[psanitra]

Thank you for info.
I hope NL will try to convert IES data somehow to maxwell engine. it will be very nice feature to have, and again, more closer to realistic rendering.

no, .ies in a render paradigm like maxwell is unuseful.
.ies contain the light distribution for the fixture + the lamp.
in maxwell when you will model the right fixture (with right material and geomery) and and the right lamp (with the new maxwell setting like lux power,kelvin colour etct etc) you will have a real distributon better than with a .ies profile.

..but mverta explained the concept better !

I work as light designer so now I can play better better better with maxwell...COOOOOOOLLLLL

Yes, I understand.Generaly i agree, it is more realistic to do it the real way, but from my experience, maxwell is producing much more noise when your are trying to do light emiter and fixture the real way, with reflections, sss etc. I just tought that it will be easier and less noise with "intensity mapped" solution.

[aitraaz]

The problem with IES data is that the profiles describe precisely how much light is emitted in which direction, i.e. they have a "shape" built in, but no correlating geometry. Light profiles assume that the light is an exact point light, and guarantee only that the IES/Eulumdat computation is correct at a sufficient distance. Soft shadows are not achievable with light profiles alone. The profiles are generated by measuring emitted light at the grid points of a grid placed around the light. For any light direction, this allows determining the light energy by interpolating the nearest grid points.

Maxwell uses physical geometry as emitters, and would require some special adaption (if it's even possible) to work with an emitter that somehow didn't have any physical geometry. Engines like mental ray let you assign an IES profile to an area light source, to approximate things like soft shadows from such profiles, but at that point, you're just approximating/guessing again.

In the end, I'm not sure how much of the IES standard is compatible with Maxwell's architecture, and I'm not sure if the traditional implementations are actually as accurate as you might get in Maxwell just by enterting explicit data for an accurate piece of geometry. I've not worked with IES profiles in anything other than mental ray, and since you have to assign it to area light sources to get soft shadows, you've corrupted the "accuracy" enough that you might as well have not used them in the first place, imo. Whether you could simply extract the spectral emission profile from a light independent of its shape is unknown - at least, to me, at this time.

_Mike

Well this isn't a bad piece of reasoning, but you're kind of on and off target here all over the place (Beyond mental ray there's the vast world of photometry/radiometry to back me up here)...

...One get's the point though...

Maybe I missed it, but what's the 'load emission data file' for?

Oh and thanks for disclosure effort as usual looks pretty cool that screenshot...

EDIT: On a closer look, I notice we've got lumen/candela photometric input fields for emitters? Nice!!

[maurizio]

......and what are those 2 icons on the right of the refresh one???

[Fernando Tella]

I guess that IES-like patterns could be achieved with mxi textures in the shape of radial gradients or oval gradients. I haven't tryed though.

[mverta]

The thing about a lot of these arguments is that they keep extolling the virtues of other engines. If you want biased speed, and cheats and everything else, really, there's tons of options out there. Hell, I can load IES profiles in mental ray right now. But I can't model a light and have it behave accurately in mental ray; in fact, the closest I can get to the look of Maxwell is in Vray, and I can tell the difference, so it's just not close enough. And the pot-shot arguments can be directed at any engine, on any platform, any time. They take almost zero creativity. Mental ray makes you do GI optimizations? Oh, who's got time to do that all day; I've got deadlines! You have to do render passes just to get occlusion balanced? How stupid; to need a compositing program just to make your renderer work! Bah! You go to any forum on any platform and you see pages and pages and pages of complaints about all the things it can't do, or don't work, or how frustrating the workarounds are, or how stupid it is that you need workarounds. I don't know about you guys, but a good definition for the whole of VFX would be "workaround". So I guess it's no surprise that Maxwell gets fired into the air like so much skeet, too... like fat sports fans yelling "boo" in disapproval of an athelete when they can barely climb the steps to the bleachers themselves.

Maxwell's got something nothing else has; but that comes at a price: you want real, you gotta go real. If a hang-up there is, "who wants to model lights?" or, "who wants to make wood textures?" that's an obvious place for the community to step in and work together. But I think like any technology, you can't define the usefulness of one thing by the definition of something wholly other. I think it's nice to image a product that does it all, but I don't think it's particularly realistic; it always comes off to me as "cake-and-eat-it, too". I guess a submersible, flying car would be great, but that's not how it is... you gotta choose the right one for the journey.

It's funny... I know, having said all that, that even reality-dedicated NL is constantly searching for ways to bend the rules and make Maxwell behave as much like a biased renderer as they can, but there's always going to be a point in there where Maxwell is in danger of losing the one thing that makes it truly unique. Personally, I look forward to the day that Maxwell enters my production chain; I used to think it was a long ways off, but that day has been getting rapidly closer with each update. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, though, I will say one thing: Maxwell has brought fun into my job in a way I haven't felt since my first foray into the world with StrataVision 3D many years ago...


_Mike

[Hervé]

I could always give a try modeling the particles of the film "emulsion"... he he..

[kivimaki]

so it's not exactly a pie-in-the-sky notion.

I am pretty sure your IES pie is rapidly ascending into the troposphere, seeing as how that thread is thirteen months old...

