- Sat Oct 04, 2008 4:34 am
#281670
Respectively, I have to disagree with mtripoli. Not that what he says isn't true -- minimal/no control of lights, camera, environment, materials, etc. -- it is his conclusion that it's a "renderer for people that don't need a renderer" where I disagree.
Recently, we had a client, who had a client, that needed to submit some renders of a couple of their products (each from three angles...6 renders in total) for a publication. Oh, and by the way, the publication needed them in less than 48 hours. On our hardware, these renders would take a minimum of 12 to 18 hours each under Maxwell so that wasn't going to be workable. The alternative of course was PhotoWorks, but I've never figured out how to get it to render in any reliable and predictable way, so I felt that (for us) it would lead to a non-usable result and would therefore be a waste of time. (There are, no doubt, those that would be very capable of getting PhotoWorks to run in a decent way, I'm just not one of those people). That left us with trying the newly distributed PhotoView-360 Luxology product.
Was it as good, flexible, robust, etc. as Maxwell? No, but what I was able to do, was to get good quality, medium resolution (2,400 x 2,400) renders, that met the clients visual requirements, and more importantly met the timeframe. At less than 120 minutes per final render and less than 30 minutes for a test render, I was able to show the client the initial direction, have them make some color, texture, and angle changes and still process the overall job.
If we had a dedicated render farm, then certainly we could have accomplished this (and more) with Maxwell, but at this time, we do not and this is the point. Currently, as everyone in this forum is aware, unless you have either the raw horsepower or the luxury of time, Maxwell's achilles heel is its rendering speed. There is no Maxwellian notion of render compromise. There really isn't a test mode (although on occasion I have tried using R0). Simply stopping the render at SL 8 or 10 or even 12 doesn't really portray the way the render will look at SL 18 or SL 20.
So is PhotoView-360 a Maxwell killer -- clearly not. Is it competitive with Maxwell in terms of flexibility, features, ultimate quality -- not even close. But, is it something that one can take advantage of when the conditions warrant -- I think so. At least until Maxwell improves its render speed by an order of magnitude; offers an alternative rendering solution; or until we get that 64 core render farm...none of which seem likely in the near future.
Saludos,
Ken