[grahamcowen]

Hi folks

I've been looking for ways to speed-up and clean-up Interior Design renderings in Maxwell - we're an Interior Design Studio and basically all of our work is Interior renderings as you'd expect. From a number of threads I've read I have been able to infer that caustics can be a significant load on the renderer and I'm looking for a way to switch them off across a scene.

It would appear in the form.Z plug in there are actually switches for it, but could someone point me in the right direction for switching caustics off either in the SketchUp plug in (I'm guessing that's not possible) or doing it in Maxwell itself? I just can't seem to find a switch or an option anywhere, and it would be great to be able to test to see if this gets us where we need to get to.

Thanks and apologies if this is covered somewhere obvious - I've been digging around for ages trying to find out how to do this and, while I can find a lot of advice telling me I should turn caustics off, I can't find anything that tells me where the option is to disable!

Cheers and Happy New Year!
Graham

[JDHill]

The switches you are looking for are found in the Render Layers group, at the bottom of the Scene Manager's Output tab (if you don't see that group, you just need to flip the Advanced/Minimal view switch, next to the undo/redo buttons in the tab's toolbar). In Maxwell Studio, those are found at the bottom of the Render Options panel.

[grahamcowen]

Awesome! You've no idea how long I've been looking for those ... ... Thanks for your help.
G.

[crcgrp]

Did you see a significant change in render times by turning caustics off?

[Delineator]

The switches you are looking for are found in the Render Layers group, at the bottom of the Scene Manager's Output tab (if you don't see that group, you just need to flip the Advanced/Minimal view switch, next to the undo/redo buttons in the tab's toolbar). In Maxwell Studio, those are found at the bottom of the Render Options panel.

I could be wrong, but I think the item he is looking for is:

Code: Select all

-dispersion:off

in the command line. Unless there is an easier way to do this that I don't know about?

[JDHill]

I don't really think so, people often talk about disabling caustics, and it's that group of switches they're referring to. You're correct that to globally disable dispersion in the plugin, you need to use the command line field.

[dariolanza]

Hello crcgpr,

Disabling caustics doesn't reduce the render times. Internally, Maxwell keeps calculating them (it is in the internal algorithm, and it must calculate them to keep the correctness) but it doesn't paint them in the final render.

It is usually useful when you want to apply the caustics in post, so you need a render without any caustic.

BUT, as sometimes the noise in the render is caused by caustics (when it is white dots near reflective or transparent objects), then disabling caustics would obviously discard those dots, getting a cleaner render faster.

On the other hand, Dispersion is about the separation of the light beam in its colors (like Newton's prism) forcing the caustics to be separated due different wavelengths. This is also a time consuming calculation, useful only on jewelry projects and the like. Due its render time, it is disable by default.

Cheers

Dario Lanza

[crcgrp]

Thank you for the explanation. "Cleaner render faster" is what I meant and how I should have worded my question. I did not know that Maxwell renders them internally whether they are "turned on/off".

Good information!