[Bubbaloo]

but it's misleading when you generate inaccurate expectations

Who did this? OscarMaxwell?

Maybe if the "plans for some form of light baking" were discarded later somewhere in the course of Maxwell development, a little courtesy announcement would be in order to keep the loyal paying customers informed. After all, the last thing that was said kept our hopes (and expectations) alive since 2005.

[tom]

Brian, it's normal for everybody to plan things and sometimes in the way you don't know how. Oscar's words are not conflicting with what I say, nor they are promises for the the first release. I didn't mean we planned and later discarded something in silence. Contrary, now we have more plans for the future.

[subspark]

We will wait.

[Bubbaloo]

Brian, it's normal for everybody to plan things and sometimes in the way you don't know how. Oscar's words are not conflicting with what I say, nor they are promises for the the first release. I didn't mean we planned and later discarded something in silence. Contrary, now we have more plans for the future.

Ok, Tom. Thanks for the update. I look forward to more!

[Jan]

Lightbaking would be a great feature, at least for our work in realtime. The Maxwell render lighting could improve a lot the quality of baked textures.
Only as offtopic, there's an example of we're working on:

http://www.vimeo.com/1657688

Regards

[yanada]

Fry me

[def4d]

i don't think it would really improve your work here, better think of interior scenes

congrats for the huge model !

[subspark]

That model must have taken a couple of years to assemble! Its HUGE! And how did you measure the city and acquire the textures? Laser scanning from chopper?

Cheers,
Paul.

[Jan]

It's a free model from Microsoft. Must be very low poly for realtime.

def4d: the indirect lighting received on textures comes from baking. In interiors is more noticeable, for sure.

yanada: ¿?

[gianca]

It may not be challenging to NL, but it is a valuable option for many artists.
Why snobbing a feature that will broaden the Maxwell user base?
I'm evaluating maxwell for a major feature movie, and the fact that it has not baking option for Matte Painters is a major let down to an otherwise brilliant product.
Stating that you "don't want to make Maxwell "yet-another-realtime engine with baking support"" it achieves nothing but limiting options to people who wants to expand the use your software. Well, if that's really the plan then is working well... In the mean time I will keep an eye on Maxwell, hoping that one day I will be able to use it for more than just a image still.

cheers,
Gianca

Question says > ...some form of baking...
Answer says > ...there are plans...

Trying to make promises out of thoughts and plans is not very accurate. Because it seems like Oscar's word has been understood as "Yes, one day we will have texture baking like in Sitex's BakeAIR." Obviously, this is not the case. In general form, the nature of available "baking" (render to texture) technologies are not very interesting to us and we don't find them challenging enough or don't want to make Maxwell "yet-another-realtime engine with baking support". You're free to wish anything but it's misleading when you generate inaccurate expectations.

[def4d]

Welcome here Gianca, hope you'll be heard

[Bubbaloo]

I would love to see some Maxwell rendered stuff in movies.

[gianca]

I would love to see some Maxwell rendered stuff in movies.

Me too.
I purchased a license with the intent to prove to VFX studios that Maxwell render could be a viable tool to produce realistic environments to be used as CG extensions in movies.
However, so far I've been frustrated by the lack of support for industry standards and workflows, like for instance exr output with layer support, and baking capabilities.
Mental Ray and Vray have these options, and while it takes much longer than maxwell to get these renders to look realistic, the aforementioned lack of options prevent any studio to insert Maxwell in their pipelines.

[deflix]

with all due respect you'd be mad to use maxwell in a rendered movie.
You will have very little control and vast render times, .....I would say its almost impossible. Its just not designed for animation im afraid.

I suggest vray or similar. certainly not an un-biased solution.

crazy!

ps - as for quality between maxwell and vray there is very little in it with a good artist at the helm. Maxwell is just incredibly easy to use thats all.

[gianca]

I never wrote about advocating the use of Maxwell as a main render in a movie. Not sure where u got that idea.
But as you pointed out, Maxwell is quite easy to use and it's also very fast to achieve very realistic results for environments, hence my post about the lack of baking support that will make the maxwell "solution" available to be used with other industry standard renders for movies.
Without baking option, as I posted, it is just not practical, unless you use camera reprojections (which may be problematic) but then again the lack of support of exr gets in the way as well.

We usually use photos shot on set, which Matte Painters then use to recreate virtual sets that will be used to extend the movie's practical set: in the case of fully CG sets where photos of live sets are not available we generate images for the painters using CG renderers like Vray, MentalRay, Brazil, 3Delight, Air, renderMan, etc. These are still images that painters can enhance using applications like photoshop or bodyPaint. Once a look is achieved these images are projected back into the geometry, and rendered with the aid of additional 3D passes for specular, reflection, etc to achieve the desired effect.
I see no problem whatsoever on inserting a unbiased renderer into this pipeline, as long as it plays well with all the other parts of the pipeline.
We are not quite there yet.

Gianca

with all due respect you'd be mad to use maxwell in a rendered movie.
You will have very little control and vast render times, .....I would say its almost impossible. Its just not designed for animation im afraid.

I suggest vray or similar. certainly not an un-biased solution.

crazy!

ps - as for quality between maxwell and vray there is very little in it with a good artist at the helm. Maxwell is just incredibly easy to use thats all.