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How come Maxwell isn't mainstream?


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I'm not quite sure why no one has brought up multilight in this discussion. I know it affects render time, but being able to essentially have a day and night rendering in "one" render session is extremely valuable. In fact, with proper preparation, you have many different lighting scenarios.

 

I had no knowledge of this option.

Is it rendering more than one image and sharing the repetetive tasks associated with boht images, but switching out the exposure math for day vs night (per se)?

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It sort of makes channels for each light. There isn't a visual representation of such, but you are presented sliders with each light type (they are essentially just materials applied to objects). You use the sliders to turn up or down the intensity of the lights (including the daylighting). Using these sliders. you can instantly go from a day time rendering (interior lights slid all the way down) to a night rendering (daylight turned all the way down). Imagine the flexibility of this, given that you have a slider for every type of light. Check out their site for videos on this. They aren't magic.

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  • 2 weeks later...

great topic, i've been eyeing unbiased renderes a while now but i've never brought myself to purchase one (though octane render in beta and at 99€ is really tempting me atm)

 

To be honest I've seen by far the best renders coming from maxwell and indigo, they were quite emotionally intriguing as well, especially coupled with interesting models, far from being realistically dry or anything.

 

I love the photography approach since i'm an enthusiastic photographer myself, and I never really saw a vray render that spills light just as beautifully and realistically as max or indigo do.

 

But all in all, until they break down that computation time from a couple of days for a normal sized render to a couple of hours they're simply not worth the tradeoff - maybe for hobby renders.

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  • 4 months later...

the short answer is people are just lazy. most could care less about the difference between biased and unbiased rendering,nor the quality|realism of the latter. why should they when hyper-realism visualizations own the market anyways?

 

i agree that speed should be a moot point,both from the standpoint of current and|or future gpu tech and personal workflow pipeline for scheduled renders. at the heart of every workflow is the obligation to mold it to whatever render engine creates output. even vray cant bang out your best works in under a minute -theres always a logical limitation. once that issue is addressed appropriately for maxwell,there shouldnt be an issue.

 

learning curve is actually quite simple,especially with plugins into the autodesk slew of applications. that said,imho its something that could very well be the difference between your signature output and the throngs of vray services out there. hth.

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This thread was started by me about 8 months ago. Do we still feel the same way now that Maxwell 2.0 and Fire has been out? Does anyone feel that we are going to be pushed by clients for unbiased rendering? I read a while back that the reason people graviate to Vray is becaues of the large user base. Doesnt this mean that all of our renderings will have the same feel to them? The stuff on the Maxwell site is really mind blowing and I think could really set an illustrator apart from some of the many Vray users out there. I am very tempted to give this software a run.

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People are often fooled by (every) render engine's marketing trick; the companies put all kinds of high-end renders on their pages as propaganda material, but they forget to mention these were made by top artists and that the most important part of the appeal is not just the engine's performance but the artist's interpretation of architecture or interior design, and often there's also heavy post production techniques involved for that added appeal.

Also, even though unbiased engines are traditionally marketed as a "click the button and produce breathtaking images easily) that's far from the truth.

All things considered, they generally can produce photorealistic imagery with less effort, but if you want to use them properly, specially stuff like maxwell studio and so on, you'll have to invest a whole lot of study into it. The Maxwell user guide is not really much smaller in size than V-ray one.

I can't imagine producing a series of decent production size images (4000*5000 pixels or something) without a proper render farm (or waiting for a week for one to render to a decent quality), so at this point, traditional unbiased renerers are still a very clumsy choice for a freelancer or even a small studio without a proper render farm. Not to mention trying to do animations at that speed. I guess it depends on individual's market and projects though.

Even though I have what I consider a decent mini-workstation (i7 980X hexacore at 4 ghz per core) and I can churn out decent medium sized interior images with Indigo (another great unbiased renderer out there) relatiely "fast", it's still far from what V-ray can offer me in terms of flexibility, robustness and speed.

And knowing vray as I do at this point, I can honestly say I can achieve the same results or 90% same results in 20-50% amount of time needed with Indigo.

What I am looking forward to though is indigo's announced GPU support and stuff like Octane render (which is really lightning fast, GPU-only unbiased realtime renderer) to become more practical. At the moment GPU-only renderers are limited by the amount of RAM your GPU has. With my scenes often moving around 10 or even 15 GB of ram when loaded in MAX this kind of approach is out of the question.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Maxwell is 40% off from now til the 16th. Is now the time to adopt???

 

I don't think price has been the issue. It could cost $20, but if it can not render as fast as other solutions then it will still have problems being adapted as the preferred engine.

 

Actually, if it cost $20, I think a lot of people would make due with it. ;)

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I use maxwell and Octane in production and it's okay to use.

Maxwell if I have some time for the rendering and Octane for small animations (in unbiased mode).

 

The thing is most clients (at least mine) won't recognice if its rendered biased or unbiased. I also supplied realistic renders and the client liked the unbiased preview renders I handed them more as the realistic ones because of lacking knowledge to lighing and physically behavior of light. So I stick with Octane renderer mostly and do unbiased exteriour renders.

 

For outdoor renders Maxwell is not that slow and it heavily depens on the scene you do. I always discuss with my clients what they need and then choose the proper renderer. I think i save time and nerves in scene setup but have to wait a bit longer with Maxwell. :)

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Michael,

 

Is it possible to post some stats for Maxwell? Maybe something along the lines of sample image, resolution rendered at, time needed on render, hardware stats, and how many CPU cores used on Maxwell?

 

It is hard for me to understand the speed of things without a baseline reference.

 

If you have time, it would be interesting to see something similar on Octane also.

 

Best,

ts.

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I would like to do a scene but don't have much time at the moment because a project is just ending.

Sometimes its a bit of work to transfer a scene because to get a good comparison the materials need to be created for the specific renderer.

The Octane Team also states that its a bit unfair to compair other engines with Octane because Octane is still in Beta. I have a little other opinion about this because if they release the renderer they have to live with speed compairsons.

 

Here is an interesting thread with a sample scene which comapares the engine:

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=48218&page=0

 

Plus another one with frosted glass tests on different render engines:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=902691&highlight=maxwell+frosted

 

Seems iRay isn't performing well at all.

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Yes of course. But you have to buy render nodes.

 

Thats a deal breaker for me. One user should be able to harness the power they have available without additional licenses. Same with Realflow. Pisses me off to be frank.

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Bought lots of render engines in the past. Maxwell is the best money I have ever spent. I have vrayforC4D too but hardly touch it anymore.

 

Amongs other likes ...

 

* lighting setup is done in minutes

* multilight

* interactive texturing and render preview with Fire

* awesome results

* maxwell studio

* ...

 

I have nice machines for production and I produce images under 1 hour.

 

gr.

 

 

sven

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