Everything related to Maxwell Render and General Stuff that doesn't fit in other categories
User avatar
By choo-chee
#400789
Forester wrote:Choo-chee, I think that you are looking at the list of cameras under the Camera parameters, "Response" tab that shows "Maxwell" written on the tab.

Instead, click on the "Filmback" tab that shows "Custom" written on the tab. That should open the list of basic camera types.
can't find a "filmback" tab on Maxwell's camera's properties... (I'm still on V4 does that matter?).
on Maya there's a "filmback" but with other options and I guess it's not the one you mean as it's Maya's.
By buffalo deal
#400791
It is in Studio and I don't remenber if it was already available in V4 but it looks like this in V5
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By buffalo deal
#400792
I just checked in Maya Attribute Editor for the camera...and there is no such a "Maxwell Filmback" parameters.
Only Camera Response Preset

cheers

alex
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User avatar
By jojojoj
#401120
Hi There,

I'd be insterested to know what the plans for further development are. Seems that dev-pace has slowed down notably.
Thanks!

Yann
User avatar
By Matteo Villa
#401121
jojojoj wrote:
Thu Nov 18, 2021 2:51 pm
Hi There,

I'd be insterested to know what the plans for further development are. Seems that dev-pace has slowed down notably.
Thanks!

Yann
Yes is something I noticed too.

No more updates from the Devs about the upcoming features.

But I’m positive about the future.

I hope they don’t screw up this release like they’ve done with the V4.

Other rendering engines are improving fast;
Competitors are growing up faster then Maxwell Render, taking huge space in the rendering market.
Maxwell render need to bring something new sooner

If the developing roadmap need a loot of time to be accomplished, it’s better for the Devs to add something juicy to keep the users loyal to this Suite.

Adding new shaders, adding a complete ready to use library of free objects inside Studio to speed up our workflow, create a collaboration with Evermotion or Quixel Megascan like Twinmotion.

Actually I feel like this project is merely abandoned.

I hope to be wrong.
User avatar
By Matteo Villa
#401382
Actually the Team is very silent. To much silent.

But anyway Maxwell Render 5 is more usable then the V4.

The problem is I’m obtaining good results with Twinmotion with less time.

And when Twinmotion will be upgraded to Unreal 5 engine … man.. maxwell render need to bring some juicy stuff to keep me on paying for V6
User avatar
By CDRDA
#401383
And when Twinmotion will be upgraded to Unreal 5 engine … man.. maxwell render need to bring some juicy stuff to keep me on paying for V6
I recently decided to do a couple of interiors using UE4 & UE5 rather than Maxwell, partly as a test, partly because there was a small chance that the client would then order a movie walkthrough. Whilst the end results were quite satisfactory with renders produced by Ray tracing in UE4 and Lumen & Path Tracer in UE5, the quality over a Maxwell render is still quite far behind.

The time it took me to setup the project, create/migrate materials, models and lighting was quite considerable compared to a Maxwell project setup natively in SketchUp. UE5 Lumen at the moment cannot do highly reflective/mirror objects with acceptable quality, so raytracing has to be used and that introduces its own issues in some circumstances. Obviously this will change over time as features are added and refined.

Twinmotion, when it has Lumen built-in will obviously make it a highly desirable tool as at the moment the interiors are still terrible unless Path Tracing is used to render. I think even with Lumen, Twinmotion in the next 2-3 years will not have the quality that Maxwell offers, even without any further development.

For speed and convenience, for sure, Twinmotion will provide a viable option for lots of people that require quick turnarounds without the absolute best quality. Ultimately it comes down to what the point is where time and acceptable quality intersect and that will be different for all of us.

At the moment, if I can setup a Maxwell render in a few hours with foliage, grass, mxs references and lighting and send off to render for a few hours at the render farm, I can get on with other work whilst that does its thing. With Twinmotion/Unreal Engine, I have to hope my model imports correctly, which often it doesn't, spend more than a day setting up everything and placing models and then render using my computer which usually crashes if I try to render anything over 4k res. The other thing with Unreal Engine is that it has the opposite problem to Maxwell.... It is updated so often, that it is difficult to keep up with the changes and every project has new challenges to overcome, or a new tick box that needs to be ticked in settings, or introduces problems with materials from earlier versions! With Twinmotion, admittedly this is much less of a problem.

Undoubtedly if Maxwell is not being developed further, then other software will eventually catch up. I really hope Maxwell is still in active development, but it has been eerily silent on the forums of late...
User avatar
By Forester
#401384
OK, Maxwell remains my favorite.

