MAXWELL ANIMATION: made out of my boredom

[baroim]

Hiya All

 

I have made this simple 6 seconds animation using Maxwell. It turned out to be quite fun and challenging. It was rendered for 14 hours for 208 frames at 720 x 480, using 16 cores equivalent pc's (2x Quad and 4x Dual). It worked out to be about 5 minutes per frame for what i consider as acceptable level of graininess.

 

Post production with Adobe After Effect (especially for noise/grain removal).

 

Maxwell animation (external link) (9mb flash video)

 

c&c guys, thanks.

Edited September 3, 2009 by baroim

[trino]

the illumination is great, nice shaders too, but i think it stills very very noisy for an animation.

[Devin Johnston]

Light quality is good however the noise is still to high and the blown out windows are just to distracting and overpowering. Was this done with their latest engine, if so how does it compare speed wise with the older version? What SL did you let it render to?

[baroim]

Hi Guys

Thanks for the critics. This graininess is indeed still there. I was just wondering, if only this is real animation project which would run quite a while, i.e 3 minutes, would people pick the noise up (as oppose to this one where people get familiar with the scene and notice the noise almost straight away because it’s a loop 6 seconds animation).

Maxer, the 5 minutes each frame, took it to SL 12. At the moment we are using 1.7 version, I don’t know if that is the newest one. Also I am thinking, if I could bring the graininess down even more in internal, I reckon I could get a better luck in external at the same SL.

One thing I quite like, is the fact that I don’t get flicker on the animation, grain yes, but no flicker, also no pre calculated lighting solution whatever which could not guarantee a flicker free anyway,…

On the overpowering windows, J that was simply because my laziness to put something on it.. J,..

I really like how Maxwell does the illumination, but in term of win some loose some, I don’t know whether achieving the lighting quality but pay the price with noise/grain would be worth all the efforts. What do you think?

[Devin Johnston]

I was once an avid supporter of Maxwell for about a year that was the only program I used but I eventually got tired of fighting the long render times and excessive noise and moved over to Vray. The question you have to ask yourself is can you afford the noise and long render time when other engines can produce the same quality in a fraction of the time? In my case I couldn't afford it so I had to switch to an engine that offered more than just minimal setting tweaks and "physically correct" shaders. Maybe your experience has been different but if not you should think about another option.