Maxwell Render | Official public forum

In response to a lot of people who are complaining about the amount of time maxwell takes to render... umm.... I don't think so.

There ARE issues with noise, which hopefully will be fixed, and we need glass that works, but otherwise Maxwell kicks LW's butt for photorealistic rendering.

FYI: I first started using LW in 1998 with V5.6. I'm by no means a LW newbie. The LW image includes gradients, etc. etc. I spent about 1.5 hours texturing and setting up the scene.

The maxwell scene is a different story. Aside from having a different object for the transparent object (no 'air' polys facing in) The scene is identical.

For both scenes there is just a single light source (point light) on the maxwell side I used a very small sphere (about 20 polys). Keep in mind I have been using LW for more then seven years... and I don't think I've been using maxwell for 7 months... I'm sure with a bit of tweaking I could bring the LW image much closer to the Maxwell image... however, my whole intent with this wasn't to work for 5 hours.. I imagined that i had to produce an image for a client in one work day.

The LW image failed. The maxwell was done so soon, there was time for client input for the FINAL.

Here they are:
LW image:
Settings
Radiosity: 4x12 (low to meet the deadline)
Caustics: default except for accuracy set to 525
AA: 3 passes
Time: 7h27m + setup = Total 8h 57m... over budget and frankly unacceptable. The image is over exposed... but because it took soooo long to see anything in this case I figured one could get an idea of the differences without loosing time to lower the light level.

LIGHTWAVE IMAGE:

------------------------------------------------------------
Maxwell Image:
Settings
Standard materials.
small ball for emitter in the same location as the LW light, set to 2000%
setup time 20 minutes

Render time: 4 hours.

I actually rendered it DOUBLE SIZE to take care of the noise issue, so in fact this four hour render is for an image TWO TIMES as large as the Lightwave image. I estimate that LW would have rendered for 12 hours or more with these dimensions.

Had I left it to render for 7 hours like Lightwave it would have been almost noiseless, and TWICE AS BIG.



MAXWELL IMAGE:


In conclusion, Yes, I COULD come very close to this image in quality with Lightwave, but I estimate between the higher radiosity settings and other texturing 'tweaks' it could take as long as 20 hours including rendering.

So, Maxwell is a slow renderer? Umm... not compared to Lightwave. In most cases with Lightwave I would use an area light, no radiosity, no caustics, no depth of field, or even motion blur just simply to get an image that didn't suck within an hour or so. 99% of my CG images on my website are Lightwave WITHOUT caustics or radiosity. I don't know about you... but I'm never going back.

Cheers all.

adehus,

I agree. In many cases like this:

which is a 2X closeup of a 67hour 1900x1200pix image.

render:http://www.iandavis.ws/maxwell/plasmagun_21.jpg

The noise seems related to the amount of light and also camera DOF. In an architectural render fully lighting the scene (like an object would be) would be impossible and look incorrect anyway.

I'm assuming, and perhaps wrongly that these serious issues will be remedied, like the black dots of the last beta. The glass material is also currently unacceptable. Look at the difference with the two renders, lightwave is bright and sharp, maxwell darkens glass and both blurs anything behind it and casts a very dark shadow.

My test was to just show how amazing maxwell can be... or perhaps the promise of a mature Maxwellrender. I can't imagine anything better then a renderer that just works. No elaborate tricks to fake a material, imagine just clicking 'steel' then dialing in the colours and other user friendly parameters and on the other end you get photoreal steel! As an artist i can't imagine anything better. Since really there is no limit. I can see a maxwellrender, perhaps version2 but a time where there is every natural material available as a shader. Skin, Car paint, Rust, Steel, etc. All just available from a dropdown menu.

I guess I just realized after using maxwell for a few months that in my projects I didn't want to use Lightwave materials anymore. I know they are more powerful, and the effects you can achieve with LW are practically llimitless... no, it was just the sheer joy of being able to create exactly the realistic materials you wanted very, very easily. It's intoxicating. So, all this time, I thought the best thing about Maxwell was it's output quality, but I did this test to demonstrate to myself, and perhaps others, that in the end what purchasing this product gives you is actually, and more importantly, is time. I have a time shortage, like many people I'm sure, so for a rendering tool to free up several hours from each project is like FREE time. I've done more creative work since maxwell then before. I now don't worry too much about texturing, which really has freed my mind to concentrate on modelling. I now don't avoid the time consuming details which used to frustrate me. I feel more relaxed and look forward to finishing the model if only just to give it a render. The net effects of using this product are absolutely not what I expected, nor what I bought it for. But man, I'm glad I bought it.

Cheers, and sorry for the ramble.

Ian.

iandavis wrote:adehus,

I've done more creative work since maxwell then before. I now don't worry too much about texturing, which really has freed my mind to concentrate on modelling. I now don't avoid the time consuming details which used to frustrate me. I feel more relaxed and look forward to finishing the model if only just to give it a render. The net effects of using this product are absolutely not what I expected, nor what I bought it for. But man, I'm glad I bought it.

Cheers, and sorry for the ramble.

Ian.

Same here, its been a joy working with Maxwell over the last few months and 9 times out of 10 my images turn out better then i plan.
Even now it still shocks and amazes me.

John

Thanks for bringing a real live test to here..
I agree with you, before Maxwell I spent most of the time on any project just tweaking composting rendering and waiting to reach just a near good level of realism.. so, the last stage of my projects were always the difficult one.

Working with Maxwell makes it so easy ,, not because I'm lazy:) ,, I would like technology takes the hard parts and simplify it same like Maxwell does…

Good comparision.
However any comparision with with LW's GI renderer is going to make any other renderer look good. LW might have been the first mainstreem program to include native GI rendering, but within a couple years (and certainly by todays standards) it is by far the worst out there.
I too did a direct comparision on a project before between LW and Vray. It was a simple room where the only light sources were external. It was originally set up in LW, where I tried rendering it with a 2 bounce GI solution, it took 20 hrs to render and was blotchy as heck I then tried it in Vray. Even with transfering the model to MAX, reaplying all the textures and setting up the cameras and lights to as close as I could get it, it only took just over 1 hour for a 6 bounce solution which looked far, far better and very clean. A 20x speed increase without even taking into account the better quality.
Newtek have an anoying habit of adding a new feature, then all but abandoning it for years at a time, in the case of GI lighting it's effectively been on hold since it was introduced 6 years ago.