[Kevin]

Here's our short animation project aimed at hopefully getting us some tv commercial work. Its mostly Maxwell, except for the pollen and the jumping Nozine bottle.

Each frame was rendered in 2 hours per node on a dual 3.0 xeon renderfarm and was created in Maya 6.5.

http://www.akornstudios.com/nozineknows.htm

Enjoy!

Kevin & Joshua
Head Akorn Animation Nerds

[Micha]

Nice animation. Why did you decided you for maxwell in this case?

I think, with a biased renderer is the setup time longer, but for a animation is this not so a problem, because the rendertime seems to be more important. The materials in your animation dons't look so difficult for a biased renderer.
During my study I have rendered an animation of 2 minutes with 10 minutes rendertime per frame - approx. 1 week rendering.

[Kevin]

We just wanted to see how Maxwell worked out for us. We love the still image results and wanted too see what kind of problems it faces in animation production (of which I've posted).

With a biased renderer like Mental ray a 2 hour frame is still pretty fast and Maxwell was beating it in the time/imagequality race. We finished the render in 4 days, not bad for a 30 second short, although we did do it in 24fps.

Our next project will most likely have Maxwell rendered backgrounds with RenderMan characters for more versitility in the compositing stage.

Thanks,

-Kevin

[Micha]

Mentalray need 2 hours too? With a render farm? Upps.
Hmm, sorry, but the flower animation dosn't looks like a typical Maxwell GI rendering. First, I have thought it is classical render technic without GI and with bounce lights too.

[Mihai]

Funny stuff The voices add a lot to the shot as well. The animation was nice too, snappy and well timed.

[Chris_TC]

The issue with GI in MentalRay is that no matter how many photons you use, you still get occasional artifacts in the corners. On a single frame, it's not a big deal. But in an animation, there's all sorts of flashing and spots appearing and disappearing.

That's what the radius setting addresses. The reason why you can tweak these things is to find the best quality/performance tradeoff.

[Micha]

"two hours on a single node" ... ahh, I understand.

[x_site]

:::: thank you... fantastic work!

[Maximus3D]

Great stuff this commercial Kevin! and it's nice to see Maxwell being used in commercial production work this way too.

Keep up the good work guys!

/ Max