STRAT Posted October 23, 2004 Share Posted October 23, 2004 anyone seen this? http://www.maxwellrender.com/ cant wait for further render time details Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Poco Posted October 23, 2004 Share Posted October 23, 2004 Some really impressive renders there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skogskalle Posted October 23, 2004 Share Posted October 23, 2004 yup... it seems to be a damn good renderer.... but it says nowhere on the site how long those renders took... I like the idea of telling the render how much time to spend on the GI calc and then let it find the best settings itself.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted October 23, 2004 Author Share Posted October 23, 2004 that is correct. it's essential they say about render times before peeps consider it i think. also, news of a demo would be nice Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PiXeL_MoNKeY Posted October 23, 2004 Share Posted October 23, 2004 I suggest you let the renderer get out of alpha/beta stages as render times can change as features and optimization occur. So they will probably post that info as it gets closer to release. -Eric Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skogskalle Posted October 23, 2004 Share Posted October 23, 2004 good point Pixel Monkey - nice name btw =) but... even at this pre-alpha stage, if they dont mention anything about speed on their site, which usually is one of the most important aspects of a renderer (atleast in out business), I cant help but think they aim more for photoreal quality than short rendertimes.... guess we´ll just have to wait and see..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 I don't see how they would have any money left for developement after blowing so much cash on copywriting. Actually, I think they are putting us on. I looked at the 'gallery'. All they did was go out an photograph a bunch'a'stuff and pretend they did it with a computer. Come on, they faked those renders! I know a photo when I sees one! Then again.... Yeah, it would be nice to know render times. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 I am not sure what's special about this. I've seen renderings by all of the major players that are superior to these. The 'Physically Accurate' sounds like 'SLOWWWW' to me. The advantage of the GI (Final Render, Brazil, VRay) is that it is NOT physically accurate, where these skip areas that aren't necessary and allow the user to control how accurate the GI gets (which is great, 'cause when I know I'll be doing a NPR image, no sense in worrying about artifacts or perfection, but I like the light - I am using Final Render Stage-1). I spoke with some tech guys at Autodessey (FormZ guys) and they will be incorporating a 'physically accurate' GI engine with teh next release. When I asked if it'd be anywhere as quick as fR or others, it was a solid NO. I like the idea of saving time more than anything. I am looking forward to seeing fR Stage 2 and their standalone version that will be out sometime (and Vray will have one too). The competition heats up, which can only be good for us (I think). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted October 24, 2004 Author Share Posted October 24, 2004 i've been hearing rumours from testers who say it is blisteringly fast. i also like the idea you can specify the render time you want and it'll produce the best render to fit that time. ok, it's no revolution, but so what? and equivalent to brazil or vray can never do any harm can it. and yes, the beta/alpha stage will always be allot slower than the full production model. i personally will be keeping a close eye on it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 The whole text description on their site is hammering away at the point 'we are rendering physically accurately--second only to God'. I do not think you can say you have perfectly modeled the way energy behaves in the real world without being at least a little wrong and a lot full of yourself. The results look great. So render speed and ease-of-use are key. They go into telling us how everyone else writes renderers that use a 'pinhole' camera. THEY do much better, modeling the optical character of real cameras, so they don't have to do flares, chromatic aberations and distortions as a post-effect. Great! Now we can bring all the imperfections of real optical photography into our digital work! Well, they claim an 'artifact free' result. I currently use a physically accurate (to a point) renderer--Lightscape--but it is far from artifact-free. And the other side, the beautiful stochastic mode of Cinema is clean, but too slow for production work. Bring it on... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Juan Altieri Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 post a rendering time and get the best of that time.......? maybe good! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fran Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 I don't see how they would have any money left for developement after blowing so much cash on copywriting. Actually, I think they are putting us on. I looked at the 'gallery'. All they did was go out an photograph a bunch'a'stuff and pretend they did it with a computer. Come on, they faked those renders! I know a photo when I sees one! Then again.... Yeah, it would be nice to know render times. LOL! Too funny Ernest. Anyway...someone over at the VRay forum brought up a good point in that the realism is going to depend largely on the shaders. I would hope the program comes with a library or templates. The info mentions an SDK for programming shaders. I don't want to have to wear a propellor beanie (again) to use the thing. I am more an artist than a mathematician. