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Hi !

As a Maxwell Newbie, I might be asking for silly things, or things which are already implemented but I oversaw...
Anyways, here goes :

1)-Simplified clip-mapping, like using a weight map at material level
2)-Single sheet SSS for objects like leaves, curtains, tensile membranes
3)-For objects with displacement textures, the ability to use very simple geometry.
As of now, a certain amount of tesselation has to be done which defeats the purpose of displacement mapping.
4)-The use of proxy objects for instancing, within 3rd party modelers. I understand this feature is only available in Maxwell studio right now.
In Rhino, for example, I can use blocks, which helps a lot at render time, but I hit a limit as to how many blocks I can display in the Rhino interface.
5)-The ability to output .PNG with a transparent Alpha chanel.

Does it make sense ?

Those are all good requests and i agree on most of them.

Btw, welcome to the forum osuire. Enjoy your stay and do try our buffe here (the MXM Gallery) i'm sure you will enjoy it.

/ Max

Hi Olivier,
you finally did you renderer-decision, unbelievable .
Concerning your wishes two comments:

osuire wrote: 3)-For objects with displacement textures, the ability to use very simple geometry.
As of now, a certain amount of tesselation has to be done which defeats the purpose of displacement mapping.
?

I think the fact that the displacement feature is not quite useful inside Nurbs modelers like Rhino or SolidWorks has a couple of reasons:

1) Their meshers. They simply were not originally created to support stuff like displacement.
As you know the Rhino mesher always creates far more polygons than necessary to represent something simple like a box.
But for years people were happy when stuff didn't look all too edgy and one did only start thinking of meshes when the display starts
to crawl. This is different with mesh modeling packages. Here the mesh is not reduced to be the display helper but it's the actual working geometry.
People take care to keep it clean - it's easy to set up for displacement.

2) The fact that most Maxwell supported modeling packages are mainly SubD-modelers. So also the customer base consist mainly of people who
work with meshes on a daily basis. They give feedback from a mesh-modelers point of view...

3) In my observation the majority of people here are professional visualizers. They therefor work with waayy simplified models for rendering.
Stuff which takes a lot of time to model/render simply gets cheated with textures and - displacement.
Stuff which is near to the camera can (this is possible inside SubD-modelers) get dynamically tesselated more dense than stuff which is
farther away. You as a person who actually builds the stuff you design throw complex, fully defined models at the renderer which can make it choke...

Funny enough for people who typically have all the engineering details inside a drawing it takes too much time to simplify the object in way
that it renders at the performance rates which are possible when using cheats.

osuire wrote:
4)-The use of proxy objects for instancing, within 3rd party modelers. I understand this feature is only available in Maxwell studio right now.
In Rhino, for example, I can use blocks, which helps a lot at render time, but I hit a limit as to how many blocks I can display in the Rhino interface.
?

Here you are wrong fortunately: The Rhino-plugin supports instances. If you check a box Rhino exports blocks as instances.
Have a look at the Output tab in the Scene Manager.
cheers, Holger

Polyxo wrote:

osuire wrote:
4)-The use of proxy objects for instancing, within 3rd party modelers. I understand this feature is only available in Maxwell studio right now.
In Rhino, for example, I can use blocks, which helps a lot at render time, but I hit a limit as to how many blocks I can display in the Rhino interface.
?

Here you are wrong fortunately: The Rhino-plugin supports instances. If you check a box Rhino exports blocks as instances.
Have a look at the Output tab in the Scene Manager.
cheers, Holger

I saw that I missread you. So you are talking about having a box representing a complex geometry that is displayed inside the the viewport
in numerous instances and gets rendered fully at rendertime? This currently is not available, but Jeff LaSor created a bounding box display
which helps a lot when dealing with heavy scenes. It never made it to Rhino-labs - you will have to make newsgroup search.

Holger

complex, fully defined models at the renderer which can make it choke...

I disagree on this. Maxwell handles complex geometry better than any other render engine I've used. Maxwell allows me to use fully 3d entourage like plants, cars, trees in my arch-vis work, that I wouldn't be able to use in mental ray (without getting crazy render times).

I agree about the specific mesh characteristics required for displacement. I have wished for a mesh optimizer for Maxwell at render time for displacement.

Bubbaloo wrote:

complex, fully defined models at the renderer which can make it choke...

I disagree on this. Maxwell handles complex geometry better than any other render engine I've used. Maxwell allows me to use fully 3d entourage like plants, cars, trees in my arch-vis work, that I wouldn't be able to use in mental ray (without getting crazy render times).

Hi Bubbaloo,
I was talking about really complex stuff here. Cars and trees for use in CG scenes are typically highly optmized °display only° geometries.
That is not what I was talking about. What I was saying is that it can be harder to simplify a highly defined production geared design for render
than swindeling in some virtual detail.

Hi folks, and thanks for the warm welcome
Maybe you'll be sorry later on, but anyways...thanks.

To be completely honnest, as Mr. Polyxo pointed out, I have taken a long time to test Maxwell and another unbiased render engine which name evoques potato sticks cooked in boiling oil.
Most of my requests are based on what I find better in this particular engine.

Regarding point N°3, here's an extract from the competitor's user manual : " Let's say you want to use MPDM* on a simple plane, the scene will render much faster if the plane is modeled with two triangles rather than if it is tesselated".
This contrasts sharply with what I read in Maxwell's user manual : " The more polygons you have in your base mesh, the less precision you will need to render the same amount of displacement detail. Using less precision will always render faster".

Regarding point N°4, there is a proxy object in "F_Y" which is quite practical for use with typically high-poly and numerous objects such as vegetation. For those who don't know it, here's a screen cature of their manual (I hope I won't get in trouble)... : http://www.box.net/shared/psnjyz9pjx

Cheers !

*MPDM : Micro-Poly Displacement Mapping

Yayyyy !
Single surface SSS : Done !