVIATWAS ???

NVITWS with some depth of field and shadows for a change.

For that price you are not far off Cinema4D R9.5 core and FinalRender2.

Dont waste your money on Maxwell....Wait for bryce6...Just listen for once and keep ahold of your cash,I feel DAZ has something up there sleeves when it comes to Bryce's Rendering enginge... Which is still a Fairly fast Rendering engine for what it does do.

Well, Maxwell IS hyper-realistic. If they ever get all the bugs worked out and the software polished it'll be ahead of the pack...but, expensive still. (A number of "if's" there...) Yup, DAZ may pull off something cool. (hopewaithopewait) AS

Maxwell needs to slow down and stay in pre-release until they have something that really works well and plays well with other apps. And they also need to learn a thing or two about user interface design :)

The need to make their final price $500 with an early bird option of $250....

Forget it... If you are willing to SHOVEL out that amount of money on a Plugin... Then you need to Just hold thy cash my friends. In the next Couple of Months me thinks we might be hearing the whispers of a version 6,But that is only what the spirits world tells me. Sometimes it is hard to get the wind Spirits to travel all the way from Tacoma to Draper...

whispers of another three yeas of waiting? LOL can't wait to keep waiting ;-) Bryce has a great renderer it just needs a few perks and a lot of optimization.

Yeah, Maxwell can produce great results, but thats with the beta version. Unfortunatly its also the slowest renderer in the known universe. In order to speed things up, they have been forced to rebuild the core from scratch, and i seriously doubt we will see a working release in a near future. I also have a feeling that by the time they are done, Vray and other renderers will be able to produce renders with similar results. As with the studio, its probably great if you want to render a chair or some shiny spheres, but its totally useless for anything more complex. Lets just say that you have a scene with 100 million polys divided into 3000 objects. First youll have to export the thing to studio, learn the damn thing(even camera movement require a tutorial), and texture everything inside studio. Now, to add some more fun, lets say a client want some changes regarding the models. Then youll have to go back to your primary 3D program, do the changes, export the thing again, and re-texture everything once more. Nice workflow...not time consuming at all... :)

It will be cool in real time on the 25th generation ipod 40 years from now

I guess it doesn't look that promising. Now I'm depressed again. But I sure would like to have those realistic soft shadows... that's what makes a scene look so good. Those indirect, global shadow effects are priceless, and it's such a pain having to paint them in by hand.

It's promising in the vien of how realistic the renders can look. It shows how far technology is coming. But, Rochr's right, Vray and others won't be too far behind. Sooner or later most renderers will be able to do similar realism. It's just all that &%*!ing waiting we have to do....;o) AS

max-, the maxwell renderer is very promising but it's ahead of its time. V-ray and other renderers will do a fine job much faster than maxwell, but thge maxwell result is based on real light properties and will therefore be more physically accurate. This is great for architechtural work because you'd need to see very accurately how a building will look under a variety of real-world lighting situations, both indoor and outdoor. These people are not going to be producing animations so it's very reasonable for them to wait a day to render. The use of Maxwell for more common 3D tasks and animation will become more common as computers continue to get faster and faster. Within a decade we may find a maxwell-type program that is almost instantaneous.

I love render-talk! Maxwell has some impressive results, but alas, it's still years behind mental ray, V-ray, and Brazil. You can do anything Maxwell can do with mental ray, for example, and it's much, much faster. And you can do a million things with MR that you simply cannot do with Maxwell, period. For the price, a new version of Max (which ships with mental ray AND V-ray) would be a far, far better bargain, and of course at the top-end would be Maya and XSI. Foleypro, I have to disagree with you... Bryce has the slowest ray-tracing engine on the market, period. Mostly it's because it IS a pure ray-tracer, with no scanline functionality. Terragen is also pretty slow, but nothing beats Bryce for sampling redundancy... Don't get me wrong, I love Bryce just fine! But after years of using other software, I've realized just how slow it's engine really is. Scenes that take minutes in Bryce take seconds in mental ray, literally. Not that I think Max is such a great program, but still... This is the main thing holding Bryce from the professional mainstream : you simply cannot animate heavy scenes in Bryce. But I'm not naysaying for no reason! I'm looking forward to version 6 as much as the next person, I assure you! And hopefully DAZ makes us something special... I'm dreading the possible need for Vue Infinite.

..... :>}