[brodie_geers]

For me the extra 3 sliders don't provide enough benefit. It's been a long time so I don't recall if there was a particular render speed hit but it was certainly more RAM. Have you tried bringing the MXI into Photoshop and using the Photoshop action? I've found the results to be basically identical to doing it in Maxwell. It gives you as many layers as you have lights and you can tweak the color and intensity for each layer individually.

In other news, it seems you can open an .IES file in notepad. Perhaps there's an easy button to simply increase the overall power there, but I'm doubting it. Lots of numbers, no explanation of what they do.

-Brodie

[Half Life]

I have an older version of Photoshop (CS2) which does not support the Maxwell Plugin -- CS5 is on my upgrade list, but until then I'll have to look in your general direction with envy

Also colormultilight animations are pretty cool -- I've been hankering to do a music video style animation when I get the time.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Here's link that details the contents of the IES file -- there is a multiplier value in there you can change:

http://www.kxcad.net/autodesk/3ds_max/A ... ormat.html

Best,
Jason.

[brodie_geers]

Ah, CS5 has been pretty nice, even just upgrading from CS4 (not that I'm using my own money, it's all the bosses). Content Aware is really pretty automagical.

Thanks for that link. I'll take a look and report back.

-Brodie

[Half Life]

Yep, that's the downside to not having a boss -- no bosses money to spend on goodies

I play with the demos for each version -- I've been using Photoshop since version 3... at one point in time I was an Adobe Certified Photoshop Expert, but they require experts to retake the test for every version and that's an extra $150 per version I'd like to keep in my pocket. I've always thought it was pretty stupid to pay people to tell you how smart you are ... I'm sure VTC would love it if I got certified in everything but who has the money for that.

Best,
Jason.

[brodie_geers]

Ya, I hear you. It's nice having the extra tools but in reality not much changes between PS versions (for us folks at least). Hard to shell out $700 or whatever the upgrade fee is for a couple tools that you don't really NEED.

-Brodie

[brodie_geers]

looks like I'll have to go with no ML. I optimized some things, got rid of some lights and optimized some textures without much change. Switching ML off, I was able to get to SL 1 in 5 minutes and the MXI is only 300MB.

By using half-life's suggestion, I was able to alter the IES data to increase the multipliers.

-Brodie

[gotoxy av-media]

thx bubbaloo for this info!
this will speed up my very large render (17000px x 7000px) tremendously!!!

otherwise it would write the MXI every SL...




munch

[Richard]

I've found my render times seem to have about trippled with V2 which seems might be due to the number of emitters now required as I previously had one emitter material and grouped emitters by geometry now I need ten on average! So it has really booted render times in the butt!

[rusteberg]

Funny, I've found render times have lowered while workflow times have been cut in half..... And that's without this real time preview thingy everyone is spanking off over...

[Bubbaloo]

I think you may be doing something wrong, Richard. Why do you need so many separate emitter materials? Slap the same material on multiple emitter geometry and voila, you have a group of emitters controllable by one slider in Multilight. No more worrying about joining geometry and multiplying wattage.

[Richard]

I think you may be doing something wrong, Richard. Why do you need so many separate emitter materials? Slap the same material on multiple emitter geometry and voila, you have a group of emitters controllable by one slider in Multilight. No more worrying about joining geometry and multiplying wattage.

That's actually my point Brian - Now every emitter channel for ML needs it's own material where previously it was just the case of grouping by geometry. Now every separate emitter group needs to be made unique and edited, a new mxm created and applied, my list of materials has now grown massively and the workflow close to doubled.

Here is an example material list for a full home exterior / landscape and includes 3 furnished internal rooms with downlights and lamps plus exterior lights. Previously I could use just two emitter materials and now look at the list - the emitters are highlighted. I keep the list short as the top material "WALLS INTERNAL" covers 15 different common materials in the 1 MXM via weights.

Seriously this was my biggest disappointment with V2 it is now slower and the workflow much greater - NL BROKE it massively IMHO! V1+ made light work of this!!

[rusteberg]

richard, you're such a wiener...

[numerobis]

[Mihai]