Maxwell VS mental ray
 

Guys, Both of it are good, but i choose maxwell over mental ray. What do u say?

maxwell for animation should be a no no i suppose for stills it could be quite good if you can let it run for hours

Might as well draw many more renderers in this battle, but lets add Final Render to it as well.

Now:

Maxwell:

Physically correct renderer. Computes light as it would travel in the real world, and, if you leave it on enough, no noise- no nothing. Never will it have blotches, since those are Photon Mapping caused artifacts. Maxwell runs on edited versions of the Metropolis Light Transport algorithm, called ER (I don't know what it stands for). However- the MLT or ER algorithms are... slow. but they are unbiased. Well, compared to other algorithms they are fast, but the industry leading standard is Photon Mapping, and that is really faaaaaaaast. MLT or ER isn't really faaaaaaaaast. Also- MLT and ER are not so good at caustics- though Maxwell might use photon mapping for caustics.

Mental Ray:

Store brand photon mapper. It is super-efficient, but its artifacts are splotches. It is not unbiased becuase photon mapping is only an approximation of the rendering equation (light situation and radience transport that describes how light goes around in the real world). Mental Ray is efficient, fast, and mostly, an industrial standard (mostly, and I think so, correct me if I'm wrong), since Mental Ray is inset with Maya and 3ds Max.

Not forget xsi :D

But what i heared is that maxwell is really easy to render with.. with mental ray depending on experience i suppose.. (I can't do anything lol ) can take very long to tweak with so many settings

that is completely true about tweaking the settings. And with maxwell it's true that you just specify the kinds of lights... etc. and its done!

But then you wait for 10, 20, 25+ hours for a "semi-clean" render.

maxwell is well programmed for ligh effects