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Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 4:36 am
by renbry
Hi all,
We just finished this ad for Pure Blonde (a Beer Company in OZ)
Maxwell was used extensively for the crystal temple and critically, for the collapse at the end. It was a pretty quick turn around and I chose Maxwell because of the reliability of the raytracing and control it gave for giving glossy/frosty, complicated surfaces. We needed to iterate up the quality whilst still having a complete image sequence for comp to start working on in Nuke, using the 32bit Float EXR outputs. While the dataset was almost 5 gig per frame for the most complicated shots, Maxwell only needed up to 2GB in memory to render it...amazing.
One shot needed to be rendered stand alone (outside of Maya) due to the memory required by maya to have the scene loaded and translated out (over 10 gig...) but we used Rush Render Queue to batch render from Maya/Maxwell and Maxwell Standalone.
We still did use Mentalray for a few wide shots which were approved early in the lookdev and the typical ambient occlusion/data passes for comp tweaking, but Maxwell essentially delivered a 'beauty' pass which was able to be exposed and graded to suit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWEMf0GG ... r_embedded
Matt
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 4:46 am
by renbry
two of my favourite frames from the destruction sequence...
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 5:11 am
by Bubbaloo
Nice job! Did you render motion blur or was it added in post?
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 6:28 am
by dmeyer
Very nice

Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 10:06 am
by renbry
Bubbaloo wrote:Nice job! Did you render motion blur or was it added in post?
whilst i could, and did render motion blur initially, we had to vector blur soley because temporal sample alignment between Mentalray and Maxwell was not a known factor. I will do a sphere test eventually to see if they're both centre-biased and whether shutter timings/angles relate.
The slowdown was about ~1.5x with motionblur enabled, but due to the iterative nature of the Maxwell Sample Level i felt it was reasonable to progressively render up to final quality; it was simply a compositing consideration to keep samples aligned between the two renderers.
P.s THANKS!
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 1:06 pm
by tom
Fantastic!
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2010 12:57 am
by renbry
Leggo's Rhapsody in Red
This is another ad we did last year with Maxwell and Realflow. It was a Tomato Sauce product which shows tomatoes responding to classical music before exploding into sauce and draining into the packaging.
Maxwell was used for all the tomato liquid shots and all tomatoes flying around (not the intial macro shots) They had 'spritz' and sweat applied to them via a second, displaced surface which was a water material to optically glint. Spritz Particles where meshed in Realflow and put through the same render for amazing defocusing unique to Maxwell Render.
The final liquid explosion at the end of the spot pushed our pipeline to the limit. At that time we still mostly had 32bit windows @ 2GB Ram which mean I had to squeeze 7 million faces through Maxwell 1.7 x86 AND motion blur it...
It was a great job because of Maxwell. We were able to achieve photo realism because of the number of real-world controls in the renderer; defocusing, lens abberations and spectral lighting were all relied on to get the shots delivered.
Spot is linked here:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/index.php?pa ... &mode=html
Video direct link here:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/data/project/87/mov_00.mov
Some of my favourite frames:
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2010 8:29 am
by Hervé
hey very nice...

Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2010 12:43 pm
by tom
This tomato thing is one of my fav of all times. Great idea and realization!
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2010 4:13 pm
by sandykoufax
wow very nice work and interesting ad.

Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:06 am
by renbry
Lexus - A Beautiful Contradiction
We recently finished a spot for Lexus which used Maxwell Render for 95% of the work involving their latest 2011 model doing laps on a 'tilt platform' precariously situated at the edge of a cliff overlooking stormy ocean tides.
The Lexus model was CAD data which we surfaced in Maxwell with carefully matched materials in a controlled environment to which we then placed onto the platform and into the shots. All lighting and surface behaviour was reliably rendered thanks to Maxwell Render dependible physically-correct shading models. Compositing was minimally required to get the car to match in with some live action shots.
The only 5% which wasn't Maxwell was Mentalray matte passes for faking the HMI headlights which, due to Maxwell's current optimisation of 'strongest emitter first' we couldn't clear up in reasonable time (personally I preferred the Maxwell headlights!!)
Another interesting challenge was in the metal plating had a very interesting moire/micro shadowing pattern which initially meant instancing high res geo, but without motion-blurred instances support we were facing 47+ million polygons. Believe it or not Maxwell WOULD render it, but Maya couldn't export it easily and needed 16gb of ram to export; so optimisation to a lower res panel needed to be built to stay within Maya's limits.
Spot Page:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/index.php?pa ... &mode=html
Direct Video Link:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/data/project/118/mov_00.mov
Some of my favourite frames:
img_00.jpg
img_01.jpg
img_02.jpg
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:31 am
by Half Life
Awesome!

Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 8:18 am
by devista
ufffffffffff
maxwell powerrrrr
saludos
luis
Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 8:43 am
by Hervé
awesome as always !!

Re: Fuel VFX's Maxwell Render work
Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 12:22 pm
by chaad

I have no words