[Eric Lagman]

I also use C4d, and like it very much. Cinema has a very nice object manager, which is similar to layers, but better. The only problem like you said Micha, is the exporting of complex models into cinema as meshes. Managing that can become so time consuming, and almost a project in itself. It takes me just as long to build the actual model as it does to get everything imported and organized properly in Cinema sometimes. Lets hope that nurbs plugin for cinema that is in development is going to work.

Also this made me wonder when the standalone for maxwell comes out how will its gui handle the models brought in from rhino or solidworks? Will we have to manage a bunch of poly meshes if we want to use the standalone. I am eager to see.

[Micha]

... No idea how AIR works in this regard.

AIR can render NURBS direct as RIB file (renderman standard). No meshing must be done, but can be done.

[Thomas An.]

Cinema has a very nice object manager

Is that the only thing going for it ?

I have been trying to evaluate it, but so far fail to see the immense beauty suggested by many.

What is up with the view navigation controls and how come adjacent viewports do not activate as the mouse hovers above them while drawing stuff. Why does the cursor disapear while panning ? (makes me disoriented). It feels like I am drawing using tweezers remotely through a keyhole.

McNeel has spoiled me beyond repair ?

[Eric Lagman]

Thomas,

Cinema did take a while for me to get used to after using Rhino. I don't do any modelling whatsoever in it unless it is a plane, or sphere. The modelling to me, and viewport navagation is very akward, but then again I am not a sub D modeller. You can customize the viewport navigation etc. The default one is awful. Go to windows/layout/command manager. Then click on hot keys up at the top. I have all my rotation/pan settings similar to rhino.

I have seen people on cgtalk that use cinema struggle modelling something that would only require an extrude and some fillets in rhino http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=234348. Im not making fun of this, its just that Rhino and Cinema were made for totally differnt types of modelling.

The thing I like about cinema is fast hdr,and radiosity rendering. Until now Rhino or Solidworks has not had a decent render function. Flamingo and Photoworks are poor. This is an exciting time though with Maxwell, and Brazil for Rhino. I will probably drop Cinema from my workflow once these are released. It has served me well though once I got used to it. I just don't have time in my project budgets to be exporting files to all kinds of different software in order to get a nice rendering.

The reason I have not looked at Rhinoman/Air is that it didn't seem like an offical software with a strong user base to get help from. I thought it was just some guy having fun writing a render plugin for rhino. I like the results I have seen with it, but am just not comfortable with using something that doesn't seem polished or finished if you know what I mean.

I have a feeling it will be Brazil and Maxwell that I use in the future. That is if Brazil has similar render times to Cinema. Cinema gives a great quality vs speed ratio. Which im sure is similar to Air.

[Thomas An.]

Eric,

Thank you for the good insight !

I have seen people on cgtalk that use cinema struggle modelling something that would only require an extrude and some fillets in rhino http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=234348. Im not making fun of this, its just that Rhino and Cinema were made for totally differnt types of modelling.

hmm, that was my experience too. Glad to see I am not alone

Mostly I do new product modeling and visualization (with animation and characters being at the bottom of my list; almost 0%) so maybe Cinema is simply not designed for my type of work then.

The thing I like about cinema is fast hdr,and radiosity rendering. Until now Rhino or Solidworks has not had a decent render function. Flamingo and Photoworks are poor. This is an exciting time though with Maxwell, and Brazil for Rhino. I will probably drop Cinema from my workflow once these are released. It has served me well though once I got used to it. I just don't have time in my project budgets to be exporting files to all kinds of different software in order to get a nice rendering.

ahh, so basically you have been using it as a render engine...
McNeel has made this error and neglected the rendering aspect of Rhino and it has caused many people to desert just for this issue alone (the thought crossed my mind too )

The reason I have not looked at Rhinoman/Air is that it didn't seem like an offical software with a strong user base to get help from. I thought it was just some guy having fun writing a render plugin for rhino. I like the results I have seen with it, but am just not comfortable with using something that doesn't seem polished or finished if you know what I mean.

