[ayers]

As AIR's user, I wanted to try the outstanding MAXWELL to compare. I read so much "fight" on rhino forum about this two that I wanted to try by myself. As Product designer, I will not compare them for architecture project of course...anyway I think there is no doubt we know who is the winner. So, I wanted to compare them on a very simple product...a DVD Player. Of course my skill is much better with Air than Maxwell so may be you will think that's not fair. Well, I don't think so. That's the first good point of Maxwell, no need to learn it a lot. After one hour of practicing you know everything. It's too easy.
So, I have choose one of my project made with Rhino 3.0, applied some materials (the same kind for both renderer), do a little bit setting and let's render during few hours. Look the result, what do you think?



After that, I make my choice...for the time being I will used both. For my job it's AIR because it's fast and quality is acceptable. But for my personal used it's Maxwell because the realism is amazing (may be not on my example but I know it could be) Anyway, my preference go for Maxwell because it's too perfect. Sure it's slow...now! But what about tomorrow?

Ayers

[Micha]

Hallo,

@ayers: very nice images, great work. I think, the small differences in the images can be corrected (maybe, the AIR background enironment was to white and the gamma to high).

I use AIR since more than one year, Maxwell I use since a week. My wife study product design and I use Rhino at home, in the future I want to use it professional for product design and visualisation.

My opinion: I can not work without AIR. For example, my wife make a project and need much illustrations for the documentation, most she use a combination from outline rendering and occlusion with HDRI - fast and clean images. And if the project is finish, she need much photoreal images. The setup for the environment need 15 min ... 1 h and than we can make endless photoreal images in a short time. At the end a poster print with 5 Mill. pixel image, - no problem. A very great advantage of AIR is the very very small memory usage.
Maxwell is easy to use, but the growing skill of the user dosn't increase the render speed, at AIR, the images come faster and faster.
For example the quick test dragon image - 10 min setup, 10 min render time.

Or this example, a simple illustration of a knot work, rendertime some minutes. If the environment is ready, I can make hundreds of images in a short time.

Maxwell: I like the wonderful real lightning for interior and complex scenes, AIR can not bring so good full GI images with bleeding (I think it need more time). For product design it is good enough, but for scenes with small shadows and more than two bounces, it is not perfect enough. Here an example: it looks good, but is is not easy to get it perfect. In the small edges are artefacts and it need much time to get it absolut perfect.

Maxwell can be wonderful real, but sometimes less must be enough. Here an example of a klein bottle with AIR, the caustic is not perfect (time approx. 1h) but I think it is good. Thomas has tested the scene with Maxwell and get a noisy image after 15 hours.

Conclusion for me: At the moment is AIR my daily work renderer, Maxwell is the beautiful light simulator for special cases. The potential of Maxwell seems to be great, we will see. I will use both, Maxwell and AIR are two different things.

Greetings Micha

[Thomas An.]

Hi Micha,

I like your DVD player test

One crit: Notice the AIR image has a more aliasing artifacts. If you increase the sampling rate to match the Maxwell smooth image then the time for AIR will go even higher (maybe twice ). Also, you could have stopped the Maxwell image in half the time and use Neatimage for very good result.

Overall you are right though at this point Maxwell can be really slow with glass and caustics.

Waiting for Maxwell caustics to clear is like wrestling an alegator (or watching grass grow).

Hopefully things will improve a bit before final release

-

[ayers]

Thanks Angelangel, I appreciate your comment.

Thomas An.,
It's not made by Micha but Ayers .

After looking the picture again, I think you are right about the antialiasing. Made be I will make another try. But concerning Maxwell image, it's difficult to stop it before the level 14 (still noisy). I already use Neatimage for this example.

Ayers

[Thomas An.]

Thanks Angelangel, I appreciate your comment.

Thomas An.,
It's not made by Micha but Ayers .

After looking the picture again, I think you are right about the antialiasing. Made be I will make another try. But concerning Maxwell image, it's difficult to stop it before the level 14 (still noisy). I already use Neatimage for this example.

Ayers

woops
Sorry about that my friend, I sure thought it was Micha....
.... well its 5:00am here and I haven't gone to bed yet...

[Thomas An.]

Micha,

The caustic in that klein bottle is not presentable ...
(please keep that image hidden and secret if you want people to look at AIR favorably )

[tom]

Thank you ayers and micha!
Nice comparison and beautiful renders!
I agree with you about time and quality.
But we all see M~R's reality is amazing...
I mostly like that Klein bottle!
I would like to test it in Maxwell also

[Duncan]

Ayers,

The Maxwell DVD render looks better. Some nice modeling there, I must modeled with rhino one o these days.

Looking forward to the next build of Maxwell, maybe some speed improvements.

[Thomas An.]

I mostly like that Klein bottle!
I would like to test it in Maxwell also

Tom,

Here is a Maxwell klein bottle.

[Micha]

The caustic in that klein bottle is not presentable ...
(please keep that image hidden and secret if you want people to look at AIR favorably )

Ohh, I don't want to show only the best, this is the real life. I have learned, that some people see the images and think, anything is easy, so I will show the problems too. I don't get the caustic better.

@Tom: You can send me a pm with your email adress and I send you my model of the klein bottle (in 3dm format?).

-Micha

Here an other example of AIR and caustic.

[Eric Lagman]

Ayers how did you get the textures in the maxwell dvd player in rhino. I thought we don't have the ability for textures yet. Did you do digital readout in photoshop?

[Thomas An.]

Ayers how did you get the textures in the maxwell dvd player in rhino. I thought we don't have the ability for textures yet. Did you do digital readout in photoshop?

Eric, I suspect he converted the text to surfaces within rhino.

[ayers]

Yes, that's right. Everything is made of surfaces. It's very simple and fast to do.

[tom]

ayers, but the logo objects on the curved part seems totally black... would you mind making them diffuse dark grey instead of total black?

[Micha]

I think, the McNeel team has oversleep the developing of a good rendere or interface a long time. Good, now is much in flux, but I think to slow (how long we know from the brazil plugin?).
My wife and I, we make a project with much renderings, much different version of one object with much small parts. I can not imagine, that we export all this. Is it possible to use layers in C4D? What make the rhino plugin for C4D? C4D seems to be a matured program.