[Mihai]

I'm starting this thread to gather feedback from you guys on what you'd like to see covered in future episodes. I'm thinking the format should be as for the first one: one part a mini tutorial on creating a material or showing a technique, and the second part a guest who describes their workflow.

A few ideas so far:

- creating volumetric lighting effects via the Maxwell volumetric component, or using a z-depth pass. Limitations and speed comparisons.

- creating a nice velvet material.

- essential post production tips to quickly enhance your final renders. This is something you should always do, the Maxwell MXI file is like a digital RAW file that needs to be developed.

- solutions for swimming pools (caustics seen through the water surface).

ADDED:

- Substance Designer/Painter workflow to quickly recreate a Maxwell material resembling the Substance one.

Please add to this thread on what you'd like to see covered, or what you still find difficult to understand in Maxwell.

*there may or may not be special Maxwellzone offers presented only for those that attend the live Maxwell TV sessions....*

[mjcherry]

I love all of these!

I've gotten a lineraized Color Checker chart from a friend who owns a VFX house and am going to make the model for it and start using that in my scenes along with a grey ball and mirror ball. I plan on incorporating those and their associated techniques into my post processing, so I'm anxious to see what you do beyond adjusting the lighting.

Volumetric is a BIG thing for me as well and, again, it's something I've struggled with in Maxwell as opposed to say Arnold.

Once again, I think the greatest tutorial (or series) would be really delving into how to accurately incorporate Substance into a Maxwell workflow for photorealistic (not stylized) results. I'm getting there, but I'm still struggling more than a bit with it.

For my work, Maxwell is by far my preferred workflow and I love the accuracy, render times aren't as important to me. But I need to be able to use Maxwell beyond simply ArchViz looks. Here's a recent BTS render of a prop that I'm going to be incorporating into a new scene. All textured in Substance and rendered in Maxwell, though when I made the Maxwell materials, I had to use additional maps I created in Photoshop because I could not get a good translation of the armor material from Substance into Maxwell. It's still not what I wanted, but I can live with it.

EDIT: Something like this would be awesome:

https://support.allegorithmic.com/docum ... y+for+Maya

[Mihai]

Regarding the linearized color chart, Maxwell assumes that for any textures which are 8 or 16bit, they have a built-in gamma and "de-gammas" the input textures so they are in linear space for rendering. This is what I know in any case, I'm not entirely sure if anything changed here, or what happens if loading a texture that already had an inverse gamma applied (to "linearize" it). As far as I know, Maxwell only assumes a linear texture when loading 32bit files.

For Substance Designer, you can check another thread on this forum if you do a search for substance designer, it's really not that complicated and that link about Maya is actually pretty much what you would do in Maxwell as well (the paragraph where they explain the "MILA material setup in Maya"). The only thing different you need to do is that if you had any dielectric in your Substance material, ie anything non metallic - plastic, painted metal etc., instead of just creating one extra Layer to mimic that dielectric, you would need to create two and set the top one to be additive. In regards to the Layer weight maps, you would follow the same procedure as described in that Maya doc page - set the "metalness" weight as a Layer weight for your metallic Layer that has the metallic BSDF (and here actually you can get more accurate metals with Maxwell because you have both an Nd and a K setting), and then for the top two Layers that recreate the dielectric part (the top one being in Additive mode) you re-use the metalness weight, but invert it.

Then use the color map in the metal BSDF refl. 0 and 90, and the roughness map in the roughness slot. And the same for the two BSDFs in the two remaining layers that make up the "plastic" except here you add the color map only to the refl0 and leave refl90 at white (dielectrics don't have tinted highlights most of the time, metals however do). You may have to invert the roughness maps. I will do some tests with Substance Designer or Painter and see if there are cases where more work in needed to recreate it in Maxwell. If you can, please send me a metal material you've created in either Designer or Painter so I can see exactly how you've set it up.

In any case this would definitely be a nice topic to cover for one of the episodes...maybe the next one on Feb 8th

[mjcherry]

Yes, I've rad all the threads and have contributed one of my own, that you may recall:

viewtopic.php?f=140&t=45045

I've been spending a tremendous amount of time trying to integrate the two. Can I get something? Sure. Can I get very close? After a bunch of fidgeting, usually I get something decent. Having said that, I still do not have a consistent, dependable and efficient workflow for working with the two. I want to know, for example, if I plug a roughness map into Maxwell, exactly how (by the numbers) I will have to modify that map to get the same exact result I get in Substance. If I can't achieve some level of parity (knowing that there will always be some differences between renderers) then it's not an efficient workflow.

I've read all the posts here (and other places) where people say it's not big deal, but, quite honestly, I've yet to read that from someone who uses it to achieve a photo realistic result. So yes, I'm still interested in the topic.

[Mihai]

Sorry, I forget who posted that Could you send me an example substance you've created?

[rusteberg]

Mihai, is there a way to join in on these without having to install a .exe?

[Mihai]

I don't think so, it's the gotowebinar app that needs to run, but it's tiny.

[CDRDA]

Hi Mihai,

I was only able to catch the last 15 minutes of the first episode unfortunately, but what I did see, was very informative, even the banter in between, so great job at setting this up and I am looking forward to the next episode!

