Maxwell Render

Hi everyone,

It seems I am the first to post here, I can't believe no one else took notice. This is the most important feature in years!!!

The Nuke plugin is amazing, simply awesome!!!

I have been playing with it and I have a couple of things I'd like to mention:

1. Loading the mxi is fine, but slow. I put a write node and turn it into a scanline EXR which is way faster as Nuke is optimized for this format. Also the EXR is only 2mb instead of 42mb of the mxi. Your custom nodes still work with the EXR as the latter contains all the original channels, so I was wondering if you could provide EXR output straight from Maxwell?

2. When I output an alpha, embedded or not, I am losing the sky background. I believe this should be fixed.

3. When I output an alpha, something is wrong with the MatID channel, it seems there is little variance making it useless. I'll have to investigate this.

4. It would be nice to find a way to easily create masks from the MatID and ObjID channels. Since one knows the values, they should be easily selectable instead of messing with intricate keys using Primatte. I am not much of a scripter, so I don't know if this is feasible. Vray has a Render Element called MultiMatte which produces RGB masks out of MatIDs and ObjIDs which is the correct way to do it, instead of using random colours. Do you think you could make something similar? It would make glow masks a walk in the park, let alone colour corrections.

5. In general, now that you have made this plugin, do you think it would be possible to have common passes like diffuse, reflection, refraction (transmission), and so forth? They are far more useful. I am not so sure an unbiased engine can produce these passes, so it's a long shot.

Despite these comments, I believe it's an excellent start. I have been using Maxwell with Nuke for a couple of years, recreating a multilight system in Nuke, with grades, hue shifts and other nodes, but this plugin will make my life much easier.


I will keep posting my findings.

Thanks you in advance,

Tassos Ringas

Thanks Ringas!

Your feedback is very very useful. As you said, this is a good start, but we have many improvements to do!

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Next Limit Team