[kami]

We could render everything to Sampling Level 15 (1080p renders) and begin comping, if approved we resumed the renders up to final quality.

incredible animation! really impressive what you can get out of maxwell, even with an animation that complex.
just out of curiosity: what is 'final quality' for you? SL15 already seems pretty high for an animation

[renbry]

Thank Kami,

SL 15 was an intermediate level which could be left in for some elements (like the SSS component of any shot with veges/tomatos) but there was a big issue with the room in that 80% of the participating light came from lights which are in the speaker boxes around the edges of the floor. These lights needed many, many, many bounces of light to escape and the acoustic baffling actually contributed to baffle the light!! by bouncing the light away in so many angles the light took a really long time to fill out the room... interesting that we use that structure in real life to break up sound but don't consider that it's also diffusing light So the room usually needed to get up around SL 22 which at 1080p HD needed up to 30 hours per frame. Thank heavens that Maxwell can resume, so when nothing else was rendering I just resumed and resumed until it scrubbed up clean. We had a bank of 32 dedicated 24-threading Xeon blades for a month (less than $10,000) to grind the commercial out.

Cooperative frames were very useful to run on the farm to generate certain background stills which were projected in Nuke and defocused to cut down on the amount of 3D rendering required.

[kami]

thank you very much for the info. I guess there wasn't any quicker way to get the light to be faster
but with 32 machines in the background there might be no need ...

[renbry]

Fuel has recently completed what has become their last commercial under the original management.

Virgin Australia's new "The Romance is Back" TVC for Collider in Sydney.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPqYnQYwxfs

Maxwell was the clear choice for the spot, even when compared to Renderman Studio. The quality of lighting and bounce lighting/caustic effects where another layer of detail which helped the model look more realistic. Another advantage was MultiLight; allowing compositors to tweak light balance or animate lights on in the interior scenes.

Even with the large data set and motion blur, raytraced effects Maxwell Render was able to deliver a great looking job

Thanks again Next Limit!

Matt Hermans

[sandykoufax]

very nice job!

and good luck to you and your new company, Animal Logic Fuel.

[Hervé]

very nice...

[Bubbaloo]

Awesome work!