Images with vegetation?

[RyanSpaulding]

Has anyone seen any Maxwell images with heavy vegetation? I've been trying and trying to get it to look right but I just cant seem to get things to look right. I wish I could just convert XFrog stuff to maxwell materials. I've spent weeks trying to understand the material editor. How complicated is THAT?!?

 

Anyone have any examples?

[Devin Johnston]

I've done some animations that have quite a lot of vegetation; I mainly used 2D plains that were orientated towards the camera. The problem with geometric models is you run out of memory way before you are able to populate the scene with enough models to make it look dense. You can use your models up close to the camera where you really need a lot of detail, but you still have to watch the poly count. If you post some of your images we might be able to suggest some ideas that would better suit you.

[chuck]

I thought maxwell could handle huge ammounts of polys...are they working on a 64bit version?

[Devin Johnston]

It can handle large amounts of poly's but it depends on how much system ram you have and if you want to use the HD option or not. If you use the HD option then you’re effectively slowing Maxwell down 5 or 10 times slower than it normally runs. It also depends on the size of the image being rendered, you can naturally put a lot more poly's in a scene that is being rendered at 720x480 than if it were 3500x2500 because the larger resolution uses up much more ram than the smaller one. So in theory yes Maxwell can handle large amounts of poly's but in reality it's not something you would want to do on a regular basis.

[RyanSpaulding]

Wait, the HD option is....slower? 5-10x slower? Pardon my french, but holy shit! That's approaching Vue slowness levels!

 

How does anyone ever get a 3000 px wide image out?!?

[chuck]

I'm assuming maxwell will still crash when windows hits it's 3gb limit right?

Part of me wants to load it up on my new computer...must resist...must make money...

 

It makes sense that it would be slower with the HD option enabled, using a slow HD for RAM.

[RyanSpaulding]

It just threw me off because in Vue, rendering to HD is way faster....2x as fast at least.

[Devin Johnston]

In Maxwell the HD option is used when you don't have enough physical ram to get the job done, however there is a bug and it won't work with the multilight settings which is probably the most memory hungry operation Maxwell has. I'm not sure if it's exactly 5 or 10 times slower but I can't think of a situation where I'd use it in its present form, unless you have a few weeks to wait for it to finish. The problem is that hard disk access is soooooo slow compared to ram access and when you dealing with an application that has to basically keep the entire model in memory while calculations are being done that lag in read and write speed is just to much of a liability.