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Some tips, short guide (from personal tests and self learning)


leoviale
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Ok, as I said before in my previous post here, here's my guide from my own test and what I learned from my own and reading some stuff. My intention is to create some sort of guide for people who r trying to use this tool and don't know where to begin. I will leave some links for useful stuff at the end of the guide.

 

First of all, Maxwell is a light simulator, so, u will have to know some photography theory or u will have to look up some information about it, it's no so hard anyways.

Before I get started with anything here, I will say that the key of Maxwell is the render time, and here we set allot of time, and we stop the render when we like it, not like other renderers where we set up quality and then we render and wait it to stop, here we have to render in a large amount of time and then stop it when we like the image, this is very very important, we r not talking about some few minutes, we r talking about several hours or many days talking in production times. Keep this in mind also at the time of choosing or purchasing your render tool. Vray for example, as I shown before, is much much faster, and u will get a very good result as well. The difference of Maxwell, is that we r using real values in here, and I will not set up caustic setup for example, this features r all include in a render, even if u r testing. Of course u can uncheck this options too, and make a few changes as well, but the parameters of setup r very few and I recommend not to play much with them unless u know what u r doing.

 

Ok, my intention was to make this a short guide with some tips, but as I can see this is quite long as far as I’m going now, so I will start to resume stuff a bit.

 

Let's get started, my base program is 3dsmax, Maxwell has many platforms to choose so I guess that won't be the problem, u will have to install the plugin for it, u can find the plugin in the Maxwell site.

When u install this program, (not the plugin) u will have 3 features, Maxwell Studio, Maxwell Render and Maxwell Material Editor. My first though was, why do I need Maxwell render, I won't use it on my own. Well, that was completely wrong, Maxwell Render is very important, I will explain why later on.

Ok, once u have all that, u will always set up your scene in your base program, u will create geometry, build up things, set up cameras, set textures and UV coordinates in there. That's how I do it, maybe a few ones set UV coords in Maxwell, but I will recommend that u do all that u can in your base program. Once u have all that, u can just configure Maxwell preferences in 3dmax (I will use this from now on as base program), and hit render, this will open Maxwell render and do the render. Also u can set the "export mxs" option to export it to Maxwell studio, and set some other stuff in there. I don't recommend to do this now, u can get some bugs, like geometry in random places, like unsorted, I guess we will have to wait until next plugin update. BUT, some times u won't get any bugs, and u can import in Maxwell a clean scene. The difference between launching render in 3dsmax and exporting it, is that in Maxwell u can set up the f/stop, in 3dsmax u can't set this up, u will always render with f/stop=8, and 3dsmax don't let u save the camera preferences, in Maxwell u can, so once u have the correct setup for a correct exposure, u won't make any more changes. Also in Maxwell Studio u can see the sky of the physical sky in the viewport. Those r some differences I found now.

The way I operate, is this, I set everything up in max, I have some materials I made for Maxwell, so I choose witch one I will use, so I assign standard materials with this textures applied so I can set up UV coords. Once I have my entire scene, I switch from standard to Maxwell mode, and I change the standard materials to Maxwell materials, and import my materials. Then if I have some lights, I assign Maxwell emitters to the "light object emitter", keep in mind that u cant have instances of objects with emitter materials, that will cause Maxwell renderer to crash for some reason.

Ok, one u have all that, the only thing left is the render the scene, or export it to Maxwell if u choose it to render. U can set the environment settings, like physical sky, image based, etc. As I said before, before changing any of these values, u will have to know what r u changing, otherwise u will get annoying results.

Before u hit render remember, that the time is the key in here, so, in render time u will have to set a laaaarge amount of time, like 50000, and subdiv level of 18 or 21, and remember, that u will have to render until u like the result, u will have to stop it when u like it, and believe me, this will take a looong time depending on your CPU.

Ok, that's basically the scene creation/render part.

A few tips for rendering settings. The best options Maxwell has, r the multilight, and the possibility of saving an mxi file. MXI is a Maxwell file, kind of a HDR file, but it stores allot more of information, and the best part, is that with these files, u can stop your renders and resume them later! Here is when Maxwell Render gets useful. In Maxwell Render u can resume your renders, create .mxi files, change in realtime ISO and shutter speed values, also use the Simulens, to simulate light scattering and other useful and nice stuff. Also here u can set up network rendering, witch comes useful to render in cooperative mode, where u can render a single image with lots of CPUs, and then, it merges the final image.

Ok, I think this is some good information for people who don't know much of Maxwell Render to begin and start testing.

If any of u have any question, just ask, I’ll try to answer as far as my knowledge goes ;).

 

 

Here r some links, I hope u find it useful. Greetings.

 

Maxwell Materials

Maxwell Stuff (complete list of tutorials)

Maxwell Render Forum

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> light simulator

 

So is POV-RAY ;-)

 

I remember when we had to wait a minute and a half to get white hidden lines on black of one piece of furniture. Now we can texture and light it and duplicate it a dozen times and spin the thing around in real time. With shadows.

 

> key of Maxwell is the render time

 

So I look forward to the day when Maxwell will be rendering at movie making sane speeds (not to mention how much that would help for learning its materials. I think the feedback loop time on materials is one reason I use Maxwell less than I might and hesitate to purchase it.)

 

Another reason to look forward to that day is just to see what (for instance) Mental can do at that point. I had NO idea that so many of the problems that have been solved in past decades were even problems - soft shadows, caustics in participating media... Once upon a time they thought plain old ray tracing would be a global illumination solution. They were wrong. What are we wrong about now that will be fixed and we'll all say "I can't believe we used to think those old renders looked good."

 

> The difference between launching render in 3dsmax and exporting it,

> is that in Maxwell u can set up the f/stop, in 3dsmax u can't set this

> up, u will always render with > f/stop=8,

 

Disagree. Attached find images rendered direct from Max. Only difference is between hitting render I changed camera from f/1 to f/22.

 

> and 3dsmax don't let u save the camera preferences

 

Sorry, forgot to test this and have a render going now I don't want to stop.

 

> I assign Maxwell emitters to the "light object emitter"

 

Have you seen a way to use IES files with Maxwell?

 

> keep in mind that u cant have instances of objects with emitter materials

 

IIRC, any kind of instance will be a problem no matter the material.

 

> U can set the environment settings, like physical sky, image based, etc

 

Environment defaults to On for me and I always waste a few minutes being reminded of that, go back to max, turn it off, start a new render.

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