cgn wrote:maxwell is great but for the price you are better off to get an application that is more mature.

Not 100% wrong, but MoI is and will be suitable for product modeling, so the renderer should be very close to reality, not CG looking and with many capabilities.
What Maxwell can't do easily, is animation, because of the huge render times unless you can hire a render farm.

anybody who is considering Maxwell should take a serious look at FryRender. They are about to release 1.0. They are reported to be faster than Maxwell, they have a toon rendering core as well as unbiased photortealistic render, it also has real-time display engine, and Rhino plug-in. Not sure if it can operate as stand-alone engine, but it does have 3DM support so maybe(?). And until they offically release you can buy it for half-price (but with no demo). Hurry up, though. i think this offer is extremely time-limited now...

jonah

Hi Michael, Hi all,

thanks for your comments and hints.

My primary goal is to create a 3D tube frame with MOI and to make it look neat. Before getting aware of MOI I used POVRAY and created the model from scratch using POVRAY's built in primitives and an ASCII editor (no comments please :-). Needless to say that after writing hundreds of lines of "code" I was ready for something more convenient. Well, using the first sweep command with a reasonably complex curve in MOI ... and I kinda fell in love. MOI perfectly fits my needs.

After checking your suggestions and doing some additional research I decided to stay with POVRAY (which I still like) and use POSERAY (http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/) to translate between MOI and POVRAY. Fast and easy. I'm happy.

Chris

Here are some things I have modeled in MoI and rendered with Kerkythea.

Nothing great, but a lot of fun!