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mwhite Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 If you look in the technical gallery, the first three renderings under physical sky look like they have some issues with noise/grain. Granted those are the only issues that I saw out of some great renderings. But in their tech notes, it sounds like this type of thing is not supposed to happen. Also, every image (at least that I can see) does not have ANY light fixtures or illumination other than natural light. I would need to be able to drop fixtures in very quickly and set their parameters. I would love to find out how fast you can get, materials mapped, light it, a render and image. I would drop the $395 is a minute if I actually had the time to play, but those days are gone. I don't have a month to create a work of art when most times I get half of the needed materials on Friday and am expected to get a rendering out for review by Monday morning. This does look very interesting though, Mike white Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PiXeL_MoNKeY Posted October 24, 2004 Share Posted October 24, 2004 From the technical sheet: Unbiased Renderer: Maxwell is an unbiased renderer. Unbiased means that with sufficient time the rendered solution will always converge to the correct result without the introduction of artifacts. Other rendering engines based upon widely known techniques such as photon mapping, radiosity, light maps, irradiance maps or other interpolation methods always produce biased renders. Consequently, they cannot guarantee convergence to the correct solution no matter how much time is expended on the rendering process. From that information it seems they are aiming for quality over quantity. This is nice for those who need to present realistic images, but have the time to wait for the final product. Very few parameters to control the render: Learning to use Maxwell is extremely easy. The user need only specify the amount of time to spend processing the render and Maxwell will automatically optimize its internal calculations to obtain the best result in the render period. This sounds like it can be good and bad. Instead of giving you control like other renderers you let the application control the quality based on the time you supply. Personally I would rather be in control of the quality and accept the time it takes to finish. -Eric Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wda Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 an Unbiased real world renderer??????? That uses wave and particle light theory algorythm. Am I missing something...... won't that add up to an ungainly large amount of calculations, wave length and particle effect of light is very small. You may need "8" processors. The tech specs seem like a bit of double speak, doing what every other renderer does but stated just a little different to mask something. Almost seems like it should be revolutionary, but no reference to specific science or developed algorythmic approach. I guess it's just a little odd. Why is this renderer not listed on the main site? I'd think that would be big news. Well it may actually be close to the one button renderer-GO.... get a good night sleep! With hype what's not said is usually more important than the big 'n' flashy. WDA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alkonst Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 As I could see - there are lots of artifacts on those pictures. As I understand - nothing spetial in that rendering system. Not so realistic...etc.. The pictures are so small...but anyway artifacts can be clearly seen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 won't that add up to an ungainly large amount of calculations, wave length and particle effect of light is very small. You may need "8" processors. The tech specs seem like a bit of double speak, doing what every other renderer does but stated just a little different to mask something. Almost seems like it should be revolutionary, but no reference to specific science or developed algorythmic approach. I guess it's just a little odd. the scenes seem simple. most of the interior scenes i render have detail that will bring a lot of rendering engines to their knees, unless the rendering engine can sufficiently purge or ignore the information it does not need. this rendering engine criticizes other engines for using things like irradiance maps, and such. they say they are aproximations. well if i have a highly detailed room with furniture, and several light sources, more than likely i am going to need a render engine that approximates details of the scene in order to get the image done in a reasonable amount of time. i am all for new ideas, but if you look at the scenes presented in the gallery, they don't amount to much more than a couple of walls, a window, and maybe a chair. that being said, it is $395 for a alpha version. $995 or something like that for the final version. i don't know if i would be comfortable buying an alpha verision, unless it comes with a full version once it is released. i didn't read the details, but since they