[wahn]

Hi,

my name is Jan Walter. I currently work (again) for The Mill in London. I did work in film (MPC, Mill Film, Digital Domain) and commercials (The Mill). I do know a lot about rendering (5 years @ mental images, but I also know the RenderMan world, work on MtoA [Maya to Arnold], and tested many other renderers [for fun]). It started as a hobby and later became more serious. I once worked with NaN (probably 12 years ago) at a time when Blender wasn't open source, but free to use. I still use Blender in my spare time to do render comparisons, but I obviously have access to all the commercial packages (Houdini [my favourite], Maya, XSI, even 3DS Max).

I did tests in the past from within Maya and 3DS Max, but I recently switched everything to Blender. For Maxwell I just exported OBJ files and brought them into Maxwell Studio to assign materials and start rendering. Anyway, in the future I will probably switch to B-Maxwell (or use my own code to export simultaneously to several renderers in question). The idea is also to get input from the developers of a certain renderer (the contact for Maxwell exists and I will update my repositories based on their input/feedback).

Anyway, I give workshops at the Filmakademie in Ludwigsburg and tech talks at FMX, and recently I showed a lot of different renderers (including Maxwell) in action. I have a lot of stuff in repositories on Bitbucket and I'm happy to share scenes, experience etc. with you. Unfortunately I can't grant public access to most of the stuff right now because Arnold isn't out for the public and some content is Arnold related (API and ASS files). But if you contact me directly and ask for Maxwell (or other renderer related files - except the Arnold ones) I'm happy to give you access to whatever you'd like to experiment with. Email is jan at janwalter dot com ...

Here from the README file of https://bitbucket.org/wahn/radiance_vs_ ... /wiki/Home:

A global illumination (GI) renderer comparison
----------------------------------------------

The materials collected here was used for a workshop given at the
Filmakademie Ludwigsburg in Germany (on Januray 31st, 2012):

http://www.filmakademie.de/
Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
Akademiehof 10
71638 Ludwigsburg

In the meantime I updated and added more files to automate the rendering of
test files for a tech talk I gave at FMX 2012 (http://www.fmx.de).

Here is a link to a summary of the tech talk (which was given on May 10th):
http://www.fmx.de/program/event-details ... Event.html

The slides for the presentation are available for download from
http://www.janwalter.com/Download/index.html and as soon as Arnold
will be publicly available I will grant public access to this
repository and my Blender importers/exporters (currently RAD import,
RIB and ASS export) which are on Bitbucket as well:
https://bitbucket.org/wahn/blender-add-ons.

The tech talk covered following renderers:

- Radiance (http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance)
- Arnold (http://www.solidangle.com)
- V-Ray (http://www.chaosgroup.com)
- Maxwell (http://maxwellrender.com)
- Indigo (http://www.indigorenderer.com)
- iray (http://www.irayrender.com)
- Luxrender (http://www.luxrender.net)
- Octane Render (http://www.refractivesoftware.com)
- and others

I will announce if those other repositories go public on http://janwalter.blogspot.co.uk/ ...

The (work in progress) images are here:

http://www.janwalter.com/RadianceVsYouN ... ameit.html

Slides can be downloaded from http://www.janwalter.com/Download/index.html (as mentioned above).

Let me know if you have other scenes (which could be used e.g. with the creative commons license) you'd like to contribute for more render tests, if you have ideas e.g. to create a forum for these tests where people can share experience independent of any particular renderer ...

As I said, if you want access to the scenes, would like to help with future tests etc. ... my email is mentioned above. Don't get angry if I don't answer immediately. I do all of this in my spare time (therefore NO production scenes from my side) and I'm sometimes quiet busy with some commercial work

Cheers,

Jan

[bograt]

This looks very interesting, thanks!
I'm a bit slow to read so I will have to look into this more but thanks for the post

Jules

[sandykoufax]

looks interesing.

[tom]

Hi Jan,

Nice to know you and welcome to the forum! I rendered a few frames from the scenes you sent and humbly wanted to share my opinions here. I have no experience with Radiance so, I didn't have a chance to compare the intially created scenes with the MXS files you've built. You know, when it comes to making a useful comparison, -no matter if it's quality or rendertime or both- we should be sure of the scene scale, sun position, camera parameters and the amount of illumination. These are even more important than matching the materials in the next step. For example, Scene0 matches quite nicely but, I doubt Scene1 does. In Scene1, I see sharp falloffs in your Radiance renders while it's not there in others.

So, I have an idea. Why not rendering these scenes in lambertian clay first, match the illumination/emitters and then proceed to the materials? LMK what you think. On the other hand, it's true Scene2 is rendering remarkably slower than the other 2. The reason is Maxwell's emitter power optimization. Because, the scene has several low intensity emitters running together with high intensity sun/sky. In this case, it tries to sample low energy light sources (here emitters) more comparing to the sun/sky to build an optimum balance.

Here are the results without making any modification to your scenes:

Simple Scene (Scene0)


Changing Lights (Scene1_lightsetup1)


Changing Lights (Scene1_lightsetup2)


The Art Gallery (Scene2_camera5)