I think some sort of short discussion regarding material setup would be most useful. In particular, pros and cons of using additive layers versus a single layer with 2 bsdf elements, one for the base and the other to control the roughness/reflectivity etc. A while ago I saw a Next Limit webinar where, Dario I think it was, discussed the benefits of this way of building materials as being more efficient than additive layers and working on the principle that one layer equals one material. I assume the single layer+2 bsdf is the general solution for use with the GPU renderer given its current lack of support for additive materials.

[Mihai]

I'm putting the recordings on my Vimeo/Youtube pages in case you miss an episode:

https://www.youtube.com/c/Maxwellzone1
https://vimeo.com/maxwellzone

Next episode is on Feb 8th, same time: 18:00 CET. Another nice episode lined up for you

Register:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/regist ... 6859580673

Tutorial: why additive layers are useful + creating a
nice polished concrete floor material.

Guest: Doug Meyer - hardware advice for Maxwell.

[arcmos]

Nice

[Pomrose]

Sweeeeet !!



I ll tell my grand kids .... i was there at the first 2 Maxwell TV episodoes.

[CDRDA]

Thanks for the links Mihai, I will most certainly finish watching the rest of the first episode, while looking forward to the next one.

[mjcherry]

Hi Mihai,

I was only able to catch the last 15 minutes of the first episode unfortunately, but what I did see, was very informative, even the banter in between, so great job at setting this up and I am looking forward to the next episode!

I think some sort of short discussion regarding material setup would be most useful. In particular, pros and cons of using additive layers versus a single layer with 2 bsdf elements, one for the base and the other to control the roughness/reflectivity etc. A while ago I saw a Next Limit webinar where, Dario I think it was, discussed the benefits of this way of building materials as being more efficient than additive layers and working on the principle that one layer equals one material. I assume the single layer+2 bsdf is the general solution for use with the GPU renderer given its current lack of support for additive materials.

I find multiple layers to be more versatile, but perhaps I don't play with the weight variable correctly. Most objects in the real world are not a single material. They may start out that way, but over time, it changes as they age. Metal with rust or oxidation is just one example. Glass is never perfect, there are always imperfections, smudges, fingerprints. Even if you don't see those things as obvious artifacts, they effect the reflections. I believe that if an input is used, it should be mapped and masked if necessary.

There are two ways to think of rendering and I find that most working with Maxwell are limited to one way...

The first is to make something that is believably perfect. We all do this sometimes, but for people doing product rendering, or even arch viz, the goal is to create a material that seems real but that is perfect. I've worked as a commercial photographer and that is often the goal of commercial retouching, to correct all the tiny, barely noticeable errors so that the photograph makes the product look believably perfect. This is how I see most folks working.

The second way is to make something perfectly believable. Not simply Pottery Barn Catalog believable, but really believable in all context. This is how most visual effects artists work. It's funny, I spent the first half of my life trying to figure out how to remove imperfections and now I'm spending the second half of my life figuring out how to add them.

Making a material that looks like wallpaper is not hard and can be achieved in a single layer. Making a material that looks like wallpaper that has been hanging in a cheap motel since the 50s is a different task. This is why many folks are looking to integrate with programs like Mari, Substance and Quixel. In addition to those, and Maya, I'm constantly running Z-brush, Mudbox (though less of that now), Vue and now Marvelous Designer. All in an effort to create a photorealistic surface. It has taken me a while to fully realize this in Maxwell (certainly longer than it would in other render packages, like V-Ray or Arnold) but the results are fantastic.

If you're going to be doing a class on material creation, then I don't think simply showing how to do a base layer and a gloss layer is enough. What is really needed is a resource to say, "ok, you're making a wood surface with a warn varnish? Here's how the reflections need to be controlled using the Nd,K values, R2 and Fresnel. Here's how you determine that in a physically correct manner." Because if you can't do that, then what's the point of using Maxwell, you could simply use a different render that makes "cheating" easy to do.

If someone just needs to know how to make a clean plastic with a reflection, that's easy and can be found all over (though admittedly, resources for Maxwell are pretty scant compared to most others).

I would love to see how others handle grass and hair. I just did a render where I had to make a "fur blanket" that will be used in a much larger scene. I was able to control the fur fairly well using a grass extension, but I would have much preferred to be able to groom it using Xgen. These are the kinds of developments I hope the folks at Next Limit are working on. Better integration with Maya would be wonderful as well, though I don't see that happening as most people using Maya seem to have moved past Maxwell. Apparently it integrates well into Cinema 4D though.

[Mihai]

That's exactly what is the hardest to learn and get right in most renders - the amount of imperfections to make it look real, but not too damaged or dirty...

The second episode is up now, you can bookmark the following page for links to the future episodes and any files available for download from each session:

http://www.maxwellzone.com/tutorials/maxwell-tv/

For the next one, I'll make it so you only have to register once and it will remain valid for a bunch of other episodes. I think gotowebinar now also has a "webcast" option so you don't have to install any extra apps to attend the live sessions.

[LadleSky10]

Like the Maxwell TV episodes so far Mihai. Great work. However, is there any chance someone can provide a working link to those RAL MXM Library materials your guest speaker mentions in episode 2? It's so frustrating when tutorials mention things that are no longer available on the web! I think the problem here is that all the links to the RAL Library pointed to the old Maxwell Materials site.