[mverta]

mverta, please, do not act as the prophet of render

I'm a prophet, Nostradamus, and Miss Cleo all rolled into one. Manually faking GI settings is obsolete. You heard it here.

p.s i wonder if u would manidge to respect the deadline though, my dear

Only one way to find out, princess.

_Mike

[giacob]

mverta i dont belive in prophets.. they just , at their best, sounds a bit ridicolous... at worst seems to take misfortune...anyway act as u like

[mverta]

Maxwell represents the END of traditional rendering

i think it represents the end of the whole CG industry...we will all go back and do claymation

You know, I bet this would actually be a good idea for like, a year... force everyone to work with real lights and a real camera for a change. If nothing else, maybe we could finally see an end to people putting DOF with an f-stop of 1 on every image, lens flares all over the place, and that godawful Photoshop gaussian blur "glare". I swear 90% of CG these days looks like this:



_Mike

[mverta]

anyway act as u like

... I wasn't asking for permission, but I'm glad you approve.

Oh, and here's another "ridicolous"* prediction for you: Maxwell gets used for an A-list movie by year's end 2006.

_Mike

P.S. This is just general advice for our non-native English speakers: I'm truly impressed that you're bi - or even tri - lingual. But if you're going to insult people in English, hop on over to Dictionary.com and double check your spelling first. Otherwise you end up looking like a complete tool. Just a little advice, there. I'm here to help.

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[Mihai]

This is almost a complete deja-vu of when radiosity renderers started appearing.... die-hard CG "artistes" bashed it so hard - it´s fake, it´s too slow to be any good, I can do exactly the same thing by cleverly positioning my 157 lights manually thank you very much....

This is the same thing......yes it´s currently slow but it´s the inevitable future. Instead of spending half a day fiddling with 50 different GI/caustics/AA/jitter etc etc etc settings, which all behave unpredictably, with every scene there´s always some little annoying artifact that won´t go away....I´d rather let Maxwell render for that half day knowing that I´ll have a great and predictable render. Saves me a lot of stress in this already stressful business.

Sure client time is important but doing almost every image with workarounds and constant fiddling just takes the fun out of the whole thing really....

Maxwell render time is not that astronomical, specially in 1 year from now. Processors are seeing a great increase in speed now, thanks to hitting the ghZ limits, so for rendering we are currently seeing a doubling in speed, next year we´ll have quadcores....

Maxwell is still an unfinished product, optimisations come last. But the base is set, and the rules have changed, this is a fact.

Rendering is dead - Long live rendering!

[giacob]

as a matter of fact nobody must ask permission for acting ridicously.. but u brought me to compassion mverda.. so i tried to make u aware .. but is usless i see

[4 HeRo]

This is almost a complete deja-vu of when radiosity renderers started appearing.... die-hard CG "artistes" bashed it so hard - it´s fake, it´s too slow to be any good, I can do exactly the same thing by cleverly positioning my 157 lights manually thank you very much....

This is the same thing......yes it´s currently slow but it´s the inevitable future. Instead of spending half a day fiddling with 50 different GI/caustics/AA/jitter etc etc etc settings, which all behave unpredictably, with every scene there´s always some little annoying artifact that won´t go away....I´d rather let Maxwell render for that half day knowing that I´ll have a great and predictable render. Saves me a lot of stress in this already stressful business.

Sure client time is important but doing almost every image with workarounds and constant fiddling just takes the fun out of the whole thing really....

Maxwell render time is not that astronomical, specially in 1 year from now. Processors are seeing a great increase in speed now, thanks to hitting the ghZ limits, so for rendering we are currently seeing a doubling in speed, next year we´ll have quadcores....

Maxwell is still an unfinished product, optimisations come last. But the base is set, and the rules have changed, this is a fact.

Rendering is dead - Long live rendering!

Well said

[WillMartin]

I don't know how many of you remember raytracing on the Amiga, but there was a program called TurboSilver released for that platform in the mid 80's. Well, I currently use only that program (on an Amiga emulator) for doing GI on my quad-proc AMD64 3900+. I can render a two million poly mesh at that program's most realistic settings (and at 2000x1500 resolution) in under half a second. All the junk added in later renderers only adds more computations, which increases rendering time, and who needs that? And I might add that my clients are quite happy with the product I offer them...although it's too bad that six year olds don't have more money to spend on projects.

