How to speed up the rendering time for Maxwell

[Mave]

Can anyone give me more information about Maxwell e.g rendering speed , how to counter the materials error? how to use the lighting? : )

[Arnold Sher]

oh yeah, that's easy... move onto vray:p

[IC]

Materials errors depend on which version you are using and which plugin but in my (LightWave) experience, they come from having more than one image in a texture channel or using TGAs. Also having a texture in the luminosity channel crashed it, having emitters in the same object as other geometry etc etc etc.

It's trial and error until you get the hang of it. Just keep objects and textures simple.

 

The lighting is the easy part. Just put in the time of day and whether you want sunlight or not.

 

To speed it up is the impossible part. Keep the number and the poly count of emitters and dielectrics down.

Get a good computer and Neat Image.

[Devin Johnston]

Tell us what you’re having trouble with specifically.

[mesht]

from my experience with using Maxwell, occasional crashing with Max's mat editor. for fast noise-free rendering, it's quite hard to achieve with Maxwell. i've try to avoid using dielectric materials, minimal emmiters and glass. but sometimes even with minimal noise-emmiting objects in my scene, a decent image took almost 4 to 5 hrs to render, with minimal noise.

[AJLynn]

4-5 hours is nothing. I've seen images that were renderered for weeks. Weeks.

 

Yeah, Maxwell is pretty buggy and in many circumstances very slow.

[vodka79]

Do not use pure colours as such as 255 white in rgb, reduce them to something along 220 will be fine. Do not use dieletic for architectural glass, reduce the usage of emmiters(especially for those hidden).

Get a super fast render farm.

[Horhe]

hmmm.... pray to god?

[AJLynn]

I wonder how AMD's doing with the technology they were working on that would make a multi-core CPU look and act like a single CPU. Given Maxwell's apparent inefficiency in utilizing render farms and even multi core systems, and that the license is still $250 per core, that kind of system might be the only thing that would make Maxwell fast.

[Devin Johnston]

NL is supposed to update their licensing policy to reflect the current trend in technology; that is according to Victor as of about a year ago. Whether or not it will happen is anyone’s guess but if it does it will mean that Maxwell will look at CPU's not cores.

[AJLynn]

I've asked more than one NL person about this and posted in a suggestions thread that Nicole was reading that it's about time they acted on that, seeing as how dual cores is now the "standard" CPU on the market, and never got any kind of reply.

[Devin Johnston]

That doesn’t surprise me a bit it's just like everything else they do it's just smoke and mirrors.

[superbad]

I wonder how AMD's doing with the technology they were working on that would make a multi-core CPU look and act like a single CPU. Given Maxwell's apparent inefficiency in utilizing render farms and even multi core systems, and that the license is still $250 per core, that kind of system might be the only thing that would make Maxwell fast.

 

Maxwell's network rendering is crap slow because of how it merges the output like a daisy chain. It also transfers data across the network very slowly for some reason. However, its multi-core operation seems pretty efficient. I run it on a 4 core Mac Pro, and it's about 4 times as fast as a comparable single core machine.

 

Of course, they need to update the licensing scheme yesterday. Making people pay per core is totally missing the point- licensing should be per machine, whether it's one machine or two or 100. It's my business what I put inside those machines.