Maxwell Render Exporter for Connect

I had the same response, disappointing when we pay support fees

You mean the No-Response response from Bentley or the No response from Next Limit?

No positive response from Next Limit, who I understand were given the code needed by Bentley I believe. Bentley users are in the small minority in their eyes.

Hi,

The guy who enhanced the Maxwell plug-in on behalf of Next Limit here.

There are some reasons to the responses you've got which are not very simple to explain.

Yes, the code you mentioned was indeed a starting point but it is important to understand when we talk about the code, that this code was never meant to be an official and supported example of interfacing to the concerned MicroStation V8i internals.
Those internals were never public because Bentley could not guarantee that they will be available in the future, least of all unchanged.
From Bentley perspective it is a good thing to be able to implement new rendering engines whenever it makes sense for MicroStation without being constrained or locked to parts of their internal software architecture which very few, if anyone, knows about outside the company.

But at the time when Maxwell plugin was reborn on behalf of Next Limit, MicroStation V8i Edition was already a very mature platform with also quite a bit of remaining shelf life so it made sense at the time (2010) to enhance the old plugin to keep it synchronized with both Maxwell Render enhancements, MicroStation v8i updates and of course users feedback.

What happened several years later down the road was arrival of MicroStation CONNECT.
I did an attempt (2015) to port this plugin to CONNECT but realized soon enough that this task would equal to almost a total rewrite of the whole thing (the large part of MicroStation V8i internals which the plugin expected weren't there in CONNECT or were very, very different). The CONNECT was also evolving very quickly so the differences were only anticipated to grow. In light of it, a total rewrite could not be justified.

So in my honest opinion the Next Limit is not to blame, nor is Bentley.
Both companies did the best they could at that time, Bentley by opening a possibility to revive an already stalled exporter, Next Limit by taking the challenge and supporting the effort.

I am no longer working on anything Maxwell related, but I heard that Maxwell has a Modo plugin and I also heard that MicroStation CONNECT can export the scene in this format, so the bridge to Maxwell may still exist.

I hope this helps,

Hi,

The guy who enhanced the Maxwell plug-in on behalf of Next Limit here.

There are some reasons to the responses you've got which are not very simple to explain.

Yes, the code you mentioned was indeed a starting point but it is important to understand when we talk about the code, that this code was never meant to be an official and supported example of interfacing to the concerned MicroStation V8i internals.
Those internals were never public because Bentley could not guarantee that they will be available in the future, least of all unchanged.
From Bentley perspective it is a good thing to be able to implement new rendering engines whenever it makes sense for MicroStation without being constrained or locked to parts of their internal software architecture which very few, if anyone, knows about outside the company.

But at the time when Maxwell plugin was reborn on behalf of Next Limit, MicroStation V8i Edition was already a very mature platform with also quite a bit of remaining shelf life so it made sense at the time (2010) to enhance the old plugin to keep it synchronized with both Maxwell Render enhancements, MicroStation v8i updates and of course users feedback.

What happened several years later down the road was arrival of MicroStation CONNECT.
I did an attempt (2015) to port this plugin to CONNECT but realized soon enough that this task would equal to almost a total rewrite of the whole thing (the large part of MicroStation V8i internals which the plugin expected weren't there in CONNECT or were very, very different). The CONNECT was also evolving very quickly so the differences were only anticipated to grow. In light of it, a total rewrite could not be justified.

So in my honest opinion the Next Limit is not to blame, nor is Bentley.
Both companies did the best they could at that time, Bentley by opening a possibility to revive an already stalled exporter, Next Limit by taking the challenge and supporting the effort.

I am no longer working on anything Maxwell related, but I heard that Maxwell has a Modo plugin and I also heard that MicroStation CONNECT can export the scene in this format, so the bridge to Maxwell may still exist.

I hope this helps,

Hello Chris,

thank you for your detailed message. I was hoping for an answer from you as I followed the development of the plugin some years ago and remembered that you were the main developer back then.

So if I get you right the code was not using public API only but also some non-offical libraries?

Okay, I think I see your point: I remember that it took some time (and also money, I guess) to make it right in the first place. to develop the whole thing again is maybe a little too much given that it was done already and the user base is not that many.

Using the Modo exporter from Microstation would mean that we need to open it in Modo to use the Modo plugin of Maxwell, right? We will take a look at that I guess.

Best regards
Stephan

Hi Stephan,

If you attended any of the visualization SIGs last year I showed many time times that we are actively working on a new rendering engine to replace the Luxology modo rendering engine that is in CONNECT Edition. I think that anyone using Maxwell Render to render their scenes are doing so because of it's unbiased render and quality of results "given enough time".

We will be introducing VUE's rendering engine in MicroStation CONNECT Edition Update 14 as a limited beta requiring a token to enable feature. What's exciting for you is that we will have an unbiased Path Trace option that uses GPU and CPU to render and will use either Intel or NVIDIA denoisers to achieve amazing renders in a fraction of the time it would normally take to completely converge.

If you would like to be a part of the beta group let me know and I will add you to the list. If you have a scene with materials that you have rendered with Maxwell and could share the data set with me I would be more than happy to render it with the path tracer and send you the results.

jerry.flynn@bentley.com

Cheers,

Jerry

Hi Chris, thank you putting us in the picture so to speak, I guess as businesses we are always trying to make the best use of skills and our software investments into our tool set. Especially when it still gives a desired result that isn't quite being meet in other tools.

Jerry, please could you add me into this beta group.

You are already on the list ;-)