[Kabe]

Most important questions from me personally - your mileage may vary:

Do we have (again) physical sky & sun?

Does sunlight work through glass?

Is there Normal Map support?

Cheers


Kabe



P.S.: I also would enjoy if bety and RC would be able to run side by side.
P.P.S.: Don't get why this is Off topic btw...

[mverta]

Kabe, scroll up for some answers...

Normal maps: Personally haven't tried. Stay tuned.


As for this thread not being "Off-Topic"... damn, you're right!


_Mike

[spekoun]

Thank you very much for such info and for answering...

I do mostly interior renders. Is indirect lighting improved? I mean when i have room with small window and let the light entry only throuch window I will never get clean render in beta... I would like just turn the sun on, let glass in windows and get clean render in several hours...

[max3d]

Mike, I'm afraid you lost some people by moving to the render section. We are all used to the fact that important things are discussed in the off topic area. Maybe put some dummy topic there with a referral to this topic

[jleckron]

Oh, hey, I guess that I do have a question that you probably can't answer, but I'll ask anyway, if it'll get some people thinking about it.

I noticed that the material interface for the RC plug-ins was about the same as in the beta i.e. Diffuse, Plastic, Metal, etc., even though once you opened a material in the Studio, they came in as BSDF (I may have the letters mixed up) materials... Do you know or can you tell me if in future plug in releases, instead of having the admittedly simple but somewhat limited maxwell "presets" if you will, we'll instead have the full BSDF control of the studio? Maybe w/out the previews, etc, of the studio, but still the same settings?

In other words, when I'm assigning materials in say, 3DS MAX or C4D, will I still have to apply "Maxwell Plastic", etc, or will I be able to apply a "Maxwell Basic BSDF"?

Is this question clear? I can probably rephrase (possibly with screenshots) if needed.

[mverta]

Your question's clear... the answer isn't. See, the idea of presets in one form another makes a lot of sense; it's a question of how to present them. I'd say because a lot about the organization and presentation of materials is still in flux, that I can't give you a solid answer. The cores of the materials are solid, but there are a ton of ways to present them - many of which are the subject of great debate.

One thing I've noticed, though about both the A-Team and the developing team, is that it's truly "user-biased". That is, sooner or later, the question of how best to present something truly comes down to "what will most users find friendly, fast, intuitive, easy, flexible, etc." I've never seen a case of "this is how we want to do it and they can just deal." Which is refreshing. Personally, I'm always pushing for software so obvious and inutiive, you almost don't need the manual. A lot of your question, however, targets post-RC5 concerns, I think. Baby steps!

_Mike

[Burkhard]

basicly mike,
do we have the sketchup plugin too?

Burkhard

[jleckron]

That's fine - I just wanted to get the question out there and get people thinking about it.

Oh, and just in case it wasn't obvious, I'd be in favor of the material settings in the plugins coming as close as possible to those of the Studio - and then if people want a preset, they can just load them in from a library or something.

[mverta]

Oooh, on this one, I can't speak at all, except to say that it's not like the team forgets about a platform, you know? There's just usually any number of a billion reasons why one thing has to get prioritized over another. I think everyone would just love it if all updates and all plugins could materialize simultaneously, but if that can't happen for some reason, I don't think it's cool to hold up all the other users waiting for one of them. Stay tuned, I know it's in the pipeline.

_Mike

[Tyrone Marshall]

Thanks for the response Mike, I am in your camp as I once I saw the potential of the RCs there was no going back to beta. I think the workflow of your modeling program, scene setup, and basic material assignment and then into Maxwell Studio is one that I am finding to be a good path of working. There have been times, where I actually made some adjustments to objects in Maxwell Studio well after I exported from Cinema 4D.

In my mind the four things that will complete Maxwell Render are working Sunlight system, alpha map and clip map support, SSS, and some kind of displacement map support (even it means some kind of psuedo conversion of the displacement information into mathematic correlation of physical properties that is different than what we normally think would be fine- just keep this information in some kind of advanced area as most users would never want to see what this kind of info looks like).

Great news about RC5!

[dex001]

Mverta,

is there hope for a real speed improvement to use maxwell in a professional production environment (stills) when working with tight deadlines ?
(Benchmark is set by brazil and vray I guess)
I mean I definetly see the time benefit by not tweaking too much in the material settings and being able to rely on real world studio behaviours, but render times without a renderfarm are still a big issue for our studio.

Main blocker here is glass from my experience, any solution there to come in rc5 or v1 ?

dex001

[mverta]

I talked about speed a bit in the original announcement.. I think it's too early too tell what sort of speed increase we're going to get just yet. A lot has to happen before that can be determined, but again, the question has been asked directly from all sides of the team, "How important is speed?" My answer is usually, "are you kidding?!!?" I don't think Maxwell is ever going to be "blazing fast"like a scanline or something... there's just too much math, you know? But honestly, in the few tests I've done where I really time it, start to finish, I get the final look Maxwell render out much sooner than my usual platform, and that's even with Maxwell's unfinished pipeline. But if you want the short answer: will things be faster? I'd say yes. How much? None of us will really know for some time yet... much closer to 1.0.

_Mike

[mverta]

There more to it than that, of course, but without that, you're not getting off the launchpad.

Well I could deal with that... but then again, without the fully functional layered texture system, I can't really do my job. So you and I have different production needs. Bottom line, it needs to eventually do all this stuff. And there may be some workarounds for you if it goes down this way (can't say more). But there's also the reality that Maxwell doesn't end with 1.0, you know? On top of which a lot of people have gotten some practical, money-making renders out of even the beta. So we can't say it'd be dead-in-the-water-useless, even now. I'd hate to join you in the "love it but can't quite use it yet" camp, though. Fortunately, the necessity for all these functions and to be honest, lots more, is well understood by everyone concerned.

Cut me just a touch of slack on some of these answers - I'm walking that fine line around the NDA, and I really, really, really, don't want people saying I B.S.'d when RC5 comes out. So I'm playing it a touch close to the vest, myself.

_Mike

[aitraaz]

Well, the issue is what development path the 'rc5 core' has followed as compared to the now defunct 'beta core,' and how it differs from the 'rc1-3 core,' and, presumably, the 'rc4 lightpool core' - eg., - 'will the speed improvements we briefly, however painfully witnessed in rcs 1-4 be related to the rc5 core, or was that path abandoned in favor of a parallel core which harks back to the beta core, thus an entirely new measure of speed performance...' Suppose we'll find out soon enough....

[dex001]

Ok, one more specific question about speed:

By talking about the mac plattform will there be a full support of dual and quad systems in the nearterm ? The render in network and the cooperative mode will it be available for macs ?
Right now only single processor systems are supported !? I put investements on hold since nobody of you guys gave me hope here ?

Thanks for any statement

dex001