It is the impression of the Revit guys here that it is not ready for primetime.
Hi Tristan, the Revit plugin for Maxwell V2 (V3 is out, but we have not upgraded so I cannot speak to it) is not great. At 720x480 you may be able to get a relatively clear frame in 14 minutes if its an exterior scene but its imposable to tell without doing a test. We do a mix of rendering directly from Revit using Maxwell Render, or importing to 3dsMax to use Mentalray or Vray. Your right that Maxwell would give you flicker free animations but the rendering times will depend on the final output resolution and the types of emitters and materials you use. Just curious what your designers are using to render from Revit. With that said, how are you liking Maxwell in your environment? And your users? Time consuming! Maxwell render seems to do away with that.
Our BIM manager had concerns regarding most other products including 3DS Max as he states there were issues with lighting and cameras that would require export from revit>3ds then additional fiddling with those aspects in 3ds and performing a couple of test renders to feel it out before the full res renders. There are often times I export to DWG, do some cleanup in sketchup, then bring it into Max. I also use Maxwell Render, and as of now, there is not plugin for Maxwell Render straight from Revit. sending out to Autodesk 360 butt rendering which uses a different material library, still takes a significant chunk of time, and with policy changes the 2014 release, is becoming fairly expensive. I use Max so I can fine tune my camera to match my physical camera when I take site photos. I like the idea of building my own internal render farm which gives me much more flexibility and control over the environment VS.
Sorry to revive this old thread, but we're currently looking at Maxwell Render as it seems like a pretty streamlined process vs export to anything else and having to modify the scene or (as some folks in the office have been doing) completely rebuilding the scene in Rhino and rendering with VRAY.