Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Nevercenter has released the first Beta yesterday (available for registered customers only). I'm very impressed so far.

I bought silo 1 and an upgrade to two some time ago, going to download the beta now!! that really looks great!!

isn't that great! the setup is only 7,09 MB

Hi Nico,
this took a minute or maybe two. A simple cube, extruded a couple of times and painted with a heavy noise brush. I should add, that I had no previous experience with this technique.

Wow that looks pretty intense what's the polycount on such a "thing" ?! it seems to be quite a few..

Agh, i also wanna play with it!

/ Max

It has about 70000 polygons. In upcoming Betas however, normal mapping will be hooked up. Then in theory it should be possible to get the same effect with an underlying object of maybe 200 faces. This one rendered reasonably quick anyway (40min/Sl11)

Nico,
you will also discover, that new UVW unwrap feature really works nicely. However: I could not get this to work with Maxwell yet. Direct export as quads from Silo doesn't work - so stuff would have to be triangulated before texuring. I'd like to avoid this. Saving as quads in .obj format, sharing the same directory with the bitmap works in principle. Rhino sees the textures but doesn't accept the mesh (invalid). Neither does Maxwell if you press the Rhinoll-render-button. Curious about your experiences.

Holger

Why don't you make the uv's first, then triangulate the mesh as the final step before exporting?

Btw normal mapping will not look the same as your displaced mesh. Normal maps can't change the contour of an object. You'd need displacement for that.

Thanks Mihai,
actually my UVs are gone,as soon, as I hit tesselate. But all this stuff is in Beta. I'll check in the Silo-forum.

I also can't believe, that my rock looked alike, just using a normal map. However, Silo has smart retopologizing tools, which allow you to draw your object first, without even thinking of the resulting mesh. Then you save out the normal map, collapse the displacement into a dense mesh and create a new (low poly) one on top of it. Such a basemesh with a normal map applied could look a little bit closer to my rock, at a much lower polycount.
This is how a Nurbs modeller with very limited SDS experience understands it. I know, that you know this, but others might be interested.

Holger

Interesting, but please make some more examples & tests and post them here
so we get to see them.

Thanks

/ Max

Polyxo wrote:Nico,
you will also discover, that new UVW unwrap feature really works nicely. However: I could not get this to work with Maxwell yet. Direct export as quads from Silo doesn't work - so stuff would have to be triangulated before texuring. I'd like to avoid this. Saving as quads in .obj format, sharing the same directory with the bitmap works in principle. Rhino sees the textures but doesn't accept the mesh (invalid). Neither does Maxwell if you press the Rhinoll-render-button. Curious about your experiences.

Holger

Hi Holger,

Installing!! yeah Silo is really on the right track.
it's so easy to learn and has a great workflow, and it's even going to be better.

Maximus3D wrote:Interesting, but please make some more examples & tests and post them here
so we get to see them.

Thanks

/ Max

Max, not sure, how much time I can spend on this within short. Displacement painting/retopologizing is very interesting, but has little to to with my all day work.
I am neither a character modeller, nor a professional animator.
Have a look here for starters. http://www.silo3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6917

Holger

Okie dokie, i understand Holger. That's ok i'll take a look on their forum for more tests. I just thought it'd be interesting to see what you guys can do with Silo, haven't seen that much that either of you done with it yet.

Mind if i ask what type of modeling you do with it ? mostly hardbody modeling for archviz scenes or other stuff ?

/ Max