antonio_frias Posted April 30, 2006 Author Share Posted April 30, 2006 Leonardo da Vinci is considered a master because he understood exactly how light and perspective worked. Shouldn't a Cg artist know a bit about the way light reacts in the real world. I'm no expert but from the little bit of experience I've had in Vray, we are able to control and tweak light pretty precisely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
antonio_frias Posted April 30, 2006 Author Share Posted April 30, 2006 I've heard that in the near future, cars will be able do drive by themselves. You just have to enter your destination and it will take you there. Where's the pleasure of driving, of changing gears, of feeling the engine... Makes you think Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IHAB Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 I was born in Portugal and lived there until the age of five and then my parents imigrated to Kitchener, Ontario where I lived and finished grade ten. My parents then returned to Portugal where I finished high school and a course on architectural drafting. After my military service I went to France where I've been living and working as a CAD designer ever since. Don't ask if I feel Portuguese, Canadian or French, I don't know the answer myself. I hope that explains my choice of avatar I firstly thought it was related to Zidane's retirement & realmadrid,thought you were a football fan!! ....but still why Canada??! .....this long life journey now explains Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigroo Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 Leonardo da Vinci is considered a master because he understood exactly how light and perspective worked. See my sig Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 ...my question is why are they so close, I was kinda dissapointed when I first used PPT, thinking wow, this is going to be so cool, and so much more real than the last one... Irr+QMC is already quite good, and unbiased usually isn't all that helpful anyway. There's some difference there, you can see it along the bottom edges of the Mac, the PPT one is a bit better, but unless your scene is more difficult the differences will stay very subtle. This is why I don't use it very much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 Here is the file, if anyone wants to dazzle me with a maxwell render, and is free to anyone else who wants a mac mini model, I think I pretty much eliminated all traces of vray, so it should load without problems if someone doesn't have vray... Hey Manta, can you save it out as a 3DS, when I try and open it in Max there are still some Vray dll's attached and it won't open. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 Hey guys sorry about that, there is a .3ds file in there now... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 Interesting thread. The initial mission of Maxwell seems to have been lost in several respects. The idea was that it would allow for less setup time by taking the guesswork out of lighting, material, and camera parameters. You would simply use real-world equivalents and they would produce real-world results. Sounds great, but the devil is in the details, and that's where the advantage is lost. For example, you can't simulate accurate lighting by specifying light power and color temperature alone. You also have to take into account the behavior of luminaires, dispersion, absorbance, etc. In Maxwell this means you actually have to *model* all of your light fixtures if you want accurate lighting, and you also have to establish correct material properties to ensure accurate dispersion of light. Due to the problem with caustics and dielectrics, you have to use a fake for glass, and here you're purely guessing about the amount of light that should be absorbed--just as in biased engines. So much of the time we gained by not having to tweak parameters we have lost by having to model more accurate environments. This was amplified by the peculiar material system NL gave us in the RCs and v1. Add to that the time lost wrangling with GUI issues, like balky plugins, Studio, and a nightmarish NET rendering system, and the supposed time savings have all but vanished. What we're left with is egregious render times and no offsetting advantage in terms of setup time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
runrun Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 What we're left with is egregious render times and no offsetting advantage in terms of setup time. I think that sum's it up perfectly. That is about the best review of Maxwell I've seen posted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xxfm5bassistxx Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 The idea was that it would allow for less setup time by taking the guesswork out of lighting, material, and camera parameters. You would simply use real-world equivalents and they would produce real-world results. Sounds great, but the devil is in the details, and that's where the advantage is lost. Couldn't of said it better myself really. I fully support Maxwell and NL through and through that this *could* be a great program. If Vray can render a scene in 2 hours and Maxwell takes 5 hours for the same scene, we could of spent that other 3 hours tweaking lighting and material settings to get the same effect. Usually a professional doesn't need 3 more hours to set up materials and light.I am not a professional at lighting(but I am working on it!) but it look me about an hour to set up a good lighting setup just when I was experimenting so the professionals could do it in probably half of that time. Brandon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 I think we all agree that Maxwell isn't what it was promised to be and it has serious limitations right now which keep it from being taken serious as a production tool. The thing NL needs to realize is they must make a competitive product that meets the needs of the people there selling to. They can't continue to rely on this attitude of what ever they give us should be good enough and we are ungrateful slobs for complaining about it. Their forum is packed full of "Wish List" items that if were implemented would make Maxwell the tool for the CG industry. Instead they look down their noses at us, disregard what we have to say, and hand off second rate products to us that really don't work any better than they did a year ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 There you go. And btw, you can't even render animation or motion blur out of Cinema 4D with Maxwell. Never have been able to actually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
runrun Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 There you go. And btw, you can't even render animation or motion blur out of Cinema 4D with Maxwell. Never have been able to actually. I've rendered M~R animation from Lightwave using the beta. In the past I've always been more of a LW user. I'm using Cinema 4D more now (Mac) because I want to use things like Hair & XFrog. I like the sketch/toon too. I also like 4D renderer better than LW. The LW modeler can get tiring being separate. I've not tried an animation with 4D & M~R yet. If I can't do animation, that sucks but not a terribly big deal since M~R takes so long. Seems there is a real patchwork of things you can and can't do depending on which environment you're in. I'm still trying to find the best workflow with the tools available to me. My goal is to do arch/interior realistic lighting animations for video. I have no experience with VRay, but if it renders similar scenes faster I think I'll have to check it out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 I'm not interesting in animating with M~R (toooo slow), but I do want to be able to render stills with motion blur. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 I've also discovered that the Cinema plugin still doesn't support multiple materials on an object--something that was requested over a year ago and never addressed. This is a much more serious problem for me than the animation/moblur issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 Further, material propogation still hasn't been addressed, meaning that if you place a material on a parent object, the material is not passed on to the children. Obviously they've done next to no work on this plugin in the last 6-8 months, nor have they made any serious effort to hire someone who could get this thing in shape. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leoA4D Posted April 30, 2006 Share Posted April 30, 2006 And, M~R is a bigger cpu/ram hog than ever. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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