Yup, that was exactly my experience too and I gave it a real good shot spending two weeks of my vacation almost full time trying to get up to speed with AIR.

Brian is great person and insanely helpful, but he is doing this part time and the plugin is not very refined, and there is not enough automation. It simply exposes the AIR functions to the user but there is no ergonomic buffer in between.
Just to turn on caustics it requires a chain of events:
a) Make each object receptive to cautics
b) Define object that create caustic
c) Adjust caustic parameters per object (adjust caustic photons, max pixel distance, caustic specular color, refraction color and make sure specular and refarction values add up properly)
d) Create a light that emits photons
e) make objects visible to photons (per object)
f) enable the global caustic option

if any of the above links in the chain are bad the result will be bad and its a pain to troubleshoot (and make it look real... takes a lot of patience and tuning) and you always forget one or two. The interface has no automation (for example if you adjust the caustic parameters of one object It doesn't know to enable automatically the global caustic option and if you forget to do it manually then nothing comes out)

This is something that Maxwell does all behind the scenes automatically and I haven't seen a caustic out of AIR look as good as Maxwell (so it probably requires a lot of science)

I hope Maxwell never alows per object stuff and conflicting / convoluted settings like this.

I have a feeling it will be Brazil and Maxwell that I use in the future. That is if Brazil has similar render times to Cinema. Cinema gives a great quality vs speed ratio. Which im sure is similar to Air

Yes, Brazil and Maxwell are the best things that happened in Rhino for a while. Brazil is a top grade engine and with the McNeel team fully behind the plugin the integration wil be as good as Flamingo or even beter.

These are great times for the Rhino platform

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[Micha]

I hope Maxwell never alows per object stuff and conflicting / convoluted settings like this.

Thomas,

I would wish a kind of custom attributes in maxwell, where the advanced user can change parameters for faster rendering. Per default, anything could be enable. If you don't like it, you don't must touch it. I understand your problem with Rhinoman. In Rhinoman you must use some custom attributes if you want to get some effects. Most, it is speed fine tuning against quality.
I think, Brian could make a Rhinman without custom commands, so that all effects are enable and the rendering is very slow.

For example I would wish to set different max bounces for different effects - diffuse, caustic, reflection bounces ...

-Micha

-Micha

[Thomas An.]

I would wish a kind of custom attributes in maxwell, where the advanced user can change parameters for faster rendering.

I think you like custom attributes because it is the only way you know to increase speed

If Maxwell gained speed without custom (per object) attrtibutes would you be happy? There could be other more automated ways to improve speed in Maxwell programatically behind the scenes and without having the user jump hoops with convoluted interfaces.

Question: You seem to advocate Maxwell to become like AIR... why not stay with AIR ? why not wait for Brazil ? why not Toucan ? they all have the same amount of per object options and customizations.

[Micha]

If Maxwell gained speed without custom (per object) attrtibutes would you be happy? There could be other more automated ways to improve speed in Maxwell programatically behind the scenes and without having the user jump hoops with convoluted interfaces.

If Maxwell is so good like an expert, I have no problem. For example, some caustics produce only some noise but no nice caustic pattern, in this cases Maxwell could forget the caustics. I think on the minweight option of AIR, if a reflection makes less than a specific value (f.ex. 1%) of the pixel color, the engine stop to calculate the reflection. I think, Maxwell calculate to much, what the user dosn't see.

Question: You seem to advocate Maxwell to become like AIR... why not stay with AIR ? why not wait for Brazil ? why not Toucan ? they all have the same amount of per object options and customizations.

You know the answer: Maxwell seems to be one of the best and real looking GI engines. For me, it is not so much the simple interface, what I like. Simple? Hmm, I must set gloabl bounces and sampling levels - why not without it. Only press "start" and let it bake.
I dosn't like options, I like real looking renderings and speed. The biased engines fake the reality, Maxwell simulate it. But the reality seems to be to much complex for our computer, we must limit the calculation. Let the speed grow with the knowledge of the user.