But, for those that might be interested, the current benchmark for "most technically advanced rendering engine on the planet" probably is Maverick Render. This is the one to compare against. (In response to Unreal, Unity, Lumion and Twinmotion comments.)

Maverick is an entirely GPU-based renderer. CPU is not an option. It works only with nVidia cards, and wants an RTX or greater. And it will only work on a Windows OS. It is a subscription-based application, and is reasonably priced in a Studio and an Indie version.

Having listed those limitations, physically-based lighting and ray-tracing are default features, with a lot of controls over those settings.

Material Editor - Maverick is the only rendering engine that can directly import a Substance archived material (with all its user settings) to use as a material. This means that if you have a Substance, you can apply it to a portion of a model, and tweak its parameters "live" - that is, while in the rendering engine. It has a pretty sophisticated node-based Material Editor that is well thought-out in terms of actual operation. Not only can you make transparent, semi-transparent, subsurfaced, two-side and emission materials with ease, you can start with an existing Substance, if you like, and then add to it or edit it to create even more properties. Maverick does come with a bunch of pre-made materials in its Library (about the same number of and types as Keyshot Library), but the existing Library is not its strength - the Material Editor is. Having used it now for about a month, I can say that I can create somewhat more complex and sophisticated materials with Maverick than I can with Maxwell - but these two renderers definately are more advanced than Redshift, Octane, Corona, Arnold and all the others I tried while preparing the Substance Designer tutorials for glass material.

Lighting - Interestingly, there seem to be two built-in kinds of lighting. In general, you always start with HDRI. Quite a lot of facilities here for advanced work with HDRI's.

But the built-in studio lighting is a "Keyshot Killer" and a "HDRI Light Studio Killer", for sure! To look at the studio lighting tools, here is a video tutorial worth examining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjpGAbD ... Q&index=81.

What you'll see is this video is the standard method of adding studio lights, an alternate method which targets the objects using the camera's viewpoint, and an absolutely fantastic method that lets you select a focus area on the object itself ("face normals method").

Watch through to the end of the video for this last one - because they saved the best for the last in the video. That is, you select an area of the model to be lit, click on the area, click on a light, and then slide the light over the surface of the model to adjust it to get exactly the effect you want. Of course, you can do this with multiple lights, and adjust the properties of those lights. Further, there are specific mouse controls, so you can position the light reflection, change its size, shape, color and intensity (plus soften the edges), all with one hand on the mouse. Basically, "painting with lights".

And then there is the "Light Mixer" facility.... Like I said, a Keyshot/HDRI Studio Light Killer!

Rendering - A pretty good renderer. Has decent compositing and tone-mapping tools. For noise reduction, there is something called a "HotPixel Removal" tool. I had occassion to use this because I rendered out an architectural scene with a body of water in the front, lots of glass objects and some light emitters. Scattered fireflys all over the place, and I had to ask for help. The Support Staff kindly pointed me to the Hotpix Tool, without making fun of me at all! If you get a render with fireflies, you just decide how you want those "hot pixels" to be selected and then re-render.

I can no longer comment usefully on rendering speed because I built myself a new machine with an nVidia RTX 3080 12 GB card in it. All I can tell you is that where I rendered five different scenes in Maxwell CPU on my old nVidia GTX 1080 card, and they required an hour and half apiece for a 1600x1600 render, ... I can now render those same scenes in 8 minutes apiece. So, I don't really know how much faster Maverick is than Maxwell - if the video card were to be held constant. (I can tell you that I can no longer set up a render in Maxwell, and go make myself a cup of coffee from scratch, and then return to the computer. Damn! Maverick requires a whole life-style change! :) )

So, here are a few reasons I'll continue to use Maxwell and probably work with both applications about eqully frequently from now on.

Maxwell, for me, is easier to use with my large outdoor scenes and for complex arrays of objects. (Which is mostly what I model.) I've used Lumion for years, but Maxwell beats it for quality. Maverick seems more designed for product visualization, than for architectural rendering. Although, I've had good luck with it so far, for architectural work, and have some nice Maverick renders to show for it, Maxwell is just easier and more intuitive for this purpose.

For plants with two-sided leaves, stamins and other plant parts, Maxwell's materials seem to display more acccurately. Same for objects with a lot of sub-surface scattering materials. It is frankly easier to construct these materials in Maverick than in Maxwell, but Maxwell does a better job of making a physically accurate render of these kinds of materials.

