[fv]

Hi, just made this model, took me a day and a day to get the materials right with in Maxwell Material editor.
http://homepage.mac.com/fillieverhoeven ... index.html

Most if not all of my time went into getting the displacement mapping for the bricks good enough and lots into getting the glass balconies right. It still isn't. The glass remains too dark after a SL of 14. Also the reflections seem to be off, it almost looks like the reflections on the inside show on the outside. The balconies are mirrorred for one side of the building.

I added the tree in Maxwell. All the rest modelled in Skechup and rendered in Maxwell.

Bricks have a displacement mapping. It took 20 minutes to for the render to start in Maxwell.

[Fernando Tella]

I think that you are getting refractions of a very thick (very, very thick) glass. It looks as if the balcony was solid glass. That may be because the glasses that make the walls of the balcony had lost some faces or the normals are inside out. Those are things that are hard to check in SU, but maybe you can recalc normals in Studio.

[fv]

thanks, I will check the normals in Studio, probably something wrong with the normals since the glass is only 10mm thick.

off topic,
I would also love to use network render but I gave up using my two inte 8 cores mac's to get it to work. Must be easy though but I don't have a few days to spare to understand how it worked. Well, I can always have 2 renderings made at the same time.

[fv]

I had some panes of glass with just one surface so indeed there was problem with my model. Repaired it and regretfully the reflections of mirrored glass panes is also mirrored. I will have to resort to not use mirrored glass. Hope this bug can be fixes as soon as possible.

[Mihai]

Can you post some images? I understand nothing

[messire]

- use ags glass!
- use normal bump map and no displacement which is useless at such distance of view and takes huge power and time!


Nils

[fv]

Hi Mihai, Nils,
will post my latest render tomorrow as it is rendering right now. Sorry Mihai, my post is indeed hard to understand. I had problems with glass and they turned out to be related to my model in SU. Sometimes I feel its all Maxwell's fault since I do not use Maxwell as much as I daily use Sketchup and Vectorworks.

Displacement gives such great results that I would really like to keep using it. Maybe on a distance on the web it seems overkill but on a print or zoomed in its crazy good. Its almost as if I modelled each seperate brick. Especially around windowframes and corners. It starts up slowly doing a lot of voxelization but when its on its quit fast. On my 8 core Macs its actually not a problem to have 2 good renderings finished overnight.

Problems remain in Studio where my exported models with components are often too corrupted to work with. I will send Pavol one of those recent corrupted files.

I never liked AGS glass. Often my models are used for complete renderings and also more closeup renderings. I rather keep my glass with a thickness for more realistic results. I will keep your advise in mind for when I am in a rush, thanks Nils.
Francois

[Richard]

I agree with you about displacement v's bump mapping - it seems there is some issue with bump under physical sky lighting!

I ran some tests using normal maps for brickwork - and ran the sun virtually straight down the wall, the bump was not at all visible except in shadowed areas! However using skydome the bump was very pronounced - which I must suggest seems to be a rather adverse result IMHO!

[fv]

This is a work-model I work on, just to check technical details of this building. So, not for presentation really, I would otherwise add more of a scene with trees and so on.
http://homepage.mac.com/fillieverhoeven ... index.html

As you can see the glass came out fine now. Am really sorry to have caused confusion about something nothing to do with Maxwell.

If you fine tune displacement it makes a big difference in rendering speed. Its not all that difficult and I find it easier to get right than a bump map as you seem to agree.
Francois