MAX9 is Out

[AJLynn]

Trying now with 4 bounces and more trace depth, and all glossies on fast mode (I missed a bunch when setting it up).

[Koper]

looks like you two R really excited!!

 

greate tests!!

 

Justin, you gonna post your test on the interior one?

[AJLynn]

I'm pretty impressed overall with what I've tried so far. I haven't had time to do any interiors, but exteriors with sun, sky and artificial lighting are working well. Final Gather has come a looooong way since it was first introduced, I've been able to get excellent light propagation with it - my only complaint would be that there doesn't seem to have much improvement to the photon GI + FG combination, and it's still crap for exteriors.

 

The Arch Design materials work well, in some cases they make it almost too easy - choose a template, drop a few maps in, tweak a couple sliders and you've got a material in under a minute. But there are still situations where only a good old-fashioned mental ray material with 2 dozen shaders will do. Logarithmic exposure control seems more important now, especially with sun+sky, which goes against my own biases against anything that looks even a bit "kludgy" but I can cope.

[Justin Hunt]

I am with AJLynn on this one. FG is great and comparitily fast.

 

Here is a WIP of an exterior that I am working on , it still in design development so a way to go yet. 5 minutes rendering at 1200px, Physical sun and sky. All materials are Arch and design.

 

The pool shot is of a project that just wont go away (been working on it for over a year now) Started in Max8 with Potons and FG - around 4hrs to render, now in Max9 with only FG, physical sun and sky - renders in 2hrs. Only the people and some of the planting is post.

 

I am in the process of doing an interior, busy with the textures. I started this one with Max8 and gave up and switched to Vray. For fun I and redoing it with Max9. Once it is up to scratch I will post.

 

 

Overall I am very pleased with this release,

 

JHV

[AJLynn]

Let us know what you find out about interiors. I guess I'll have to get into that too eventually Good stuff, btw, and - 5 minutes!?!

[Justin Hunt]

Yep 5 mins. The trick was to turn shadow casting off for all glass elements

 

JHV

[pixelperfectg]

From my own testing it seems to work well on arch-interiors. Here are some of my tests:

32 minute render (DOF added in post with z-buffer render):

http://features.cgsociety.org/gallerycrits/11835/11835_1161196056_large.jpg

This one was about 30 minutes as well:

http://features.cgsociety.org/gallerycrits/11835/11835_1161008865_large.jpg

The combination of IES lights & displaced rug slowed this next one down to about 2 hours:

http://features.cgsociety.org/gallerycrits/11835/11835_1161003577_large.jpg

 

All renders completed on one dual xeon 3.2 system.

 

Jeff

[AJLynn]

Nice. Were you using multibounce FG for the sunlight ones and photons+fg for the night shot? I'm not sure yet how I'd want to deal with a scene with both sunlight and artificial...

[pixelperfectg]

No GI on any of those, just FG multibounce. But instead of using a lot of bounces (I used 2-3 bounces on all three examples), I also increased the FG multiplier a bit.