(P.S.- The above post doesn't really reflect my CGI set-up. I actually have LW8.3 and M~R Beta, a pretty cool little combo! )

[tom]

I don't know how many of you remember raytracing on the Amiga, but there was a program called TurboSilver released for that platform in the mid 80's. ....

I started rendering with TurboSilver, then Sculpt 3D, then Imagine, then Real 3D, then Lightwave, then Carrara and now using 3dsmax

[giacob]

This is almost a complete deja-vu of when radiosity renderers started appearing.... die-hard CG "artistes" bashed it so hard - it´s fake, it´s too slow to be any good, I can do exactly the same thing by cleverly positioning my 157 lights manually thank you very much....

This is the same thing......yes it´s currently slow but it´s the inevitable future. Instead of spending half a day fiddling with 50 different GI/caustics/AA/jitter etc etc etc settings, which all behave unpredictably, with every scene there´s always some little annoying artifact that won´t go away....I´d rather let Maxwell render for that half day knowing that I´ll have a great and predictable render. Saves me a lot of stress in this already stressful business.

Sure client time is important but doing almost every image with workarounds and constant fiddling just takes the fun out of the whole thing really....

Maxwell render time is not that astronomical, specially in 1 year from now. Processors are seeing a great increase in speed now, thanks to hitting the ghZ limits, so for rendering we are currently seeing a doubling in speed, next year we´ll have quadcores....

Maxwell is still an unfinished product, optimisations come last. But the base is set, and the rules have changed, this is a fact.

Rendering is dead - Long live rendering!

by the way there are artist that using 157 light manually ( and unfortunately i am not among them) .can really produce in shorter time render which are better of those made with GI..... i wouldnt make a fool of them but i'd rather respect them, even without nostalgia
for interior animation maxwel rendertime is astonomical really. cant be denied unless u deny reallity

[Mihai]

giacob, even Mentalray after a decade of development would have astronomical render times for complex interior animations if you re-start all the settings from zero after each frame. You still have to use a cache method or most likely texture baking to make a walkthrough animation with it. I won´t go in to all the problems related to texture baking with mentalray...it´s not such a painless procedure.

Even if you first calculate and cache the photon emission, and incrementally add to the FG map, you will most likely get the typical artifacts during an animation, unless you really crank up the settings or start manually fixing frames, lots of fun. Also try to do a flicker free animation with GI or/and FG with anything like hair, grass, leaves......

It has been mentioned already that the developers intend to add some sort of texture baking feature for walkthroughs so lets just wait and see what they do.....ofcourse everybody wants to make it faster, but to me the final frame time, just the frame time, is certainly not the only indication of a renderers usability, or profitability.

by the way there are artist that using 157 light manually ( and unfortunately i am not among them) .can really produce in shorter time render which are better of those made with GI

depends what you compare with I think people that are that obsessed with doing it the old school way have looked at CG pics for too long instead of what reality looks like, so they compare their pics with other CG pics.....not a good method.

[Frances]

depends what you compare with I think people that are that obsessed with doing it the old school way have looked at CG pics for too long instead of what reality looks like, so they compare their pics with other CG pics.....not a good method.

Up until this point, I agreed with you, Mihai. There are people in the film effects industry doing it old school and match existing film footage and still photography. Doesn't matter what tricks have been used in film or photo that essentially renders it unrealistic (layers of cheesecloth for Liz Taylor closeups), the cg [must] be indestinguishable from it or it fails.

[Maxer]

I agree, it's totally possible to create realistic imagery with traditional lighting techniques but how many people can do this in a reasonable amount of time? Maxwell is going to level the playing field so that almost anyone is going to be able to create these types of images with virtually no lighting knowledge. I guess the next question is will this lower the CG field or the worth of the artists working in it to a point that the images created are no longer looked at as "special" or "unique" and their talents go unrecognized?

[Frances]

I agree, it's totally possible to create realistic imagery with traditional lighting techniques but how many people can do this in a reasonable amount of time? Maxwell is going to level the playing field so that almost anyone is going to be able to create these types of images with virtually no lighting knowledge. I guess the next question is will this lower the CG field or the worth of the artists working in it to a point that the images created are no longer looked at as "special" or "unique" and their talents go unrecognized?

Maxwell can't do proper lighting for you. In fact, it is quite blunt in telling you when your lighting setup sucks. There are many examples of work in this forum that demonstrate how bad a Maxwell render can be with poor lighting. Lighting plays a major part in a render's realism. However, you also can't have good illumination with poor materials or by whacking out the camera to try to make up for bad lighting.