Having IES would be very nice, but this line of conversation began with an important and very powerful addition to Maxwell and has now fallen victim to argument and biting scarcasm.

We are simply going to have to wait to be sure of the fate of IES in Maxwell. In the meantime, let's put a little more trust into Mike who, for all intensive purposes, is our best source for constant bleeding edge information - due largely in part to his experience in the field and his connections with Next Limit.

And to Mike: I really like your music.

[ludi]

And to Mike: I really like your music.

Indeed!

Mike, do you provide some royalty free tracks? (for buying, of course)

[aitraaz]

The thing about a lot of these arguments is that they keep extolling the virtues of other engines. If you want biased speed, and cheats and everything else, really, there's tons of options out there. Hell, I can load IES profiles in mental ray right now. But I can't model a light and have it behave accurately in mental ray; in fact, the closest I can get to the look of Maxwell is in Vray, and I can tell the difference, so it's just not close enough. And the pot-shot arguments can be directed at any engine, on any platform, any time. They take almost zero creativity. Mental ray makes you do GI optimizations? Oh, who's got time to do that all day; I've got deadlines! You have to do render passes just to get occlusion balanced? How stupid; to need a compositing program just to make your renderer work! Bah! You go to any forum on any platform and you see pages and pages and pages of complaints about all the things it can't do, or don't work, or how frustrating the workarounds are, or how stupid it is that you need workarounds. I don't know about you guys, but a good definition for the whole of VFX would be "workaround". So I guess it's no surprise that Maxwell gets fired into the air like so much skeet, too... like fat sports fans yelling "boo" in disapproval of an athelete when they can barely climb the steps to the bleachers themselves.

Maxwell's got something nothing else has; but that comes at a price: you want real, you gotta go real. If a hang-up there is, "who wants to model lights?" or, "who wants to make wood textures?" that's an obvious place for the community to step in and work together. But I think like any technology, you can't define the usefulness of one thing by the definition of something wholly other. I think it's nice to image a product that does it all, but I don't think it's particularly realistic; it always comes off to me as "cake-and-eat-it, too". I guess a submersible, flying car would be great, but that's not how it is... you gotta choose the right one for the journey.

It's funny... I know, having said all that, that even reality-dedicated NL is constantly searching for ways to bend the rules and make Maxwell behave as much like a biased renderer as they can, but there's always going to be a point in there where Maxwell is in danger of losing the one thing that makes it truly unique. Personally, I look forward to the day that Maxwell enters my production chain; I used to think it was a long ways off, but that day has been getting rapidly closer with each update. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, though, I will say one thing: Maxwell has brought fun into my job in a way I haven't felt since my first foray into the world with StrataVision 3D many years ago...


_Mike

Yo Mike no problems here I don't think anyone wanted to belittle maxwell with this argument or suggest that biased rendering is better or anything like that...

The point was that lighting design is mostly done with lux values and ies profiles for good reason, it didn't become the industry standard by chance. Your points about mental ray and other biased apps taking a workaround approach to integrating ies profiles is correct, but many other lighting analysis apps have made proper use of them..

If maxwell is calculating light correctly using radiometric values, then let's have at it, its a great innovation, but lighting design still concentrates on wavelength values perceived by the human eye.

As ies profiles have integrated error tolerances, the issue is that the user would have to model light fixtures with insane levels of accuracy (and have a really, i mean really flawless material system) on which to base the calculations. From a practical (production) point of view, there's just too much possibility for error at this point for it to be feasible.

But i guess there's no reason why it couldn't eventually be done. From the screenshot we see the lumens/candela input values, which i think shows that NL is moving in this direction. Converting radiometric data to photometric data (lux) shouldnt be prohibitive...So, who knows?

[DELETED]

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[giacob]

come on .. dont get too much excited... is normal.. if one would go to mental ray forum they would say... mental ray is the best u cand do with it things that cant be achieved on other renderers...
here they say...etc etc...
anyway both have theyr pro and cons.... mental ray has , for me, a fakier look and a fakier lighting( even the archiviz renders they put on theyr site as sample are far fakier than maxell's,... nobody can deny) and in most cases a much harder setup.. on the contrary u cant get decent, good looking archiviz render in most cases in a shorter time than maxwell and is more flexible...can use passes etc...

[rivoli]

Hey, here's a simple render showing nice lighting etc, took about 5 min's to set-up 30 seconds to render! looks nice to me! most people would be very happy about the light here!

don't get me wrong andrew, but you can't be serious.

[aitraaz]

Mental Image's VFX gallery is fantastic, but in all fairness, it's architecture gallery is, to say the least, lacking (except for the U5 Rathaus images which have been there since '99). Normal, considering that Mental Ray is primarily a VFX tool (and a damn powerful one at that)...

A propos, what's all this talk about (whiskey) holes?

[lexpattison]

What I think is funny is AndrewSweet lecturing Mike Verta on production VFX. Talk about pretentious.

.... and where exactly are the images that use IES? seems to me you linked directly to their general gallery.

[leoA4D]

Sniping leads to more sniping leads to flaming. Argh!