[lchest]

Greetings Maxwellians. I have just started using Maxwell 1.1 thanks to the latest Max9 Plugin (1.0.77) - all the previous max plugins were too buggy for my liking so I stayed clear til now (I normally use Vray). I like the look of Maxwell and hope to start using it in my work. The setup is pretty easy but I dont yet know how to make the materials/lighting look good, with very limited time to learn. I am really disappointed with the excessive level of noise in this image. This is 16 hours of co-operative rendering on 8 cpus (one Quad 265 Opteron + two Intel E6400 machines !) Its a really simple scene with hardly any polygons. The lighting is a physical sky + hdr image lighting + spheres in all the potlights with standard emitters from library. Glazing is AGS_Dielectric_basic. I could upload a scene if anyone is willing to take a look. Also, the walls are supposed to be pure white and the floor is supposed to be very light grey. I made the wall material as white as possible in the material editor, but it still comes out murky/beige/grey ??

[4 HeRo]

Hi lchest,

"spheres in all the potlights " Thats a no no try to use a simple plane with 1*1 segment this will help to reduce the render time and the noise.
For the walls usr an RGB value of 218*218*218 it will also reduce noise and render time
As for the murky/beige/grey colour that could be something todo with time time of day and or the HDR you are using.

Hope some of this helps you


Cheers

John

P.S the render is look sweet so far

[superbad]

In addition to what was mentioned above, remember you will have to adjust your exposure to get the walls to appear white. Also, check the sky / time settings- if you've got an orange-ish sky, that color will show up on your white walls.

Also, instead of using an HDR outside, try converting the image to an MXI and using it as an emitter plane just outside the window. Less noise, easier to control, and it will probably look better.

[Mihai]

Did you use the hdr image just to get it to show up in the windows? You could instead render an alpha and composite later. As mentioned, use as low poly emitters as possible, a single sided plane will usually be enough.

I'm not sure if previous newsletters are available but there have been some tips and examples on how to optimize a scene.

[Fernando Tella]

I've noticed that physical sky on interior scenes can produce a lot of noise. Your spherical emitters will render a clean image much faster than with physical sky. you can make the test with a multilight image and see which are the lights that gives the noise and the beige color to your whites.

I would replace the physical sky with an emitter.

[lchest]

thanks all for suggestions/rapid response. HDR was a bit of an afterthought & partly just to provide a backdrop out the window. I have run out of time this week but will start re-doing the image next week and will post my results/findings. I look forward to it ! To create an Emitter plane with an MXI, I guess that is simply a case of making a plane, applying an emitter material with the MXI in one of its slots ?

[tom]

HDR was a bit of an afterthought & partly just to provide a backdrop out the window.

Don't forget to place same HDR to the reflection channel as well. It's not seen on the mirror

[lchest]

Yes - the reflection was on my list. thanks for reminding me.
I had tried replacing the sky with an emitter but no light seemed to get throught the glass. Ill try again. Can anyone point a good link to building light sources ? I seem to remember seeing one in the forum but cant find it. For instance, is it worthwhile putting a glass material in front of a "lightbulb" to simulate a real light fixture ?

[lchest]

when i place the emitter outside the window there is no good way in Max9 to hide it. I can hide it to camera, but it is then visible to reflection. If i turn off 'visible to reflection' it then doesnt light the room. I thought there was supposed to be a maxwell object rollout for this kind of stuff within Max (it isnt in my Max - i thought its supposed to be under modifier panel).

[michaelplogue]

when i place the emitter outside the window there is no good way in Max9 to hide it. I can hide it to camera, but it is then visible to reflection. If i turn off 'visible to reflection' it then doesnt light the room. I thought there was supposed to be a maxwell object rollout for this kind of stuff within Max (it isnt in my Max - i thought its supposed to be under modifier panel).

Take a look at this tutorial by Tom on how to make invisible emitters (third option down).

http://www.maxwellrender.com/tutorial02.html

[lchest]

yeah i saw that - but it was for Studio & not Max. My first impression was that it wont work in Max, but i'll take another look.
This is a new test - 6 hours (SL 14.39) on 1 computer (Intel 840 Extreme) - still noisy - i wonder if a higher SL would fix that ? I swapped the sphere lights to planes, but I kept the physical sky (as i havent sorted out the invisible emitter issue yet) & cut the hdri from lighting. I saw another post recently which was using physical sky and was very nice & smooth.
Any other tips ?

[lchest]

I just rendered this second image for 8 hours on 3 dual cores and its still very noisy. Only difference was that I rendered it at 1400px instead of 900px

[misterasset]

Just an FYI. On interior scenes I usually target SL18 for a finished product. By then the noise is to the point where it looks more like photo grain and if you don't like it a program like Neat Image will take care of it.

Your image has large open spaces with broad surfaces, which makes the "hiding of noise" much harder.

There seems to be some sort of pattern appearing on the floor. How did you go about making your materials? Did you copy from the MXMGallery or give it a go yourself?

[lchest]

at SL 12 the images are looking really bad. I'll aim for 18. Some of the materials are from the library and some are screwed around with by me. The floor has a bump map set to 2.5. I will go back and replace all materials with items from the library so i know that is not the problem. BTW - is this a bug - as you can see, the reflection in the mirrors is incorrect - it kind of downsamples the mxi to an unrecognisable blur. For the backdrop image I tried with both hdri and mxi - no difference.
Maybe my mirror material is wrong. I have a single bsdf layer with reflectance 0 set to '240' - so its almost pure white. Nd is set to 5 (i have yet to investigate what this does). Roughness is 0 & i think everything else is default.

[lchest]

OK - ive been digging away at Maxwell for about 3-4 days now. I'll try one more final rendering, but it looks like I have to go back to Vray to complete this job. Shame - but I will hopefully come back to Maxwell again some time in the future and have another go, see if i can make it work, see if theres a better manual. Also, even if i did figure out the various problems (noise, odd reflections, coop rendering) I dont see how I can render a 4000px image with only an allowance of 8nodes for my two licenses. I'd need about 40 nodes to get the job done in a reasonable time frame, and that wouldnt be possible til the licensing rules are changed as purchasing new licenses is not an option for small business like mine.