Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Made in modo 201.
1200*800, 5 MPolygons, GI. 30 min on my dual 1,8 PowerMac.

The result shown speaks for itself: displacement, and speed.
No prerenders were needed as modo updates a render preview window on the fly as you change any setting.

PS Don't get me wrong, i'm a M~W fan and try to use it in as many places as possible, but, the area of REAL use for M~W is still WAY TOO narrow.

Displacement we really need, i agree!

but speed... rather not if it means results like that of modo. The quality difference between the two is (for now) pretty large and you can fake and interpolate as much as you want, it just doesn't get equal to maxwell. So i'll keep paying with ridiculously high rendertime for riduculously awesome imagery

Speed is a must, obviously that doesn’t mean we should sacrifice quality but Maxwell is just to slow for most work, not to mention animations.

Maxer wrote:Speed is a must, obviously that doesn’t mean we should sacrifice quality but Maxwell is just to slow for most work, not to mention animations.

That's what I meant by speed! Not the "quality sacrificing" way.
Some time ago i spoke with some colleagues here in Russia about different render engines and we agreed that there is already a perfect (almost) renderer (guess what?) but we still lack one thing to use it - a perfect computer! XD

-Adrian wrote:Displacement we really need, i agree!

but speed... rather not if it means results like that of modo. The quality difference between the two is (for now) pretty large and you can fake and interpolate as much as you want, it just doesn't get equal to maxwell. So i'll keep paying with ridiculously high rendertime for riduculously awesome imagery

No, i mean the ridiculously high quality of maxwell in a not-so-ridiculous time

BTW modo also bases its render on almost physically correct algorythms. They symply can be manually limited to save time.
And there is two more things i like more in modo (hopefully they will be implemented in M~W) - the light intensity is set not in plain watts, but in watts per srm^2 (that really gives much more clear understanding and control) and it can save OpenEXR images.

Make it simple for yourself, if you want Modo's renderspeed then use Modo. If you want Maxwell quality, then use Maxwell. Starting to try to turn Maxwell into some sorta Modo hybrid renderer is not a good idea. If Maxwell would start cheating that much then i am no longer interested in it.

Modo does what it does well, and Maxwell does it's stuff very well too. If you mix them up you end up with a soup that won't taste good at all, a soup which most likely will get burnt beyond recognition on the stove too.. if i put it that way.

/ Max

Boris Ulzibat wrote: And there is two more things i like more in modo (hopefully they will be implemented in M~W) - the light intensity is set not in plain watts, but in watts per srm^2 (that really gives much more clear understanding and control)

That's the old beta system, in 1.0 you have even more options than that, and the easiest one is to set directly the lumens output, something that you can find out for most lightsources, even cheap 40W bulbs

You now also have lumens/m², candelas, and cd/m², and ofcourse the watt/vs efficiency rating. The efficiency rating is again something that the manufacturer usually mentions. It's how many lumens of output you get per watt.

Maximus3D wrote:Make it simple for yourself, if you want Modo's renderspeed then use Modo. If you want Maxwell quality, then use Maxwell. Starting to try to turn Maxwell into some sorta Modo hybrid renderer is not a good idea. If Maxwell would start cheating that much then i am no longer interested in it.

Modo does what it does well, and Maxwell does it's stuff very well too. If you mix them up you end up with a soup that won't taste good at all, a soup which most likely will get burnt beyond recognition on the stove too.. if i put it that way.

/ Max

Yep, but you didn't quite get what i meant
I LOVE Maxwell quality, as i said before i'm really a maxwell fan, (and advertise maxwell to all friends). The picture posted was my first (!) render in Modo, just trying it out, but i saw there things, which, if present in maxwell, would make me just the happiest person in the world (for some limited time at least:). These things are:
1) displacement (and it really is the most important)
2) speed (not the speed of modo, just more speed)

In the current state, maxwell is usable, but in very narrow area:
look what i mean - speed and frame-by-frame export make the animation rendering with maxwell a hell.
lack of displacement makes rendering photorealistic organic models rendering a hell. (of course you can model every bumb on the nose of the model, but imagine working with such a model in studio!)

