Maxwell Render | Official public forum

A rendering of an old naturalist's flea observation glass. Unfortunately after SL16 there is still noise in the glass. Modeled in modo.

Wow, incredible materials.

nice work - materials are great, just that cork lets the scene down (bottom left) imo. It looks too flat, maybe need some bumb or something, or perhaps the roughness is to low?

This one is definately great! wow, the materials just blew me away. best and most realistic material i've seen so far. Btw, i saw it yesterday at the Modo forum. How did you do that material ? it's perfect! please post a wire of your scene.

Lovely work on both the modeling and rendering.

/ Max

Yep, lovely work and materials!!

Dazzling scene, very nice indeed. I really wonder if it's possible to catch the same realism when you render the same scene with any other engine.

Beautiful

Thanks guys, for all your generous comments. Since I posted on the modo and Maxwell forums I have been asked in both to see a version rendered in modo. So here is what I came up with in modo. Please feel free to share your opinions on both the images. Before I give you my two cents on the subject here are the stats on both renders.

The Maxwell image rendered at 700x1000 took about 23 hrs to render on a single P4 3.4GHz machine, since it is an unbiased renderer I won't go into further render settings. The modo image took 15 hrs to render at the same resolution but on two machines (using write buckets to disk/skip existing bucket), one being the same one as the one above i.e. P4 3.4GHz and the other a dual T2300 @ 1.66GHz. Other render settings were: AA @ 16 samples, Refinement shading/threshold @ .15/5%, GI with 3 indirect bounces, a ray threshold of .01, Irradiance Rays @ 2000, and rate at 2.5. Most surfaces were set to have blurred reflections@ 512 rays. Both images were lit by the same three luminous objects/emitters, I am not going into the watts, lumens, Kelvin etc, I just eyeballed the scene to come up with similar intensities, as you can see I may have been off on the backlit source in the modo image.

So here are my two cents, I have been using the modo renderer for the last few months and modo itself for almost two years now and Maxwell for a year and a half so this is not a question of loyalty to any one app, I like and use them both.

In this project the ease of setup, the quality of the image itself and surprisingly the render time made Maxwell the better bet. I started by importing the objects (modeled in modo) into Lightwave, did not setup anything just added the Maxwell plug-in to the surfaces and exported it as a Maxwell scene and then did the composition and surfacing in MW studio. Surfacing was extremely fast (no presets used either) and I got the results I wanted in about two hrs with very few test renders. In comparison took me a very long time to set it up in modo, partly because I was recreating the scene to match the one created in MWStudio and this was time consuming and a definite challenge. I wish I had done the composition and surfacing in Lightwave making it easier to import it both into modo and Maxwell with largely the same parameters. I also felt surfacing required more trial and error and I felt bogged down by the speed of the iview to give me an accurate feedback. I think this was largely due to the fact that an indoor scene lit with luminous geometry really slows down previews/renders. In addition after fiddling with the render settings for about six hrs I was pretty certain I have did not have the optimal settings for this project. Everyday at work, the ability to play with various render settings in modo is great; I am able to control how much time I spend and the quality I will get from a render. In this case I wanted the best possible output but after hitting F9, I just wasn't sure all the bases were covered and did not have the time to experiment further.

I am not going to comment on the images themselves since the idea of posting it in a forum it to get comments from you guys. I find it amusing that in all this, Lightwave still managed to make itself relevant in the pipeline. Next Limit, a modo plug-in, perhaps? Luxology, an available SDK, maybe?
Thanks

Thanks for this comparision silba. Very nice Modo render, too.

incredible materials !!!