It's all about time

[gianlucabotti]

Hi i'm new in this forum i'm a student and i would like to buy the student-version of maxwell render (i need it for school). I've been looking for a lot of video and tutorial and i saw how this render program is awesome out of every way but i have also noticed that the render time is a lot... Is there any tip to make it quicker?

Thanks in advance to all.

[matthewspencer]

Speed is not Maxwell's strength but there are many things you can do to help.

- Make all emitters 1-poly planes

- Never make a fully saturated material. In other words, if the material is white, set it to 240,240,240 (R,G,B) instead of 255,255,255

- Try to use AGS glass (through the material wizard) instead of real glass

- Turn off motion blur, dispersion, all simulens effects

- Use render instances when possible

 

That's just a quick list...let me know if you have any other questions

[gianlucabotti]

Thanks Matthew i'll try you tips on the demo version.

[bartjole]

If you render you'll notice that the rendertime would be like 300h. It realy depends on your system and the scene, but you'll notice it's good enough after a few hours (at my very slow system) and from that point the updates will be minimum. I'm not sure but i think you can set a time limit. The best thing you can do is use Maxwell Fire for a preview (just to see how the settings/materials work out) and use the actual renderer for the real production.

[matthewspencer]

That confused me at first, when trying to use Maxwell.

Here's how it works: you can stop your render either when it A) gets to the sampling level you want or B) when it gets to a certain amount of time. Both options have their uses. If I need something to be the highest quality, no matter how long it takes, maybe I'll set time at 9999 and then SL at 22. It will definitely get to SL 22 before it gets to 9999. But if I'm short on time and quality isn't as important, I'll set time at, say, 60 minutes, and leave SL at whatever. If it gets to my desired SL, great. If it doesn't, at least I know it will finish when I need it to.

 

So if you set time to something arbitrary, there's no point in looking at the "time left" figure.

[numerobis]

- Use render instances when possible

 

if you're aiming for speed it should be more like "do not use instances when possible" !

instances only if the scene doesn't fit into ram - it will be slower.

Edited September 10, 2012 by numerobis

[matthewspencer]

if you're aiming for speed it should be more like "do not use instances when possible" !

instances only if the scene doesn't fit into ram - it will be slower.

 

Yeah you're mostly right, actually. It can vary case-by-case; if you're doing a large network render where much of your time is eaten up by MXI exports, then instances are definitely a speed improvement, but don't help the actual render time.

 

Also in some cases, instances have no render speed effect. It depends on position/number.

 

Personally I prefer them because it helps when I'm working in the viewport of my 3D software.