All posts related to V2
By Polyxo
#372959
eric nixon wrote:What's wrong here? - your settings/geometry problems, hence the noise, so why let it render? The noise is saying , hey theres something wrong.
If you create an SSS material, apply it to a cube and start rendering... does the material look clear right away on your
machine? Were you able to judge the look of a tiny surface structure? I can say that this isn't possible where I sit.

My point wasn't complaining - but I would agree with Martin that predictions on certain subtle material properties
are really hard to make currently. That is not to say that persons who do little else professionally than rendering might
be able do develop certain instincts but one certainly can not see what's wrong :).

The mesh in question btw is not greatly more complex than a cube, it's all quads and closed and nice, the sss material is
a basic preset one - the only thing I did that I added the nor_foam.jpg from the default material library at a
high tiling rate. Actually I still don't know what went wrong... here's a downsized version of the raw render and I swear
that there was no chance to see this triangulation artifact at Fire res/low sampling levels.
My personal guess is that MW treated that Normal map with the same criteria it uses on Bump maps where high intensity
multipliers lead to shading defects too - but this should actually not be the case with Normal maps: They have a baked in depth
and typically should be used at 100%. Or MW doesn't like the Normal map at such small tiles...
Whatever the cause is - I could see the defect far too late for my liking and Fire didn't help either.
User avatar
By Tok_Tok
#372964
I know it's pretty easy to produce some fairly decent materials, but if you need to dig deep into complex materials, the render speed and the cumbersome material preview is a big problem
+1
Had this request years ago but I haven't been heard yet :( The preview image in the editor is way to small, I'm surprised no one at Next Limit has run into this..
User avatar
By eric nixon
#372999
My personal guess is that MW treated that Normal map with the same criteria it uses on Bump maps where high intensity
multipliers lead to shading defects too
Correct, yes the tiling was too high for the intensity, it works the same as bump maps.
but this should actually not be the case with Normal maps
Incorrect, see above :wink:

Tok Tok, if you need a close up use the floor preview. I think its fairly obvious that a bigger preview in mxed would be slower to use, its a compromise. Personally I use fire a lot with mxed for interactivity and so the small image is needed for realtime interaction.

I do think that complaining that stuff doesnt work, or that NL have designed something wrong is a bit silly because as of 2.7 almost everything does work.. (caveat: I'm using the C4D plugin, cant speak for other workflows). I cant remember seeing noise in any renders in the last six months, I churn out maybe a hundred test renders every day, theyre normally clean by sl12-13 in around 4 minutes on average, (12 cores @3.7). Ok I'm not rendering interiors, thats a different situation, but for general designing maxwell really allows the designer to see their design almost instantly.

So whats missing? well,... it needs decent documentation (the think website makes me laugh, the info is so spartan, hard to find, and often just wrong. Maybe its improved, I dont know, I never went back...) The old 2.5 manual is still a good read though IMO.

A dirt shader / or AO shader would be awesome.

It would be nice to setup group mapping more easily. For example, say I want to see a 'paint plash' across a group of objects, currently I have to embed that channel into each mxm in the group which is too much clicking.

Using image sequences as textures would be nice.

Controlling light falloff without modelling baffles would be great.

Organic procedurals would be really useful for texturing large rocky landscapes.. and other things.

Thats all can think of right now.
By photomg1
#373002
eric nixon wrote:
. I cant remember seeing noise in any renders in the last six months, I churn out maybe a hundred test renders every day, theyre normally clean by sl12-13 in around 4 minutes on average, (12 cores @3.7). Ok I'm not rendering interiors, thats a different situation, but for general designing maxwell really allows the designer to see their design almost instantly.

my personal new wish is for Next limit to pay Eric to do some tutorials for us .

That is not a joke eric ! your knowledge of maxwell has always impressed me and your ability with its materials has floored me before .

sl 12-13 with no noise , I want too. 100 test renders a day I also want . :D

where in London are you Eric ? might try and apply to be your teaboy so I can peer over your shoulder whilst you work :lol:
Last edited by photomg1 on Fri Nov 08, 2013 8:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
By Polyxo
#373003
eric nixon wrote: Correct, yes the tiling was too high for the intensity, it works the same as bump maps.
but this should actually not be the case with Normal maps
Incorrect, see above :wink:
Well, as already stated above - I beg to differ and had deliberately set the Normal map to 100%.
Normal maps differ from Bump maps insofar that they have an inbuilt multiplier. Everything in them is hard-coded, vectors
and intensity - that's why one can not edit them in Photoshop without breaking them.
When outputting such maps from say a digital sculpting app, setting them to 100% is the expected value - it's somehow
like with 32 bit vector displacement maps which also have an inbuilt intensity factor, which is the only value to make such
maps work properly.

