[j_petrucci]

Before messing around with Maxwell, I enjoyed a lot comparing rendering engines quality (what a strange sport... ) and now I'm thinking about doing it again with some of them, freeware included.

The new patch is coming, so I think it would be good to plan some nicely planned comparisons... this is my proposing: let's choose a nice and significant scene to render exposing some advanced topics like Reflection, Refraction, Caustics, SSS, ... whatever we like and convert it to main 3D format (Max, Rhino, Cinema, Lightwave, ...) to make people testing with their favourite software; then take the most famous engines and render that scene to the same resolution and (possibly) the same quality settings.

A draft of the renderers list could be this (* are the one I can handle)
1) Vray*
2) Final Render
3) Brazil
4) Lightscape*
5) Arnold
6) Turtle
7) Mental Ray
8 ) Renderman
9) Virtualight
10) Winosi
11) Flamingo*
11) 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D*, Lightwave, Maya, etc... internal engines
12) ... [more to come if proposed]

If this can be taken by many nice people, like the ones posting in this great forum, it would be a snap to have a very detailed report of the current state of the art of renderers, Maxwell included, obviously.
the more we are, the easier would be to find someone owing one program, and someone else owing another, so to cover all the possibilities...

I can set up a proper page on my site for this "project" and upload every image one can render divided into categories, so we can have all them in one single place, easily updatable and browsable; someone could also think about some nice title for it...

If the overall comparison will be good (and I think it would), we can also give to Next Limit as a gift for the main site from its many "lovers"...

so... anyone with me?
(I'm already thinking about some example scenes...)

[zuliban]

i did one today vray vs maxwell beta i liked more beta result here they are:
vray:

beta:



both looks very similar beta have better color mapping even vray its very easy to get to similar result as maxwell maybe cuz its a simple scene

[Eric Lagman]

Both are very good. It would be easier to compare if your images were both rendered from the same camera view. Just a thought.

[oscarMaxwell]

great

[def4d]

Zuliban: Could you please render your "zulibanroom 2004" with Maxwell?

[Intuition]

I did a direct Lightwave vs F-Prime vs. Maxwell comparison back in March/April.

http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread. ... ht=maxwell

But I don't thin you can see the images if you are not registered. I'll post em here but maybe I should redo the scene IN the new 1.2.1 pacth now.

[j_petrucci]

I just thought about this thing and I think it would be more useful to render a separate scene for every "interesting" aspect, one with caustics, another with refraction, etc...

in these days I'll post some scene, and anyone interested who wants to try some rendering is welcome, so I can gather and organize them.

good night...

[Mihai]

Actually I think it's better to have a room where all those effects are mixed and interact. The key to Maxwell is light interaction.

I propose it should be a room with an overcast day look (like 4 Hero's pic) because we've seen too much bright studio type look and it's nice to see the color variation from the physical sky.

Put some bookshelves in it, with lots of books. This is difficult thing to render in a clean way with interpolating renderers, but shelves is something you have in almost all interior renders.

Maybe also have some glass statues in there to produce caustics (both in direct and indirect light).

Make the floor glossy.

Make sure you have some objects in the foreground so we also get a fairly strong dof effect. Perhaps in the foreground could be a table with some glasses, so we see how the caustics are affected by the dof as well.

[j_petrucci]

ok, nice suggestion Mihai, I'll try to make this scene with Cinema 4D then post it in various formats, so everybody can decide if it's good or not and eventually modify it; when it will be ok, I'll start rendering it with other engines without modifying the scene, so we can easily compare it.