[hatts]

I do think it's a bit odd when people start threads about other rendering engines, using Next Limit's message board, on the server they pay for. A bit like heading into a local bookstore, using their wifi, and downloading e-books.

It would be one thing if the topics were something like "I just heard about this Corona feature, is there an equivalent in Maxwell?" or "Look how great this V-Ray render is; any way to duplicate it in Maxwell?" But topics like OP's are just "Corona is sweet" full stop, and then develop into "here's why Maxwell sucks."

Not saying it should be banned, just that it's a bit tactless.

[photomg1]

You want to head over to the modo forums if you think this is a harsh thread , you would be horrified there .Anyway my posts are all conjecture , as for example there is no plug in to my host app on many of these new render engines .. but to borrow something I read elsewhere tonight .

"if folks don't say anything, the developer, assumes everything is OK and rightly so. So at least keep them aware and on their toes. Of course you have to be proper about, refrain from referring to them as "di " etc. You know what I mean : )"

[jespi]

With the greatest of respect Tom (I really do mean it) .I'm not bothered if its biased or unbiased ,I just care about how the final image looks . Now if one looks the same or very very similar to another but is a lot faster I'd happily disregard the semantics of biased/unbiased .
I'm not doing a science project , I just want images finished faster I have a finite amount of hours left in me for 3d and in that time I'd like to get as much done as possible. I ended up in this part of the render world as the biased engine I was using just didn't give me the look of what maxwell does . Whether that was due to the shaders or the light transport differences I don't know. (or care tbh)
In all honesty if it had given me the results that Corona does I might not be here (can't give a definite answer on that as I'm just going on some of the renders I've seen produced ) as it seems a lot closer to an unbiased feel than the render engine I was using before. I'd quite happily tweak settings to my hearts content if it meant getting the same/or very similar results faster. I know we are all different on this !!

your not going to do it and I'm wasting my breath but I'd love you to introduce some options for bias in maxwell (portals vcm etc etc )….. but I already know its not going to happen

I also see the irony in the interiors tutorial that next limit posted , that's just a user introducing bias albeit in a limited fashion.

Again Tom , said with respect as I do love what the maxwell engine produces .

Can't agree more with photomg1.

I evaluate render engines based on three key points: quality, simplicity and speed. I don't care if it's biased or not. In fact, all of them cheat in some way and have limitations.

I think Maxwell is great in the first and second point, but the third one really struggles me sometimes, making impossible to use under some circumstances.

As for Corona, I would say quality is at the same level than Maxwell. Based on what I've read in Corona's forum, still haven't have the opportunity to test
Corona personally, I would say it's many times faster than Maxwell. So the only aspect I need to know is its simplicity. If Corona's parameters are easy to understand, I think it would be a good render engine for me.

Don't get me wrong, I love Maxwell but would love to have a bit more flexibility...

[mtripoli]

Normally, I read these posts and shrug - so what. However, after looking at some of the images shown, and the rendertimes quoted, I have to say that I agree with some others; I frankly don't care "how" it got there, just that I got there. Some of those images are startling in how nice they look. Remember, when Maxwell was introduced (I was there, a very early adopter and gladly coughed up the cash) the images did not look that impressive. I'm a die-hard Maxwell fan; when someone asks "How did you do that" and I start telling them I sound like a zealot - and have been told so. But I would gladly trade being able to do something in an hour instead of overnight, biased, unbiased, a kid doing with a box of crayons - doesn't matter.

[Tora_2097]

When looking at galleries from half a decade ago and recent ones, you should also take into account that other tools have also made leaps in functionality and features that might have aided in creating better looking images. Think of tools like Multiscatter, ForestPro, Marvelous Designer, Bercon Maps, Crazybump, Z-Brush for example and also the wealth of ready to use assets like trees, furniture and high quality HDR maps. Those have matured greatly in over the span of only a few years.
After all you can only get quality renderings if you feed it the right stuff. Also many many tutorials and demonstrations have helped spread the knowledge further. You can get great results with any current render engine.
As for Corona I have some preliminary results after my tests. I tried to keep it fair, though some features have no direct counterpart sometimes.

Corona Render Sky& Sun:



Maxwell Render Sky& Sun:




Now the look is obviously very different and Corona is missing both reflected and refracted caustics from the sun. Also the shading quality is superior in Maxwell, both are using non-lambert surfaces. Both have been rendered for the same amount of time, Corona was set to pathtracing for both primary and secondary bounces. Setting the maximum sample intesity to 0 in Corona-thus making the light transport fully unbiased-gave fireflies. The default color output in Corona was also a little flat and closely resembles the output I got from another renderengine starting with a capital letter V...
The images above are already custom tonemapped to get a little closer to Maxwell- you can do that during or after the rendering in Corona.
Many of the features and settings in Corona suggest to me that it has been built with a Hybrid approach in mind from the ground up, and true enough setting the secondary bounces to use a biased method the look hardly changes-at least for this scene. The speed is then several orders of magnitude greater though. Using a biased approach comes with the usual advanteages and disadvantes associated with it- great speed, cacheable GI, potential quality loss in scenes with a lot of fine detail flicker in animations etc. It's a tradeoff basically.
Now I did not expect the sky&sun implementations to look the same so I did another test with a HDR image as the sole light source aiming to level the playing field a little more:

Corona HDR (again already custom tone mapped):