Even if you were correct... then it was still tremendously helpful to get earliest possible feedback by the renderer.
Helpful in that respect was if one could globally turn off SSS for test renders (with a single checkbox) in the way one can also turn
off displacement.
User avatar
By seghier
#373004
eric nixon wrote:
So whats missing? well,... it needs decent documentation (the think website makes me laugh, the info is so spartan, hard to find, and often just wrong. Maybe its improved, I dont know, I never went back...) The old 2.5 manual is still a good read though IMO.
that true ; pdf documentation or html like in 3dmax or rhino is useful ; i can't use think website
i hope maxwell team make pdf copy of the help; that is not impossible :)
User avatar
By Tok_Tok
#373008
eric nixon wrote:Tok Tok, if you need a close up use the floor preview. I think its fairly obvious that a bigger preview in mxed would be slower to use, its a compromise. Personally I use fire a lot with mxed for interactivity and so the small image is needed for realtime interaction.
Just to fight fire with fire; I think it's pretty obvious that computers have gotten a lot faster since MR 1.5 and that you honestly can't see any detail on such a small image. Another thing that's pretty obvious is that the floor scene isn't usefull for a lot of materials - that's why we have multiple preview scenes.

I know you could edit materials via Studio with fire but I just don't want to start another program for that. Also, I always work from 3ds max -> MXE or directly in the MXE.
I really think I'm not the only one working this way and I certainly don't see the issue making the preview image scalable.
User avatar
By Mihai
#373015
PDF more useful? How?

- the format is fixed, you can't add a long list of things or images and still stay on the same page
- you can't search easily and get instant results of searches
- there is no related content at the bottom of pages
- you can't organize the info in distinct categories and subcategories
- videos are much easier to see on a web page than in a pdf
- lastly for us to update something in one page takes a few seconds compared to updating and reposting a PDF, and then telling all the customers to download again the updated PDF. Imagine this happens maybe once every week, where we need to update some plugin release info, we discover a mistake somewhere and so on....

You have got to be joking....
By Polyxo
#373023
seghier wrote:i can't see videos ; and i can't wait hours to see one page i need pbf and it very useful.
Offering online Help resources exclusively of course may have big advantages, for the user but even more so for Next Limit: Content can get updated
effortlessly, therefore I can well understand what Mihai says. But such offerings of course require speedy internet connections.
I find quite remarkable, that among the makers of web publishing tech (CMS's etc.) there seems no interest at all to support regions with shaky internet
or no connection at all. It should be absolutely doable to write all online content into just one offline browsable document, including all page layout features,
slideshows, embedded film clips etc. It even should be possible to link this document to the online version, to check for updated versions and to only replace
content which actually got changed.
The shared expectation of all these web-framework developers seems to be that all people are online at all time anyway and that everybody is perfectly
content with causing traffic for the same data over and over again.

@seghier, if your internet connection is so unrelable you might profit from using HTTrack or similar website copiers. If you run it overnight you
should be able to download all help files and things hopefully look similar to the website.
User avatar
By choo-chee
#373045
photomg1 wrote:
eric nixon wrote:
. I cant remember seeing noise in any renders in the last six months, I churn out maybe a hundred test renders every day, theyre normally clean by sl12-13 in around 4 minutes on average, (12 cores @3.7). Ok I'm not rendering interiors, thats a different situation, but for general designing maxwell really allows the designer to see their design almost instantly.

my personal new wish is for Next limit to pay Eric to do some tutorials for us .

That is not a joke eric ! your knowledge of maxwell has always impressed me and your ability with its materials has floored me before .

sl 12-13 with no noise , I want too. 100 test renders a day I also want . :D

where in London are you Eric ? might try and apply to be your teaboy so I can peer over your shoulder whilst you work :lol:
I've said it before.... we need maxwell to install with perfect materials, not this "sample library"....
User avatar
By Ernesto
#376042
joaomourao wrote: their main goal is not money for sure! There are a lot of companies doing just that...
If you think about it a bit, you can easily understand this is the hard way for Next Limit, so they are on it for a reason... a thing they really believe in, QUALITY!
Interesting....

I believe in quality also. But I do not see quality as the counterpart of money!
There are lots of companies / people that works very well offering quality!
You are right quality is not a product for everybody, if you deliver quality to someone who do not want quality, you might be loosing money! but it is you fault, because you didn´t filtered your clients.

Ernesto
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

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