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#399706
Thanks Tim,
Your answer is very useful to me ...
I am also on Mac and when Maxwell 5 was released I thought it was not worth updating because I cannot use GPU.
My work on Maxwell mainly concerns the creation of materials and probably only for this would be worth updating ...
The cost of updating is not high, I will probably wait for discounts

Thanks again for your availability :D

Leo
User avatar
By Nasok
#399714
No probs - just shoot me a line if you need any help or support on materials - personally I find Maxwell material editor more intuitive than other engines.
I actually think that materials a fairly straight forward - once you grab the core principle of how they are behaving and why - it'll be a swift job of creating those.
However - I believe that in many cases - when some materials are not looking the way we want them to look like it is not because we did something "wrong" in material itself, (i.e. used the wrong numbers or texture) but rather the rest of the scene. We tend to forget about other factors that dictate the look of the material - like it's environment, lighting, overall shape (very important), even camera settings - all of those are really working together and depend on each other.

Honestly, I would never thing that you have hard time with materials - your renders look awesome!! 🙌🏼
#399719
Thanks Tim you are always very kind.
Honestly I don't have great difficulties with materials, what I meant to say is that with the help of Maxwell 5 Substance Painter Material Assistant it could speed up my work.
As for the lighting and all the photographic aspects of the rendering, you are absolutely right ... for my works I often take inspiration from photographic shots and on websites such as flick'r you can also find the camera settings .... starting from this data helps a lot the final result ....

Thanks again

See you soon :D :D

Leo
User avatar
By Nasok
#399720
V5.1 - that has Substance Painter Material assistant (and bunch of other things like fixes and improvements) will be released very very soon .. I believe I'm not allowed to reveal the exact date :) but it is not the matter of a long time for sure - I mean - you've seen the lightsaber in first post (that's beta) so it is almost here :)

Studying photographic shots by professional photographers is, in my opinion, a very solid way of learning.

Also, if you would find yourself in a need of a good read - I would highly recommend - Light, Science & Magic
Image

By Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua - absolutely amazing book. This is its 5th edition - I have it (and I also had it in 4th edition) - and it is just as a work book. Beside some examples and explanation of things it also has practical light schemes with core principles to better understand the family of angle, the nature of light, surface .. camera lenses - wonderful read.

Even though it describes itself as "an introduction to photographic lighting" it has some very clever ideas and concepts.

Cheers!
User avatar
By Forester
#399721
Thank ou for the book suggestion. I checked this out, looking at the table of contents and some sample pages. Decided to purchase it. It looks like it would be a have a lot of utility! :D
By buffalo deal
#399727
Hi Nasok,
What is the difference between the fourth and the five edition as I bought the fourth some years ago when it was published. Is there something very new and very interesting to make me invest in this new edition?
Thank you,
Cheers
alex
User avatar
By Nasok
#399731
Hey Alex .. oh wow .. that's a question :) well .. it depends on your operating system in quite a number of cases.
For instance if you're on PC - then GPU is way better in V5 and even more optimised in V5.1 (which is almost released .. like really - almost) . .I'm on Mac so can't really compare PC's version.

Now, I have to say that I'm not a frequent Studio user - I mainly use Maxwell with Maya plugin. And I do use Maxwell Studio - time to time - but not really frequent - so my observations might not reflect heavy ussage.

Now, recently, I've got my hands on studio v5 - so I was doing testings - overall it felt more stable (especially in terms of FIRE preview) and generally less crashes.
In terms of what's new in studio: well, here is a page dedicated to it - https://maxwellrender.com/features/ - I believe major improvement came to MULTI GPU (as they re-wrote the entire code of it) .. but, since I'm on Mac - can't really comment on how good it is 🤷‍♀️ or how better it is in comparison with V4.

There are some noticeable add-ons ..like cloud rendering - this might be a small - but definitely a very handy feature for production houses and design studios (like where I work) - as in most of the cases we try to render on our machines - we even have a few machines dedicated specifically for rendering .. but sometimes when clients want everything .. tomorrow - we use render farms and if you haven't set up workflow with render farm previously - I can tell you - it is not user friendly and not as straightforward as it seems.

little off topic - I used to render quite often through Ranch Computing - render farm .. with V3 .. now recently tried to set up again with V4 - and boy I failed. Their in-house software doesn't fully work, freezes, crashes and some buttons simply do nothing when pressed - and since the workflow with that render farm structured that way that you have to evaluate your project first using their software (to pack it with all dependencies and stuff) - you physically can't even send it to render farm 🤷‍♀️ not even talking of estimating how much would it cost you ... but again, I'm on nac - maybe on windows their internal software works better .. this is just experience that I had - and it was right before the big project .. so eventually we outsourced some renderings to other parties.

That was a real-life scenario where cloud rendering that goes straight from Maxwell Studio - would help a lot. Might not be an everyday feature but definitely a great to have one.

