[iandavis]

I really don't know how this could work within the math framework of Maxwell's rendering engine, but using it just makes me frustrated that there are NO LIGHTS. To control light using the standard tools, spotlight, distant light, etc... they are invisible for one... and easily placed to fill shadows etc.

Having a realistic solution for my render is great, but the client doesn't always agree, and sometimes it's just a dealbreaker for a render to have zero control over lighting.

glowing objects is a great idea. Having a super realistic way of treating lamps, etc... great... but for a real tool having 'cg' lights is essential.

I know it's most likely planned for the final, but IMO this feature, even the addition of the three basics (distant, spot and point) would add SERIOUS power to the existing form of Maxwell. Even if they need to follow the existing math, ie. a glowing 3D surface/emitter, some sort of standardized maxwell-generated 'lights' that were easier to POINT and move, and speed up rigging a scene quite a bit. The unpredictable nature of glowing objects is driving me batty.

cheers

[Mihai]

Spotlight= place a small emitter inside a cylinder. Reuse it in all your scenes.

Distant= Move the emitting plane far away from the center of your scene.

Point= Make a small lowpoly sphere as your emitter.

It has already been stated that Maxwell will have it's own IES compatible format for lights, so we won't have to model everything. Although don't rely too much on IES, it is not so accurate as you think.

The best case anyway is to actually model the light fixture, then you get the best quality rendering.

Personally I don't think invisible lightsources would bring that much to Maxwell. Even in renderers that have them, I have almost never used them. In Maxwell it's pretty easy and far more realistic to brighten up a part of the image by working like a real photographer and placing a large plane with a very weak emitter or just a bright diffuse that will bounce more light.

For the situations when a client really doesn't care for realism and wants crazy stylized lighting, I don't think Maxwell will fit the bill and IMO it's a bit of a waste of time trying to make it work like all the other renderers, which is what we're trying to avoid in the first place.

[iandavis]

Firstly, I am a photographer, have been for almost 20 years. The problem with using the photography lighting paradigm is that lighting in the real world REALLY sucks. I don't like having to be constrained by the physical limitations in maxwell, the same ones I am in the real world when I shoot.

I want lights that can be made invisible, and cast no shadow.
I want lights that can effect only the colour of the object/refection, etc.
I don't want to be forced to use high quality lights all the time.
I do want to be able to add a slight glow, or rim lighting WITHOUT placing a big physical light in the space.

I render a lot of techno stuff like stainless machinery, Hard Drives, etc. Using physical sky is great, skydome... good... but after the last setup I did I found that the current maxwell light system doesn't offer the flexibility I need to produce a realistic render quickly. And that's the bottom line. I will most likely need to go back to Lightwave for that. It's not a matter of a bug or the product maturity.. it just doesn't currently have the toolset I need to set up a complex lighting rig quickly and without a lot of hassle with lights casting shadows, lights costing rendertime, lights adding noise, etc. etc. To me, and possibly many others, Maxwell represents a tool to create realistic renders without the need to FAKE the different aspects of the behaviour of real light. That doesn't mean however that the system should be devoid of the perks a virtual system has to offer!

No... I stand by everything I said. A lot of us, those who do use photographic lighting techniques actually DON'T want a physical manifestation of the real world. Frankly the real world SUCKS for lighting. Why should we bring THAT into the computer where it really doesn't need to be!

I have been doing this a while... I do know that the addition of virtual lights will make it possible to quickly get EXACTLY what we need to light a product. In the real world you need to jump through all kinds of hoops; watch reflections, hide wires, etc. Being able to avoid that is the primary reason maxwell appeals to me. So... yeah, you CAN accomplish pretty much anything if you use the existing object lights, in a physical manner... but sorry, for a production environment that's just a pain in the %%%.

My 2 cents.

Iandavis

[n1tram]

Have you heard of Vray, FinalRender, Brazil...? Those are some fine renders that dont care about real life.
Maybe thats your solution. But asking the nl guys to make another of those just doesnt make sense. There are more than enough renders that work that way. Take advantage of your knowledge as a photografer. Dont make those 20 years a waste. You can still make some crazy stuff with maxwell the way it is. (have you ever had a floating bulb with no cables?)

I love maxwell the way it is. A real life simulator.

Edit: I didnt mean to offend you in anyway. Im sorry if I did.

[iandavis]

absolutely no hostility. sorry if it sounded that way. No. I LOVE the physical realm aspect of Maxwell. And your point regarding it's focus are not lost on me.

My point however is about use by professionals. If I get frustrated and ditch it in favor of brazil... what does that mean? Well, it means that NL didn't move away from the target of having a real world simulator and by that lost me as a user.

If my concerns are wildly silly. Like, "I'm moving on unless you make Maxwell sing "maxwell silver hammer" when a render is done"... well, I'm willing to bet it would be an army of one. However, I don't think my frustrations trying to use this tool in the 'real world' are isolated. I don't have a huge amount of frustration doing renders for illustration or of my own models. I can light them and do them the way I WANT... And don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have bought the thing if I didn't love what it can do. I had to borrow the money from my wife you know.

No, my entire point was just so NL could get the sense that SOME pro users would appreciate having a few of the 'standard' CG tools for lighting. If they choose to do this by adding standardization and other niceties like direction indicators, falloff controls, etc. Then GREAT... If they chose to do nothing... Ummm... I'll still use it... you bet. I'm in love.

But hey, you gotta be a special kinda freak to do this job.

cheers all.

[n1tram]

NL, is there any chance to make a standard type of light that can be then adjusted by its geometry?

