Maxwell Render vs Artlantis w MR

[Anonymous]

Hi,
I'm looking into buying a renderer for ArchiCAD for my office, and I've been mostly interested in Maxwell Render (Nice quality, although long render times as I understand). Now that Artlantis has a MR plugin that sounds like an option though, as we could then use Artlantis for the renders that needs speed rather than perfect realism.

But I can't find anywhere what the difference between the Artlantis MR plugin and the full Maxwell Render is, and if anyone here has experience with both options I'd like to hear your opinions.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Lots of discussion of this in the Artlantis forums here:

http://www.artlantis.com/index.php?page=support/forum/liste&pages=1&fid=atl_general_us

Artlantis has a 30 day free trial, including a trial of the MR engine. Maxwell also has a free trial. It would be best if you tried both to see which fits your needs.

[Anonymous]

I've been using both Maxwell & Artlantis and they are very different animals. Maxwell is fantastic, but there is a certain amount of tweaking needed, usually in trying to get textures to scale and render properly. And the methodology used to work with those textures is counterintuitive IMO, I still don't really have a handle on it.

Very interesting about the Maxwell plugin. I wonder if there is some benefit to setting up the render in Artlantis and rendering with the MR plugin vs. simply going straight from AC to MR. I may have to give the trial a whirl. If it could replace the awkward Maxwell Studio that would be fantastic.

[Hobbesnb]

This seems like big news!
There were always better rendering applications than Artlantis, but the one selling point Artlantis had was an ability to import new reference files while maintaining the work already done in Artlantis.

With the integration of the MR engine, I think Artlantis is going to be the go-to for ArchiCAD users. My firm is currently verging on purchasing rendering software, and if the trial performs as well as I hope, I'm sold.