[aitraaz]

But you can't eat a tuna fish in the same time you eat a sardine.

interesting...

[tom]

Adehus,

Well, speed is quite important and this is obvious.
I'm just infront of comparisons. You can criticize as "this is slow for me".
But, it's not technically fair to say "this is slower than the other engine".
For benefits of everyone, the improvement in speed will always be
"the top issue" for Maxwell Team. Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,
Tom

[Mihai]

I honestly don't think there is any one factor that is more important than speed.

If that's true then why use GI in the first place? Biased or unbiased? Why not just take a screengrab of your ogl viewport and have your render in 0.001 seconds?

Time is not everything is it? There is a balance between quality and time, add to that the factor of setup time/ease of use/predictability and Maxwell suddenly doesn't seem that slow after all.

Ofcourse it won't be suitable for EVERY render you plan to do, at least not until hardware catches up with it a bit more but for those renders when you DO have time I bet you would like to use Maxwell for them and I also bet those are most likely the renders you will showcase on your website.

Maxwell also offers things like accurate light studies, just set up a location and time and you can show your clients what the illumination will be like. Try doing that with any other renderer.

If you have clients that want to make a change to a 3000x3000 GI render and expect that change to be done in a couple of hours than ofcourse you wouldn't use Maxwell and I bet you would be pressed for time with any other GI renderer as well, do these clients really not wait more than a couple of hours?
On the other hand one that is willing to wait until the next day seems more reasonable, even if I didn't have Maxwell I wouldn't like a client that expects instant updates. Who would, Maxwell or no Maxwell?

[aitraaz]

do these clients really not wait more than a couple of hours?
On the other hand one that is willing to wait until the next day seems more reasonable, even if I didn't have Maxwell I wouldn't like a client that expects instant updates. ?

No they don't wait a couple of hours. And being able to choose your clients for most people is a luxury...

...anyway agree with what you're saying better to be calm now and bet on overall quality....

(lightscape light studys werent accurate? (relatively of course)...all those years i've thrown away...)

[Maxer]

I'm getting a bad feeling about something, we seem to be getting some feedback from the more experienced users. Mihai and Tom are you on the top tier of Beta testers, do you actually get updates that the rest of us dont?

[Mihai]

adehus, the only "answer" for your situation unfortunately is that you wouldn't be able to use Maxwell for that render. I don't think it's realistic to expect Maxwell to be as fast or lets say just a little bit slower in all situations as a biased renderer and still do what it does.

We seem to be talking about extremes here, would a large complex GI rendering of an interior really take only 20-30 min with mentalray or vray including setup time and tweaks? With a glossy floor, and lots of detailed contact areas where biased renders usually give you splotches?

If 1 hour is the most you can wait for a render than obviously Maxwell will not be used. I also seriously doubt any other renderer will cope with that time unless you accept artifacts and either start covering them up in PS or hope the client doesn't go "what's this over here?".

Maxer, Tom is employed by NL, so I'd guess he has access to the latest versions I'm not on a beta team, I have the same version as everybody else....and I haven't rendered a thing in Maxwell for more than a month

[Maxer]

I agree

[thomas lacroix]

i agree, time's a luxury we most of the time cannot afford and i couldnt agree more on the fact that the client that feed you cant afford you to wait 50 hours only to change a seat fabrics for example ( nor do you), that simply isnt useable if it's not under 6 to 8 hours for a 2 K render not processed on a nasa rocket science comp, anyway maxwell is promising but we all crave to see it usable in production...

any teaser of things to come NL? october's in 15 days...

[thomas lacroix]

any teaser of things to come NL? october's in 15 days...

I'm dying to know something too... the responses I see on this thread from NL disciples make me concerned

W&S...

[true]

may be they will release it by 31 OCT 11:59pm...

just joking...I still love maxwell, I just hope to use it sooner for production purpose.

[Mihai]

So let's talk about less extreme examples. Consider a competing GI renderer that takes 10 hours to set up, and 6 hours to render. 16 hours total time for that end of things. On the other hand, for the same rendering Maxwell takes 15 minutes to set up, and 60 hours to render. See the problem? Client calls with changes- "OK, we can do it, it'll just take three days to get back to you with it." It just isn't realistic by any stretch of the imagination.

You know I agree with you adehus, right now the professional use of Maxwell is rather limited unless you have access to a pretty large renderfarm (assuming coop rendering will work) or can pay someone who does for the rendering.

But let me explain a bit my point of view on Maxwell and why I like it so much. I think about 6 years ago GI started really taking off and every 3D app had to have this feature. Remember the discussions? The rendertimes? Completely unusable. It took at least 3-4 years until computers caught up with it and people started using it seriously in production. Big animation studios started even later. Now you almost never see an arch viz render not done with GI.

So this evolution took about 4 years. But Maxwell was released to the public for not even a year and it's still very usable in certain situations. What it has done is bring a breath of fresh air to this business. It makes rendering fun again. It actually pushes you to really put lots of details in textures and modeling because you know in the end it will look fantastic, while with a biased renderer it's often hit and miss.

Computers don't evolve linearly, it's not going to take another 4 years for Maxwell to be as usable as biased GI is now. In one year from now our top machines will be garbage, thanks to the switch to multicores, and perhaps rendering add-on cards.

In the mean time, I agree with you, but I'm also looking to the near future and therefore I encourage this development to the fullest.

The most practical thing we can do for now is outsource the rendering to other people like daros, he has an 80 proc renderfarm I think.....or 50...

[Hervé]

well to jump in, the best bet for optimizing for now would be a good denoiser inside Maxwell algo... (not a stupid outside app that ruins in 5 seconds a 60 hours render...)

many times a render is fairly finished, but you have to double time just to try to remove that damn noise in the corner....

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[thomas lacroix]

i'll ad my comment also concidering the business use of maxwell, for most of us that use C4D we dont have access to that many renderer, and for most of us the competition raised when vray became the next render to follow, maxwell seems to be an alternative to help us stay within our app instead of going to another ( 3ds or viz not to mention) so yes my futur could be brighter if nl deliver on time with the appropriate speed boost, we bought a render engine, not a fancy gizmo that will be useable only in 4 years.

[Maya69]

yes thomas the time is the money

perso, i wait a vray for maya (october) and i must be work with vray

i like maxwell but if i don't speed render i can't work with maxwell.......


tom you are beta tester

the speed in release ?