That's what i mean

Mihai wrote:

Boris Ulzibat wrote: And there is two more things i like more in modo (hopefully they will be implemented in M~W) - the light intensity is set not in plain watts, but in watts per srm^2 (that really gives much more clear understanding and control)

That's the old beta system, in 1.0 you have even more options than that, and the easiest one is to set directly the lumens output, something that you can find out for most lightsources, even cheap 40W bulbs

You now also have lumens/m², candelas, and cd/m², and ofcourse the watt/vs efficiency rating. The efficiency rating is again something that the manufacturer usually mentions. It's how many lumens of output you get per watt.

Yeah, you're right (though i didn't use beta). i just don't know much about lumens and candelas so watts are more clear to me, and even with watts vs efficiency setting the emitter is surface area dependant. I know, that the lumens/m^2 and cd/m^2 are area undependant, just don't understand them... yet

Aha, okies i see what you mean now.

Sure i agree that rendertime displacements should come too, hopefully not too far away in the future..

About speedimprovements, i'd say that's a tricky one. And probably one of the more timeconsuming tasks for the developers to work with. The set of algorithms that make the foundation of how Maxwell operates can probably only be tweaked to a certain level before they start to loose their meaning and then the output result will look like something that came outta any other renderengine (cheated & faked).

Any change to the core or any part of the engine affects pretty much any other part of the whole huge 3 dimensional nodebased network that connects every part of Maxwell into one piece and which makes it work, if you shake one of those outta place you have to adjust all the others. Alot of work..

Animation is kinda messy now, i agree and i hope there'll be a easier way to do that soon.

If my guess on any of this is wrong then by all means feel free to correct me

/ Max

Boris Ulzibat wrote: Yeah, you're right (though i didn't use beta). i just don't know much about lumens and candelas so watts are more clear to me, and even with watts vs efficiency setting the emitter is surface area dependant. I know, that the lumens/m^2 and cd/m^2 are area undependant, just don't understand them... yet

Well, I'm not sure what the options are in modo, but just having a watts setting doesn't make sense, since it's just the power the lightsource consumes. Example, a 40W incandescent bulb can put out 700 lumens, and a 40W efficient fluorescent bulb can put out say 1200 lumens....

So without an efficiency rating don't expect to get accurate lighting by simply using a "40W" lightsource.

In Maxwell for example, I model a bulb exactly the same size of a real one, and give it 700 lumens (it's a 40W normal bulb and I got the lumens rating from the manufacturers site). The lighting will then match what the real bulb would output.

Mihai wrote: Well, I'm not sure what the options are in modo, but just having a watts setting doesn't make sense, since it's just the power the lightsource consumes. Example, a 40W incandescent bulb can put out 700 lumens, and a 40W efficient fluorescent bulb can put out say 1200 lumens....

So without an efficiency rating don't expect to get accurate lighting by simply using a "40W" lightsource.

In Maxwell for example, I model a bulb exactly the same size of a real one, and give it 700 lumens (it's a 40W normal bulb and I got the lumens rating from the manufacturers site). The lighting will then match what the real bulb would output.

Yes, i know about what the efficiency means to realism, i guess modo treats all the emitters as being 100% efficient, not sure though...
But that's not the thing that matters. I don't intend to compare maxwell with modo or anything else. Just my modo-made picture was an example of things i wanted in maxwell, not more
Can you tell if the displacement feature will be implemented in the future versions? No exact info, just the fact itself...

I would wager that Maxwell will never have micro-poly displacement. The rendering technique required for it is completely incompatible with the way Maxwell works.

I hope I'm wrong though, 'cause it'd be extremely nice to have!

In the meantime, I just use my host application for displacements and that works pretty well.

If you want Maxwell-like diffuse reflections in Modo the rendering time can increase 50x

Madness

Anyways I've been dorking around a bit with modo, very cool little app, fun to play around with, they've done a good job with it.

Wouldn't consider using it in production work, but lots of fun anyways. I immagine when you set out to do a render engine from scratch like that, you gotta make a choice - biased or unbiased, each with its own set of advantages/disadvantages.

Still no middle ground, i immagine that's yet to come