You model the receptacle, put the emiter in it (hence you can adjust wattage/intensity). And now the tricky part... Model a dielectric lense that could be modified in real time by ajusting a couple of values.

Say... The same way that you have standard and complex geometry object where you can define them by 3 or more parameters (example: Cilinder - Outer radius, iner radius, height, number of faces). We could have a new object called lense, which could be determined by its radius, its convexity, concavity and thickness.

There you would still be in the field of real life simulation, yet lighting would be easier.

I know that this isnt what you asked for Ian, but its something

[iandavis]

I want lights...
and material editor.
and faster rendering
and stand alone rendering
and
and
and a pony
and to kill Jar Jar binks with a shovel...
oh...
and a new Mac.
and spring break (also includes being 20 years old and in college)

ummm....

but... I guess i'd settle for incremental improvements over the next several months until october when final release is ready.

yeah... yeah, that's it... that's what I want.

[n1tram]

You forgot about the cookies... NEVER FORGET ABOUT THE COOKIES!!!

[Mihai]

iandavis, I understand what you are asking, they are not crazy requests......what bothered me is you saying there are no lights in Maxwell... I tried to give you examples. You want them to be invisible to the camera, that's another thing.

We have to also keep in mind that one of the appeals of Maxwell is the simplicity, or better put, the predictability. So today someone wants per object lights.....tomorrow, why not add a falloff different from the physically correct one.....and so on....so we kind of get back to every other renderer that's out there, which is a mess of different settings for which in 97% of the cases you are trying to make the scene look somewhat realistic and not like CG. It's funny also how a very frequently requested feature of mentalray used to be to be able to have visible light discs in the render!

What would work well I guess is to have a basic/advanced switches so if someone wanted to tweak beyond the physically correct, they could. Although I wonder how difficult this would be from a developers point of view...especially in terms of debugging when the number of combinations of realistic/unrealistic settings is increased.

[iandavis]

Mihai, that's it exactly. I was counting on always being able to load a model, click physical sky and get a realistic natural feeling scene. But maxwell has such power I was trying to render some rather boring machine renders for a composit I'm doing for a client... I was just frustrated with the absence of some of the tools I was used to.

As for NO lights, perhaps that's my bias. I don't actually think of the maxwell lights as LIGHTS... though they may behave more like lights then the 'lights' I use in LW. No, I liken them (from my LW biased view) to an object with the lum channel cranked up, lighting using radiosity objects in Lightwave is somewhat of a problem at best... so... therein lies my perception.

It also doesn't help that I cant seem to get predictable, speedy, or noise free renders using the maxwell emitters.



As for today lights... tomorrow ruin... well, like I've said elsewhere, software bloat is not the end result of added functionality... it's the end result of poor interface design and feature over proliferation. Shade is a good example, having been indevelopment for going on 20 years, it has almost the functionality of Lightwave, yet anyone who has used it would NEVER KNOW. It's context sensitive and has remarkable power. This was in my mind... the more contextual control users have at their disposal the more flexible the tool becomes. Photoshop is a good example of this. I have never met a pro photoshop user that couldn't show me a new way of doing something... and I have been using it since version 3...

Maxwell has bottomless potential. I just wanted to express how much I want to USE IT to replace my current solution. (Lightwave) for outputting photorealistic background plates. And for me, the addition of the 'function' I require is needed. I don't care how NL does it, that is, they can approach it from any angle.

it's a task based thing. Another example. In my work I need to render a background then animate something for the foreground and composite them. I don't know if maxwell has a 'shadow' surface capability.. a surface that renders the shadow density to the alpha channel and nothing to the colour channel. This allows animated maxwell objects to be composited into other applications. It seems like a small thing, but imagine the new users and uses such a small addition would allow. Now I could animate books and such in maxwell, and re-use them for many backgrounds.

I digress. I'm not disagreeing with you so much as chomping at the bit for a few much needed tools for doing various task specific jobs.

Cheers

Ian.

[n1tram]

Well... Life is strange and time consuming.

[Sergio Apodaca]

"....that lighting in the real world REALLY sucks"


Maybe the sun's light REALLY sucks, maybe the moon's light REALLY sucks, maybe the supernova's light REALLY sucks.

Strange thoughts to a photographer who REALLY sucks twenty years after.

[iandavis]

Sergio, if you ever shot 4x5 with studio strobes and a bunch of stainless steel 'objects' you will understand my reference to 'real world' lighting solutions for photography "sucks". If not... then I guess you will have to take my word for it.

I was discussing artificial lights not the physical sky.

and... "Strange thoughts to a photographer who REALLY sucks twenty years after." what does this mean anyway?

I was talking 'in comparison' to the lighting solutions I get to use for my CG imagery.

www.iandavis.ws

check it out, and feel free to critique my work.

[Nakonieczny]

I love that maxwell is "real" by default. But I think it will be great if I can "uncheck" some real things to increase speed or make it less "real" but more "good looking" (in fact we've got a little bit of this). Of course I know that for the nonrealistic rendering I still need lightwave, brazil, vray or so.
And i think that virtual lights (visible or not - for example: 60 W light bulb, canon eos flash bulb, etc. ) will be more realistic than flat emiting polys. Because my first try on the alpha was to model a bulb with a lightning wire (filament? hair-spring?) - realism it realism!
Of course that was stupid, its renders looong and was still not "real" because emitter must be a low poly. So. I think "full realism" its a utopia.
I only wait for people asking :"I choose Paris in my rhinoll city coordinates and I don't see a Eiffel tower reflecting in metal surfaces - its a bug, or maybe I need a update?" or - "I set shutter speed on 125 and I wait for first sampling level 8 hours - you must fix it!"

regards

Adam