[sidenimjay]

i am thrilled with maxwell and its capabilities and potential

maxwell in my opinion, is the most groundbreaking renderer since renderman

i am not currently in production with maxwell so perhaps i havent room to complain about speeds and issues that arise from needing to meet client expectations.

tis always more enjoyable to play around rather than owe work and be under the direction of others

as far as the workflow goes, i couldnt be happier with the houdini plugin
....it is very robust, fully featured and its comfortable interface makes it a pleasure to work with. to date i have no problems with using houdini and maxwell together, and so far updating old scenes is relatively painless, especially when compared to studio, in most cases its as easy as switching to an mxm shader....and as it stands i think future versions will work seamlessly with any scene setup since version 1.1
as far as i can tell the houdini plugin seems to be the most functional of all save the 3d studio and perhaps one of the most stable

so i would like to say thanks to the guys at nl for creating a powerful engine with which to realize my own visions.....

[VisualImpact]

At this stage, I'm sitting on the fence. I love the quality of the images - I think everyone agrees with that. The ease in setting up the lighting is also a very big plus in my book.

However, I'm not too happy with the workflow. I still wish we could create materials directly from within our apps like we had in Beta. I rarely need to use the advanced options that exist with the "improved" material system, and I could very well do without them (please don't tell me how much better they are over the Beta materials - if I hear that one more time, I'll puke).

This about sums it up for me too. We still use alpha 1.33 for most of our work. Only use 1.1 if we absolutely have to. The workflow is just so much quicker for us. (especially with materials) and I would be a nervous wreck without render resume. (why haven't they given us a patch for this over the last 6 months, unbelievable . Is it really that difficult to re-implement something so necessary.

[b-kandor]

Hi VisualImpact,

Try this to resume renders. I specify a path for the mxi file at the start of the render. Then if I need to resume just start rendering the same mxs file again, but specify a new mxi filename and increment the seed number, then after x amount of time, merge them together.

Kandor

[VisualImpact]

cheers kandor, yes have been doing that lately.

does anyone know if doing 2 renders for 10 hours each and merging or 1 for twenty hours, which will be the clearer image.

[JTB]

Yea come back in about 10 years if you want to see a Maxwell 5.

Actually I believe that when RS2 is out, the updates will be more frequent because of the competition and because the big -i hope- problems will be partially solved

[Maxer]

With the introduction of quad cores and Maxwell 64 bit on the horizon, I'm not sure we are going to have to wait for V5 to see some real improvements in render times.

I don't think this is a good answer to Maxwell's speed problems because no matter how fast the hardware gets it's not going to make up in the speed difference between Maxwell and it's competition, the problem is the software.

[glypticmax]

Hi Maxer,
For my needs (jewelry and gems) there is no other engine that combines ease of use (quick set up, predictable results) and photo quality renders. So there is no competition, although there appears to be some on the horizon.
So for me, the improvements that are forseeable are hardware related. The ones I hope for are software related.

[b-kandor]

I don't see it as a problem, it's more a function ie. If you want to render this way, you have to do x amount of math, that math takes x amount of time, so it's just the 'way it is'. The whole time people have been saying 'renders look nice but it takes to long...' Sort of like I want a six pack stomach but I don't want to do all those situps

With the introduction of quad cores and Maxwell 64 bit on the horizon, I'm not sure we are going to have to wait for V5 to see some real improvements in render times.

I don't think this is a good answer to Maxwell's speed problems because no matter how fast the hardware gets it's not going to make up in the speed difference between Maxwell and it's competition, the problem is the software.

[Maxer]

I don't see it as a problem, it's more a function ie. If you want to render this way, you have to do x amount of math, that math takes x amount of time, so it's just the 'way it is'. The whole time people have been saying 'renders look nice but it takes to long...' Sort of like I want a six pack stomach but I don't want to do all those situps

Yea it's called liposuction

[ricardo]

I don't think this is a good answer to Maxwell's speed problems because no matter how fast the hardware gets it's not going to make up in the speed difference between Maxwell and it's competition, the problem is the software.

I think this was discussed more than once here: Switch everything on in Vray - reflection caustics included - and hit render. It won't be that faster than maxwell.

CPU power is the answer IMO. It's like trying to use renderman in an old SGI pizza box. SGI had huge 12+ processor machines for this job a decade ago. Today an average PC will do the job.

edit: I learned renderman shading language some time ago and remember being shocked that ray tracing was a late adition to renderman because it was too costly for film rendering. Bugz Life (1998) relied on BMRT to do the ray tracing.

[Maxer]

The difference is that Vray has shortcuts that enable you to get 90-95% of the quality of Maxwell in a fraction of time. Your right that switching everything on would slow you way down but no one uses Vray or Final Render in this way and they'd be stupid to do so when other options will mostly get them there. Fry is a MLT engine but some how they've figured out a way to speed things up so it is possible to do it without having an 80 core processor and half a terabyte of ram.

[sidenimjay]

who doesnt want an 80 core processor and a terrabyte of ram?


if the processor doesnt do the work then someone has to......i can make pretty pictures with renderman or even mantra, some would look 80-95% as good as a straight outta the box render with maxwell as i have for film for the past 10 years

but its gonna take alot of disk space for all the different compositing passes and
ambient occlusion this and first bounce that and reflection occlusion this and matte pass that and tweak tweak tweak and some hella good compositing tricks

cpu time is way cheaper than my time

[b-kandor]

For me the time of maxwell has never mattered and wont ever matter. In solidworks with it's lame photoworks if I crank up all the settings it still looks bad and will take 12 hours to render 1280x1024.

I only really care about how long it takes me to setup the render and in maxwell I can generally do it in under 30 minutes (my stuff is pretty simple product shots etc.) Then with multilight I don't even do a test.

I also don't promise people stuff before I can deliver, and with my puny 4 machine render garden I can make a 1600x1200 image in about 2-3 hours. Photoworks used to take 45 min. But I would spend sometimes literally 1/2 a day or a whole day doing test after test adjusting lights which then force you to adjust materials round and round.

How can we compare Fry to maxwell? Comparisons are tricky and for me involve more than just render time, there are no apples to apples.

[glebe digital]

When I first got into 3D it was on a hugely expensive Mac IIsi with 2mb Ram, cpu running at about 18mhz...........Infini-D would create a red 'phong shaded' ball and render a frame [with no aliasing!] in about 12hrs @ 640x480.
Raytracing with a smoothed shadow was the holy grail............So Maxwell is fine.......just waiting for the hardware to catch up. They are called Next Limit after all.

[ricardo]

When I first got into 3D it was on a hugely expensive Mac IIsi with 2mb Ram, cpu running at about 18mhz...........Infini-D would create a red 'phong shaded' ball and render a frame [with no aliasing!] in about 12hrs @ 640x480.
Raytracing with a smoothed shadow was the holy grail............So Maxwell is fine.......just waiting for the hardware to catch up. They are called Next Limit after all.

That's a good sum-up.

And in the early 90's I had a super PowerMac 7300 and Strata Studio Pro, ant it had that experimental radiosity thing that popped up an alert much like this: "Radiosity is known to bring the most powerfull computers to their knees. Are you sure you want to proceed?"