What do you like best about Maxwell Render?
1. Very high quality with minimum effort. The software is different to traditional renderers and essentially works of good use of the camera(s), lighting and advanced materials,
2. It's flexible and relatively easy to use and learn,
3. It supports a wide range of AEC, artist and film/media formats and add-on software,
4. It's established and has been around for over a decade,
5. It's reasonably priced and includes additional floating licenses and/or nodes. It's available as a standalone package or works via an add-on to a number of industry software.
6. The people behind Maxwell at Next Limit listen to user requests and often include these in updates/upgrades,
7. There's a large amount of free supporting information - training materials, examples, a free online material library etc.
8. Maxwell allows you to stop a render, save it, then resume the same render at another time/date.The software adopts an unusual but effect method allowing users to render either by setting a time period or level of quality. This adds great flexibility in the workflow and has been a great feature,
9. It includes a Multilight feature which allows post 'rendering' by changing any lighting (ambient, artificial etc.) after the render has finished and works almost real time depending on your hardware. This allows you to change a daylight scene to a night scene and everything in between from a single render, outputting addition images or lighting animations,
10. It's an unbiased renderer so the images are 'real'. You don't have to rely on faking the setup to get the image as the environment uses real world settings including materials,
11. It includes Maxwell FIRE as a real time pre-render feedback so you can see instant changes in the workflow,
12. It imports our CAD and BIM data without errors. We've tried other software over the years and there's been issues in the integrity of the data between transfers,
13. It supports referenced assets (xrefs) allowing large scenes to be built using external files which speeds up the render and workflow process,
14. We get consistently good images from Maxwell and our clients make positive comments on our work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Maxwell Render?
1. It was slow to adopt the GPU option for rendering which has only just been released in v5,
2. The inbuilt animation options are limited requiring other specific software for dedicated animations,
3. It lacks an established library of drag and drop assets to populate scenes requiring the user to create their own fully featured scenes,
4. Due to it's high end realism it needs a system with grunt. It still works with your 'average' desktop but renders take longer. There's a lot of newer renderers coming onto the market based on game engines which reduce the number of polygons on their models. These appear to create good images and work much faster but when you compare the quality of the images Maxwell's realism stands out. I guess each office has to determine what output they are aiming for when selecting the right software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
