[tom]

[WillMartin]

Well, I came up with different results than you. (I'm a LightWave[8] user with the M~R plug-in, btw.)

For the Maxwell side: My objects and their surfaces and their placement in this scene took about 35 minutes to put together. The objects are: a flat cube (the room), a sphere, a tube, four flat transparent color quarter circles (the "colored gels") and a small square emitter. MW's rendering for this took about 30 mins:



I am quite happy with this for the amount of time I spent on it. So, this morning it was time to see what LW would do with this scene without M~R. The modeling and placements of the objects were all done so the only set-up I really needed to do was change the surfaces settings back to being LW native and replace the M~R emitter with a LW light (a LW spotlight specifically). After a half-hour of fiddling with settings this is the best I could come up with for the same set-up (note that only two of the four coloring gel pieces are in front of the tube--but no color in the LW version here) was this, that took about eight minutes to render:

(I'll just say instead that the results were not pretty in the slightest.)

For the LW, I had all realism settings in place: caustics, radiosity, raytrace transparency, etc. I have been using Lightwave [8] for a year and this is the best I can come up with for this scene (shining a single light onto a disco ball in LW). I bought M~R a couple of week ago (but have only set up two scenes prior to this one).

Granted, the M~R one took longer to render (M~R is still in BETA remember), but comparing the amount of time I spent on setting up on and the coool end result compared to the LW native results... :):)

P.S. - Regarding Chris_TC's post above: a) Where's the color gel(s) in front of the light to give the rays some fun color? b) How/why is it extra work to make the ceiling be allowed to be hit with light in your rendering software? c) I believe that "caustics" doesn't have much to do with what disco balls do. The little mirrors are simply directoly bouncing the light rays (the same as goofing around with a hand mirror in the sun).