Maybe, you dosn't understand me right. What I wish, is a compromise: you must not use special option, but you could do it. Like a camera with automatic and manual control.

[Thomas An.]

The biased engines fake the reality, Maxwell simulate it. But the reality seems to be to much complex for our computer, we must limit the calculation. Let the speed grow with the knowledge of the user

The problem is that once you do this, then Maxwell becomes a biased engine; in which case AIR, Brazil and Vray would do just fine

I agree with you absolutely that Maxwell needs speed optimization, but I do not aggree on the way to implement the speed.

There have been a lot of discussion in the past about Maxwell speed and the developers know it:
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... ight=speed
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... ight=speed
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... ight=speed
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... ight=speed

[iker]

I agree with Thomas, Maxwell is a diferent renderer, I don't want Maxwell to render as Vray or Brazil, for that there's Vray and Brazil

...well to tell the truth, I'd like Maxwell to render as Maxwell in Vray's times

...but let's wait

[Eric Lagman]

[quote="Thomas An."]


if any of the above links in the chain are bad the result will be bad and its a pain to troubleshoot (and make it look real... takes a lot of patience and tuning) and you always forget one or two. The interface has no automation (for example if you adjust the caustic parameters of one object It doesn't know to enable automatically the global caustic option and if you forget to do it manually then nothing comes out)

Thomas,

Yes I use it for rendering and camera animations only. Cinema is the same way with caustics and things like that. There are way too many sliders fields etc to get it to work. It has some wierd scale issues in my opinion also. If i drop in a default sphere in cinema which for some reason is 100 inches (another thing that frustrates me about cinema is it seems to want everything to be huge) caustics renders as you would expect. As soon as I put in an object,or shrink the sphere smaller say 10 in or something everything gets screwed up beyond belief, and I feel like I end up fighting with the paramaters in order to get something that looks right. Some materials are also like this that are scale dependant. I have to lower all the global scales on them to .0something. Then the preview I get doesnt show properly. I even tried adjusting the scene settings scale on the preview tab, but it acts as you would not expect. Things like Translucent materials, and anisotropic materials also make me bang my head against the table because of size and scale issues. There does not seem to be much regard for real life units in rendering and modelling in sub d packages. Which why should there be though right. Actual Parts and drawings are not created from those kinds of programs for the most part anyway.

This is what I love about maxwell if you make your object wrong, lets say an emitter way too big or single plane glass instead of giving it thickness. It screws up your rendering. Those people who model with no regard to scale or reality are feeling what I feel when i use the cinema render engine for certain things. With maxwell it is nice to be on the flip side, where reality matters. Of course this is all the anal designer/engineer in me speaking.

Again this all goes back to biased and unbiased. I guess an unbiased render has to have all those sliders, numerical fields etc etc in order to fake a natural occurance? I know it sounds like im knocking Cinema, but aside from a few minor things that annoy me its Advanced Render Add on gives very good results, once you get past the learning curve.

[Thomas An.]

This is what I love about maxwell if you make your object wrong, lets say an emitter way too big or single plane glass instead of giving it thickness. It screws up your rendering. Those people who model with no regard to scale or reality are feeling what I feel when i use the cinema render engine for certain things. With maxwell it is nice to be on the flip side, where reality matters. Of course this is all the anal designer/engineer in me speaking

Eric,

I agree with you 100% (maybe because deep down I am an engineer too ) . Anyways, the Maxwell *physical* aproach is the way to go.

In regards to the scale issue in cinema, do you think it is a mater of polys? Once you shring an object maybe cinema automatically reduces the number of polys on the object (it thinks you don't need as much for something small), which causes the rendering quality to be affected ?

Again this all goes back to biased and unbiased. I guess an unbiased render has to have all those sliders, numerical fields etc etc in order to fake a natural occurance?

These controls are what I do not like too. It doesn't make sense to me. It is like trying to build a wall a brick at a time. Yes, we have absolute control for the orientation of each and every single brick but the wall grows crooked overal no matter how much we eyeball it.

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