Now what else ..
Substance Painter Material Assistant (that will be in V5.1 - in literally very short amount of time) - that is one of my favourite features - as I use Substance Painter quite often - ability to create Materials in just a few clicks - is perfect (and you can see a first post - that image of the lightsaber on the ground - has materials created with that assistant. Both ground and lightsaber's materials were created in under 20 seconds - isn't that crazy)

Colour Random - is my all time favourite here. It is just so cool to have that ability. So in procedural's section (I just wish they would add this to Maya plugin) now you have few new procedurals - Coloraturas Random is one of those. So if you have a group of objects you can add random colour blend on top of any texture channel. Say you have a Tree and each leaf has a same texture map you can add a different colour tint to every leaf. Specifying range ov hue values, saturation and value (lightness) so that every leaf on your tree will have a slightly different tint of green (for example) or it could be a group of objects where you want to have slightly variation in properties.
And it doesn't have to be just colour .. since it is everywhere - where you have texture ability .. it could be roughness - so that every object have slightly different roughness value .. or transmission ... imagine you have a few hundreds glass spheres - and want all of them to have different colour transmittance (few hundreds - ya?) .. or you can go more advanced like bump variation or for instance you have a few layers in your materials (say a layer with extra details or decals) you can add brightness variation to layer's mask - so that every object will have a slightly different influence of that details mask .. it's pretty powerful and allows you to add that little touch of reality to your renders.

. .it is like making your object in a little less than perfect position to make them look more natural, rather than pre-set and artificial.

Might be a small thing but definitely a very handy one. I've recorded a little tutorial about it :) should be out soon.

UV Random - does pretty much same thing but with UV tiles. It offset's your object's UVs with desired values so that every object will get a different portion of texture - that way same objects, that have same texture will not look too artificial (like wall tiles, or parquet floor, or pretty much any group of objects that carry same texture)

and .. I don't know, maybe it's just me, I believe I said it already - but it feels like it is rendering a bit faster. Or maybe I just became a little bette tin optimising my materials / scenes .. hard to say - but definitely a welcomed feeling :)))

Those are just my favourites .. there are some bug fixes also - https://maxwellrender.com/all-new-features/

Whether you should upgrade or not - well .. personally - I think that if you're using it professionally - the price is not high. and the software is NEW (as Barney Stinson say - NEW is always better) 😄 - and then you can have two versions :) if you're on PC - got more perks .. but for myself - even here on Mac - this release is pretty nice, but not because it has a ton's of new features .. for me it is more important to have a software that is predictable and reliable. Means it is easy to use and it is stable. Everything else is secondary :)

I don't know if any of these makes sense, hope it does :)
Cheers,
Artem.
By buffalo deal
#399735
Hey Artem,
Thank you for this reply very well sold :wink: but I was thinking about the book "Light Science & Magic" from the comments above.
That said, your appreciations about MR4 vs MR5 are more than welcome for me as I have not migrated yet.
I bought MR5 at its realease day, more to support Next Limit which where in a bad situation, than to use in production. I am still on V4 Studio and Maya plugin on Windows to do some simple renders in a small architecture office...
I'am really thinking migrate in the next few weeks, at the same time than Maya...I'am waiting MR 5.1
Yes, really whish to have a smooth workflow like direct link between Substance ecosystem (Designer, Painter & Alchemist) and MR...
For now, the settings in the map exporter from Painter seems doing a good job, thanks to Next Limit and developper to make this requested feature happened.
As I understood, the Material Wizard of MR will find all the maps needed for a specific material, if you set the path for one of them?

Never tested a Render Farm yet, as I know it's a big set up to do before sending the job... but the cloud rendering from Maxwell seems interesting.
As always, I use my computer during the day and render during the night... thanks to the Resume Render feature!

Thanks you for your time, and do not hesitate to comments the new edition of the book "light Science & Magic" :wink:
Cheers,
alex
User avatar
By Nasok
#399737
That's right Material Assistant for Substance Painter textures will work in that way - you basically select a texture (any texture from exported set) and assistant will automatically plug in all other associated textures from same material - however it's not just plugin them in .. like roughness to roughness, diffuse to coloraturas channels and so on - nope - it's waaaay more tuning happening under the hood .. I was testing it - and results are pretty impressive .. they do some adjustments to some of the textures where needed to better use Maxwell engine ... they map some textures to some channels that I wasn't thinking off - but ow after I saw it - it kinda makes sense .. my point is that is much more than just plugin in the textures in the right spot - it is also treating PBR textures (which are kinda less realistic than photo-based workflow) - so for me - what they do with SP textures is more valuable - since I wanted to use SP but I also wanted to keep Maxwell level of visuals (interns of colour bleeding, roughness variation, surface variation and etc) ... but yeah - it is literally click to select and you're done. (and you can select whether it is spec gloss or metal rough) - easy.

Cheers 🙌🏼
User avatar
By Nasok
#399924
Hey guys, here's another Maxwell material for grabs 🙌🏼
Image
Image
Image

Get it here: www.gumroad.com/tema
All textures are 4k (tile-able) and normal map is 16-bit (obviously :D )
When I was designing it I had a standard chocolate bar in mind so 1 uv tile covers around 20cm x 20cm surface area in real world scale.

Also, in the scene with yummy Marshmallows, I've used RandomColor procedural to give it a slight shift in colour, and I've included it inside this material so if you're a V5 user - you can benefit from that too.

Cheers.
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