listed the full version price, i doubt it does. maybe we will see people producing excellent complex scenes with it. i hope we do. but i can't invest the time and money into without knowing before hand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 Maybe I'm off-base about this, but I don't think this product is being developed with the arch-vis field as its target. There is no real benefit to the level of perfection they claim (and claims of 'unbiased, artifact-free, perfect physical model' etc. are very likely wrong, as in "and I never lie") for rendering. Anyone can look at this industry's body of work and see that. The market that I would guess they are targwting is Chris Nichol's--film. Anyone spending money to create software to accurately model camera aberations for the architectural market is a bloody fool. But in film that would be a VERY useful thing, when CG must be combined with live action shot with real optics. And 'physically accurate' motion blur? Same thing there. In film, they have the resources to throw into a slow but acurate rendering app. Still, I'm intrigued... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Nichols Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 I would partially agree with you on that... features such as camera lense distortion is cool. We do our lense distortion in post. It is much faster and saves a lot of time. But really when it comes to a raytracer, there is only one thing that matters: Speed. Slow renders translates directly into on thing: $$$$$. I had a render that was taking a VERY long time for no reason... trust me, I had all the PhD's in the company looking at what might have gone wrong.... btw, it was not my fault, and we had to rewrite part of the shader. Maxwell seems to be targeting a maket of "quality" it does not mean that others are not capable of it. Vray and Brazil are just as capable of making great renders as Maxwell would be of making crappy ones. I don't blame the crappy renders on Vray, fR, Brazil, or even this forums on the Rendering engine. I blame it on the artist. Or in the case of this forum, on the designer since the artist can't be blamed for trying to put lipstick on a pig. All that is really needed is speed. All the speed comes from the engine. All the other features are possible too. So features are very secondary compared to speed. And quality comes form the artist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KiboOst Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 Can't agree more with Christopher. Speed is everything in a productive environement ! Knowing well his renderer is also very important to optimize speed, and mainly quality. Artist is everything. Kib Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 All that is really needed is speed. All the speed comes from the engine. All the other features are possible too. So features are very secondary compared to speed. And quality comes form the artist. Speed is why I stick with Lightscape. But I'm going to need some features sooner or later, that LS cannot do. I was saying that the film industry will have more than a couple'a'PCs cranking frames, will have better computers and people to keep things going (Or so it is rumored to be) than me, or most typical rendering firms. So if Maxwell can't deliver speed (and we don't know one way or the other, but we all seem to doubt it, so far) then jusy whom is it being made for? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rivoli Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 i think control over what you do is needed as well as speed. to me it doesn't seem this renderer can compete with, say, mental ray or renderman in terms of flexibility and control. at this moment, as long as i can tell, it seems the key words are: magic button for perfect images. i don't think this is what a professional tool is supposed to provide. it's more like the long dreamed renderer that can do all the work for you. just hit the button and see what happens. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackb602 Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 Here's some info I just received from the Maxwell sales department. Hello Jack 1. The pre-order includes all betas and final release 1.0 at no additional cost 2. Mac OS X version and C4D plugins will be available in 1-month. Thanks, Victor Gonzalez NEXT LIMIT Technologies http://www.nextlimit.com I'm very excited about answer #2. Jack Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pixelperfectg Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 Heh, I emailed them this morning with a list of questions too. Haven't heard back from them yet. I asked about the rendering times on the gallery images (and the machine specs used in rendering). About the shaders (are they part of the 3dsmax material editor, or stand alone, is there a GUI or will I need to write my own). I also wanted to know if it was only a command line interface, or if there's also a GUI for the renderer itself. Hopefully I'll hear back from them soon, but I'm sure they are swamped with emails. Jeff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rivoli Posted October 25, 2004 Share Posted October 25, 2004 here's something about render times, it doesn't mention pc specs but still it's better than nothing: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=181065 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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