I used to enjoy working with Maxwell’s Rhino plugin.
Being able to remain in my modeling environment was the best choice for me since Rendering was only a peripheral activity.
Over one year ago, I updated to Maxwell 4 only to realize it wasn’t compatible with Rhino 6 yet.
I had to wait many months for the new “plug-in” which had nothing to do with the previous one.
It had become a very minimalistic (and bug-ridden) integration.
Now, I am prodded by the Maxwell sales team to upgrade yet again to “Maxwell 5” which, apart from new icons doesn’t seem to bring anything interesting on the table, for me at least.
I just tried running the “Fire” rendered viewport, just to crash instantly.
Then , I remembered “Fryrender” from the old days, who also used to have a nice Rhino integration, just to find that they are now “Arion render” , or “Maverick”, with two variants : one for “CAD” and one for “CG artists”, whatever that means… but no more Rhino integration !
So now, suppose you want to make changes to your model in Rhino, and re-render, you’ll need to re-export geometry, re-assign materials, etc…
I see it as a sign of Rhino’s demise that render engines don’t bother to develop proper plug-ins anymore.
Hey Olivier – I have not yet posted anything here because I do not yet have an alpha, and never want to be seen to be “selling” something that doesn’t exist … but I am working on something, just check my profile if you’d be interested to know more.
Renderers are niche products made by tiny teams–which describes Rhino, but I mean relative to THAT–most of which fail to gain any traction, so it’s a bit silly to draw conclusions about Rhino looking at add-in products that are always gong to come and go. Maxwell has more plugin support for Rhino than Cinema4D, so does that mean Cinema 4D is dead? And Maverick has currently NO plugins.
I’d say it is Maxwell’s future that is in doubt, not Rhino’s. The desperate “buy Maxwell 5 upgrade promotion on trust because we can’t be bothered to list the changes” hardly inspires confidence. Particularly as 4 has not been a great experience.
Same for me
I was quite happy with rhino 5 and Maxwell , going to Rhino 6 and upgrading to Maxwell 4 I have found that Maxwell was not there anymore just exporting the model to Maxwell studio. Maybe too many render options out there are killing the buisines
I’ve used Rhino with Arion for years…never had much fun working within the Rhino environment and always just used the plugin to assign generic materials and an environment and exported to Studio.
When Maverick came out I was a little hesitant as it didn’t have a very smooth way to get models out of Rhino. They changed that quickly with a great exporter which I use daily. They are currently in works creating a one button back and forth exporter for Rhino to Maverick. Any changes in Rhino will automatically update in Maverick, or so I understand.
For product shots and the type of work I do, as far as I am concerned, nothing touches Maverick for ease of use, speed and productivity. My opinion only.
Only I can say I use Vray Next for Rhino for my daily work as a 3D visualization freelancer for large train and air plane interiors and it works very good. The chaosgroup created a nice plugin, ready for daily use. I use the GPU mode every day and I like speed and quality. The plugin provide a lot of additional functions. Only the responsibility on the forum could be better.
same over here. I use V-Ray on a daily basis for everything from quick design sketches to full interior renders. especially the live window and the large material library gives me the possibility
to quickly iterate through various ideas and develop them into something more final. as Micha said, the V-Ray forum is not too active, but then again I’m quite happy with how they developed the plug-in over the past years. they seem to listen to people’s ideas and concerns.
Well Looking at the vray features and videos is seems that while Next-limit has dropped support
chaosgroup has made a great plugin fully integrated in rhino.
They eventually rolled out the Rhino integration. They just released Maxwell 5 for Rhino alongside the launch of Maxwell 5 Studio. The Rhino version does not need Studio installed (but they do use the same render node).
I don’t recommend installing Maxwell 5 yet though - my first test render fails if I select GPU rendering (Nvidia P4000 or RTX2080)… I’ll update when Next Limit have resolved this.
yes, definitely give Vray for Rhino a chance if you’re looking for a well integrated plugin. Vray Next is a huge step forward in terms of user friendliness over past iterations. The built in cloud render option is also pretty powerful if you need to render out larger formats and want to keep your workstation free for other work. Ever since Vray for Rhino has been adopted by Chaosgroup development speed has increased enormously.
Unfortunately I have upgraded to 5 (hoping for a better plugin) to find out that it’s worst.
Material editor crashes , no way to mange materials in a productive way and a lot of missing features.
Time to leave it and go for something else , will test Vray and Arion in the next days