Fran Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 Since it appears that almost nobody was able to get beta quality materials out of rc5, is it really fair to blame the user base? Not to mention the fact that it doesn't appear as though the A-team testers could do any better! I think NL has been way too in love with the science of material creation, and overestimated the user base's desire to follow their lead. Hopefully they are rectifying that- I personally would have been largely content with beta's materials (which leads to a long laundry list of irritation regarding their development priorities...) No, it isn't fair. It bordered on ridicule, at least from the way I saw it. And I think that NL is seriously out of touch with the majority of Maxwell's userbase. And Tyrone, I respect your work, but it is generally outside of what I'm usually hired to visualize. It doesn't represent what I would like to see coming out of Maxwell. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 No, it isn't fair. It bordered on ridicule, at least from the way I saw it. Gotcha Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 Speak for yourself, I did not have problems with RC5 and materials that can match or surpass the Beta engine. With all due respect, the proof is in the visuals- do you have something you'd like to share to make your point? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 Maxer, it is not the fact that the materials Mihai was referencing are not real, it is more that the conditions to produce certain materials, we may or do not quite have the technology to produce. Nonetheless the materials are still phsyically accurate. Case in point, you could simulate a material with Maxwell Render that could only be produced in the construct of a controlled vacuum. Umm... so the materials are physically correct, but we don't have sufficient control of the physics to create them in reality? I'll be sure to explain that to my clients... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 Umm... so the materials are physically correct, but we don't have sufficient control of the physics to create them in reality? I'll be sure to explain that to my clients... I think its a matter of having control of many physical 'adjustors' that allows so much variation that you can make the impossible. That's fine, good even for those with the time and talent to make use of it. I just want to know that, like Lightscape, I can start with a polished stone' preset, or 'architectural glass' preset, tweek to suit and go. As long as that is still available it doesn't matter how deep the rest is, maybe I'll learn it later, but I can do my work now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maximus3D Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 They did say it will ship with 200+ materialpresets so let's wait and see what it'll be then you could start with those, tweak them into your own liking and adapt them to your scene. I can't see that taking hours and hours to do, a couple o minutes at most. / Max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 They did say it will ship with 200+ materialpresets That would be fantastic. Did they say who was preparing the presets? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maximus3D Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 Nope i haven't heard who did it but i think everybody been pitching in on them so they should be good i mean 200 preset materials is ALOT! / Max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 With regard to those 200 preset materials, aren't those the super realistic ones that take forever to render? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 With regard to those 200 preset materials, aren't those the super realistic ones that take forever to render? Even if that's the case, which would make them less useful, I hope that once we all have this beast we will develop a mat exchange, or someone will write really good, efficient mats and sell a library. As long as we can still start with simple/quicker and work our way towards complex/slower then it'll be fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 23, 2006 Share Posted April 23, 2006 That's something I've been looking forward to as well Ernest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Continuumx Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 I thought my question was perfectly logical; I'm surprised I was the first one to ask it. I think the idea that they were all to busy to do an architectural test scene is a joke; they either didn't want to do one or did one but didn't like the results. Maxer, anyone that has been on a beta test team, usually does that. They test features and hunt for bugs, not render pretty images. Once V1 is released there will be good time for this! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Continuumx Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 But didn't they create that small standalone materialeditor thingy which you can use to simply create beta style materials with for the purpose of making the beta lovers happy i don't know.. Btw, i can't post on the forum now. Could be they're upgrading it or patching phpbb or some temporary problem with the server. The material wizard creates materials in the way you remember creating them in the Beta version. The product that the material wizard creates is still a standard material in the material editor. The material editor is just that. It has nothing to do with the material wizard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 So about these super-realistic materials that slow the render, what is it the makes it slow? Using multiple layers? Glossy effects? I guess anything with difficult caustics will still be slow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 Maxer, anyone that has been on a beta test team, usually does that. They test features and hunt for bugs, not render pretty images. Once V1 is released there will be good time for this! Are you telling me that all of these animations that they produced showing off the Emitter mixer panel were done to hunt for bugs? Sorry I don't buy that, and I also don't buy that they are unable to rip them selves away from their busy beta testing schedule to produce one nice rendering. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 Maxer, anyone that has been on a beta test team, usually does that. They test features and hunt for bugs, not render pretty images. Tyrone, I really appreciate you posting your A-Team experiences here. We B-Team players are not given much. As a decades-long beta-tester of Datacad, I would disagree about testing. I do the best testing when I use the beta version for real work. I don't cover all the features, but the ones that matter to my work get heavily tested. To me, working with real projects is the only way to test software. Otherwise, I feel like I'm just playing with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 Are you telling me that all of these animations that they produced showing off the Emitter mixer panel were done to hunt for bugs? Sorry I don't buy that, and I also don't buy that they are unable to rip them selves away from their busy beta testing schedule to produce one nice rendering. Exactly! You just can't find all of the bugs without doing complex scenes. I guess that means that *we* are the real beta testers... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDHill Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 Hi all, Here's a sample render done while tweaking glass materials. Don't go picking it apart, it's just one in a series of tests: By the way...the glass in this pic is refractive (Nd=1.51). Hope you like the model, Ernest. ~JD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 I guess this is an AGS material right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 Yep, looks like what we've become accustomed to seeing, post-beta... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 JD! Welcome, friend! Did Tom boot you as well? I'm glad to see my old testing model get some more use. I see you updated the car. I would expect to see more reflections than that, but overall it looks really nice. Did you try the view inside the room with the mirrors yet? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDHill Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 Hi again, @Maxer: ...well...sort of. The standard AGS is non-refractive (btw...being so, it works *perfect* for single-poly glass - no chunk-of-solid-glass-interior problem). This particular glass, on the other hand, is a refractive AGS material I've been working on. To clarify things a bit...AGS neither a Coating nor a special biased-calculation code-hack...the new material model is just very flexible. One material it can be used to represent is a pure vacuum (Nd=1.00, all light transmitted). The AGS concept simply weights some of this material with another material, giving a combination of complete transparency and [whatever the other material is]. @Adehus: ...as I said, it is a *glass* test. Obviously I'm not in the market for your job...the very beautiful images are your department. I'm just trying to nail down some good pre-fab materials. @Ernest: ...no, no boot...I am just not an architect, and so feel it somewhat inappropriate to post here. About the image, I haven't run any tests on the interior view. The main thing I'm trying to do is to come up with a series of .mxm materials that will serve you guys well, balancing (view-angle-dependent) reflection, light-transmission, and rendering speed. As you noticed, this variant was too weak on reflection...no problem, I've got about 300 different 640x480 low-sampling-level variations of this on my machine right now. ~JD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 JD, thanks for posting this it's very nice to actually see the AGS in action. I see that this image was around 2100 pixels and rendered for about 7 hours, can you comment on the speed of V1, does the noise clear faster than in RC5? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adehus Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 @Adehus: ...as I said, it is a *glass* test. Obviously I'm not in the market for your job...the very beautiful images are your department. I'm just trying to nail down some good pre-fab materials. Ahh... gotcha. Well, I appreciate that you're looking into refractive alternatives for AGS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maximus3D Posted April 24, 2006 Share Posted April 24, 2006 Interesting.. i had no idea you A-Team guys had permission to post 1.0 renderings already outside the main forum now. But if so that's cool! / Max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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