Maxwell HDR



Again it seems obvious that Maxwell captures much greater detail in surface tonality (the tufting in the couch) and has a richer and more detailed look. Corona did produce caustics here, suggesting a missing feature in their sun&sky implementation. This one used also a biased approach for the secondary bounces making it very fast indeed-12min against 2h. Using pathtracing for both primary and secondary bounces did not yield a better result, again leading me to believe that it is a very good biased engine and a mediocre unbiased one.
Still no matter how "unbiased" you set up Corona, it lacks details and needs to be adjusted in the tonemapping department to get it this far at all.
I looked at the emitter performance as well and so far Maxwell seems better optimized in this regard.
I also do not feel personally attached to a brute force approach, but until this day it is still offering higher quality albeit at the cost of rendertime.
Lest I forget, I would not want to miss features like Multilight, Fire, proxy geometry, MXI files system with resuming, a physically plausible camera system and many features besides. Would I like to get rid of long render times? Of course. The picture might look different when dealing with exterior scenarios, the time penalty would be much less severe there for completely unbiased systems.

Ben

[photomg1]

Hi Ben,
many thanks for doing that testing! very interesting and wouldn't disagree with anything you have said .From my perspective looking at those hands down prefer the maxwell sun/sky images over the corona sun/sky . The hdri's one though
I'd take the corona one's without a doubt , the speed increase is just too much to ignore on what seems a minor difference in quality (at least in my eye's) .The maxwell one on that comparison still looks like it has a long way to go before it is really clean noise wise.At a guess it could be 4hrs compared to 12mins till they are really comparable on that front.

It would be great to see a scene with more materials in place , as the white material might be skewing my opinion. Must say Benjamin your work in maxwell is what sold me on it in the first place , I still find it amazing even to this day

[RobMitchell]

I do think it's a bit odd when people start threads about other rendering engines, using Next Limit's message board, on the server they pay for. A bit like heading into a local bookstore, using their wifi, and downloading e-books.

It would be one thing if the topics were something like "I just heard about this Corona feature, is there an equivalent in Maxwell?" or "Look how great this V-Ray render is; any way to duplicate it in Maxwell?" But topics like OP's are just "Corona is sweet" full stop, and then develop into "here's why Maxwell sucks."

Not saying it should be banned, just that it's a bit tactless.

I'd agree if the posts were as black and white as "this is good, this is bad," but there's nothing wrong with discussing the pros and cons of rival software and giving suggestions to what could be added to Maxwell in the future. Competition is good and sometimes it's nice to hear the developers thoughts on things. I know you toched on that in your second paragraph, but I don't think anyone has been that blunt about things so far in this thread.

[jespi]

Thanks a lot for the test, Ben!. This for sure put things into perspective, at least to me. No doubt that Maxwell's ones look way better than Corona's in these examples. Another different thing is if the difference worths the time invested. In the second test, you say that there is a different between Maxwell (2h) vs Corona (12 min) that's 120min Vs 12min = 10X faster for Corona. This is a huge difference in time, and many customer won't even notice the difference. To me this is the key point, letting the user decides when he wants full quality, and when he needs full speed. I really would love to have a few controls in Maxwell in which I could decide these things.

José

[tom]

So, if you guys are after reaching the hell faster, what's the point of making a comparison here? I see some of you say you are happy with lack of quality as long as it's faster. I do respect! But, insisting Maxwell to follow the same route makes no sense. We discussed this on this forum for thousands of time and concluded we will not sacrifice quality for time. So, if your comparisons end up with lack of quality against Maxwell, just face it. Rendertimes cannot cover up this excuse, sorry..

[eric nixon]

Archviz is a strange beast... sometimes less-reality in visuals is actually desired, when the design is changing a lot. In that case I personally prefer to render a maquette approach in maxwell, ( a clay render basically) but for some clients I can see that a v-ray style image would be appropriate.

Btw I noticed that arnold is really slow for interiors, so maybe corona fills a niche.

Not sure what the time was on this test, about 45 mins, The room is enclosed with very bright white material everywhere, I wanted to see how using a custom sun radius would speed up the render, I neglected to put in a ground plane, so the lighting is a bit odd, as though we were inside a vast skyscraper. Anyway MW3 with softer sunlight seems like a decent solution for quick sketchy interior images;

[photomg1]

insisting Maxwell to follow the same route makes no sense

That is about the crux of it . I really wish, you would follow a similar route , I really like what maxwell has to offer and with these extra options it would be an even better package (to me and I don't doubt to some others as well).
I can only assume the original reason this was posted here was to bring it to your attention for similar reasons , to suggest to you as developers wouldn't it be nice if maxwell also had these options.


But I do get it , if that's what I want in not so many words you are telling me to go elsewhere (find another render engine).

thanks for your response

Matt

[simmsimaging]

my opinion, and it is just that, is that if people spent as much time finessing their lighting and materials as they do tweaking render settings chasing render speed, and/or hunting the interwebs for the "holy grail" of faster rendertimes, they would have spent the same amount of time - but they would have much better pictures to show for it.

It is always faster to generate mediocre pictures no matter how you do it. As professional artists we should worry more about making great images and *then* worry about making them faster. Some get this already, some don't.


/b

[Chris Krüger]

Amen

[tom]

Some get this already, some don't.

[Fernando Tella]

Life is game. We just sometimes want to play with different toys.