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On behalf of architects and architecture students everywhere I'd like to have some nonrealistic camera options. Specifically, orthographic views, clipping and pseudocolor renders that show illumination levels on a customizable scale. Allow me to plead my case:

Maxwell's realistic camera is extremely useful for setting up the kind of money-shot, sell-it-to-your-client-or-professor graphic that we've come to expect from arch-viz software, especially the "CG guy as architectural photographer" school of thought. But many of us also use visualization in design and analysis. Having the most realistic lighting engine in the business, Maxwell is particularly well suited to lighting studies that are important in the "green" design field, that are best done in plan, section and section-perspective.

The business angle for Nextlimit is, "This renderer doubles as a physically accurate lighting simulator for Autocad and Sketchup." If I can knock off a Sketchup model, render it overnight and in the morning show the client in plan view that my light shelf design gives the second row of desks the correct amount of light while saving x watts of lighting which equals y dollars per year, that's a very valuable feature, and something I can't really get from the other renderers out there, and probably not that hard to write into the software - it's already doing all the calculations.

ajlynn, you hit it right on the head with this one! My firm is big into Green, we actually built the first LEED certified building in my area so giving Maxwell the capabilities to do some minor calculations like this would be a great asset! From what I've read this shouldn’t be to hard to do for the NL team since all of this data is already there I think it's just a matter of creating an interface that can deliver this info. Good idea

We were taught this technique in my undergrad program, you'd be amazed the kind of stuff you can come up with - since then I've used it several times - only it was with radiosity and you can trust the numbers as far as you can throw an HP Pentium2 (It still works as far as convincing other people - so long as you know what you're doing is correct...)

I could use Radiance, I guess, but learning new software is starting to get too time consuming and I like most everything else about Maxwell so far... except the occasional crash...

Oh, and I'd like it if the forum software wouldn't replace a : followed by a ) with an icon that reminds me of Scooter the Evil Talking Baseball :p

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I would love to be able to have axonometric view and isometric ones for the camera so that I could do exploded drawings

tikal26 wrote:I would love to be able to have axonometric view and isometric ones for the camera so that I could do exploded drawings

Your wish delivered!

ref: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=17714

I imagine that there would be some way to capture energy data from the .mxi file so you could set up a render the same way you do now and after the rendering is done you can then pull oll this alternate data, As some of you have said, it should not be that difficult.

The problem is a classic one, garbage in, garbage out. You would have to model the emitters exactly to get reliable results.

We too do a lot of green work, at the time we are doing a Leed Gold tower and I would be very freightened by the thought of certifying lighting conditions with M~R. I have no problems, however, using it to aproximate conditions and make design decissions. Just another tool in the box...

Cheers,
D

there's a reply (i think--need to do a search) from Victor somewhere on this site that says something to the effect that this kind of analysis is possible and planned…that there will be some sort of sensor device we can place in our scenes to measure lighting, etc.

don't quote me on this until i find the thread though

here's the link (thanks olbo) http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... t=radiance