There are times when I really need the geographical coordinates. Probably most of you never use these, but my particular kind of work is greatly facilitated by lighting based on earth coordinates and time specifications. Maxwell is the only rendering engine with these facilities.

I haven't really figured out how to regularly get atmospheric moisture working in Maverick. Like I said, Maverick seems focused on studio lighting more than anything else.

So, if you don't like node-based material editing, don't go to Maverick. Some here have pointed out that they never have time to make materials. Maverick will not meet your needs. (But also, don't go to Substance Designer either, and maybe plan on having to outsource your material development needs to specialists increasingly often in the future.) If you're afraid to invest in learning new stuff, or you don't have the time to invest in self-education, don't go to Maverick. This is the absolute bleeding edge of rendering technology. Substantially new capabilities require new ways of thinking and working.

For anyone who wants to take a look at Maverick out of technical curiosity - without watching the usual shallow hype-filled adverts, there is a long series of video tutorials here. https://www.youtube.com/maverickrender The tuts are numbered in order, so you should look for and start with the first one. But, also look way down the list because as changes or replacements are made to the software, the staff just add tutorials. So, some later tuts will supersede some of the earlier ones. (And, by the way, there is no written documentation for Maverick - there are only the tutorials. Maxwell is much better is this regard.)

Anyhow, just wanted to mention ...
Last edited by Forester on Sun Jun 19, 2022 7:12 pm, edited 3 times in total.
By Andreas Hopf
#401385
"Lighting - Interestingly, there seem to be two built-in kinds of lighting. In general, you always start with HDRI. Quite a lot of facilities here for advanced work with HDRI's."

Which is why Maverick but especially Keyshot are so popular in all design fields. You just plonk your parts into the worldspace and get a great preview that is also much faster. Where Maverick falls short is that Luxion has all materials ready to drag and drop a designer needs. Both also surprise with new features added frequently, and Keyshot allows you to do lots of basic animations, essential these days.
User avatar
By Forester
#401386
UPDATE - After two months of steady work with Maxwell and Maverick (side-by-side), it is FAR EASIER to work with lots of high resolution models in Maxwell.

If I have ten or twelve high resolution, high-polygon buildings and other high resolution props in a scene, Maxwell is the much more stable rendering engine. This may be due to the fact that I am using the CPU version of Maxwell (64 GB of RAM) vs. the GPU-only (12 GB Ram) Maverick. But, for comfort of working with a very complex scene (typical of my work, but perhaps not typical of your work) and for peace of mind, Maxwell is my preference. Also, Maxwell grass is wonderful - nothing beats it for architectural scenes.

Maverick continues to amaze, though. Not sure I agree with Andreas' comment about any difference in the pre-made Materials libraries. They seem to have about the same number and the same kinds of materials. For people in the industrial design visualization business, this may be the most critical factor as Andreas explains about the lack of time in that profession. But, for people in my model-building work, Maxwell and Maverick have abilities to build specific materials to match the real world, defects and all - abilities superior to most of the other pro-grade rendering engines - IMHO. Also have been playing with Python in Maverick - its pretty darn decent.

Hope all of you are having a great and productive summer!
User avatar
By choo-chee
#401387
I still think that Maxwell is by far the best. the main drawback is that dev is at the same pace of a production render.... SLOWWWWWWW
Didn't bother to upgrade to v.5 as it appears it has nothing for me (none of the scenes I tested can live in a GPU 12 GB PC) and the denoiser is not really needed with today's CPU speeds.... but while everyone else is throwing more assets, more presets etc., we still don't get a real asset library, not enough presets to cut things short, no good library of skies or hdr's, not even an infinite ground plane (I sked for it years ago) ....
User avatar
By Matteo Villa
#401390
For Interior Design I found easier and quality wise not bad the latest Twinmotion Release.

1) you’ve more ready to use shaders.
2) you’ve ton of ready to use assets.
3) quixel megascan life support.
4) Rendering time absolutely awesome compared to Maxwell render.

And as an Archicad User I received it for free.. lifetime

And when it will be upgraded to unreal engine 5 I doubt I will ever consider to switch back to Maxwell Render.

Maxwell Team is completely absent and silent like in the old days when the Team broke up with V4.

To create/prepare a scene in Twinmotion it takes me 30 minutes max 1 hour of texturing.
Shaders and object drag & drop is easy, nearly no brain to use.

For the same scene I need over 2 hours in Maxwell render when I work fast and completely focused.
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