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
- By Mark Bell
- By Mike Amos 20251018183343
- By Blanchett