[Frances]

So, I have a new client, an interior designer who is doing this beach house. He's never had viz of his work before. Since I'm his first. I'll be gentle with him.

Anyway, I did some very early prelims with Maxwell out of Rhino and sent them to him:



He was delighted with what I had done so far. I had intended to import into Max and use Vray for the production renders, so I sent him another progress render from Vray.



He was rather disappointed with this one - he said the first one looked almost like a photo, but not the second one. I had several problems with color mapping and I'm having a devil of a time trying to get rid of the noise on some of the surfaces and to get bump on the carpet. This really is a user issue, not a software one - I'm not finding the new methods easy at all.

So now I've promised him I'll do the final in Maxwell. It may kill me though. I've warned him that there will be noise in low-light areas, but he seems okay with that.

[Hervé]

good story.... but what's up with the end.... you're happy or not...?

he 's right (the interior designer)... the "veeré" render looks like nothing.... I've never used Vray, but I heard it is very tough....

Nice render with Maxwell....

so You work for interior designers... pretty cool... I wish we had a couple here in Luxembourg.....

keep updating, I am curious to see the final result !!

you rock Frances... he he

[Jason Jacobs]

So, Fran, what did you learn from all of this?

::Dont give your clients a taste of filet mignon and the swap it out for a McDonalds hamburger patty::

For any slowbies, Maxwell is the filet mignon and V-Ray is the hamburger patty.

BTW - nice maxwell render. It looks very soft. Is this straight out of Maxwell or did you soften it?

[aitraaz]

yeah with vray you need to tweak a lot more more to get better results, i suppose that if you use vray with only sunlight maxwell will give a superior result...but anyway if the client prefers maxwell and has no problems with a bit of noise, go for it (if it doesnt kill you):)

[ki_cz]

vray can produce fantastic results. Although it isn't as accurate, or in most cases beautiful as maxwell, it's still a terrific render engine, definitely not low end. The results you obtained from vray are definitely sub-par for the renderer. I'm just saying that vray isn't exactly a hamburger patty, it's still powerful, and people achieve fantastic results with it, usually in far less time than it would take with maxwell as well.

[Jason Jacobs]

Hi ki-cz. I was only kidding. I'm a V-Ray user myself. And yes, it is a powerful program. But since we're in the Maxwell forum, it's OK to say things like that! And judging from your number of posts, I'd say that you're not yet a Maxwell "convert".

[rivoli]

oh come on, everybody knows what a great renderer vray is. there's no need to come here to point that out over and over again each and every time someone says the word "vray" in a post.
plus fran is a long time vray user and she sure knows how to use it, and i'm pretty sure she didn't mean to feed this pointless "maxwell vs the others" flow of posts.

btw, good job so far fran.

[Hervé]

PS. I saw a lot of pessimists here and no word from NL team. It's not a good sign.

... are you sure...?

[ki_cz]

Hi ki-cz. I was only kidding. I'm a V-Ray user myself. And yes, it is a powerful program. But since we're in the Maxwell forum, it's OK to say things like that! And judging from your number of posts, I'd say that you're not yet a Maxwell "convert".

Took you too seriously I guess in the end.

I'm definitely on the way to being converted, but at the moment, I just can't sacrifice the amount of time I save with vray, hopefully 1.0 is at least a *bit* faster, but who knows, maxwell does some incredibly complicated calculations. I didn't mean for this to turn into a maxwell vs. the others thread, I was merely saying that picture #2 really isn't a good example of the capabilities of vray.

[slobodan]

Fran,

What are the rendering times for both renderers?? Or at least how long did it take for Vray one?
I don't want to start anything, just curious.

Slobodan

[Frances]

The Maxwell render was 120 minutes. The Vray render was like 30 min. with calculations (IR/LC). Using QMC/LC gave better (though still noisey) results, and took about 90 min.

Vray is an excellent renderer. I've made over $50K with it over the last 12 months. That's working part time from my home. Also, it's not just $$$ that proves to me that it is a good tool for production rendering, but the client satisfaction from the renders I produced. And the personal satisfaction. Some of my personal favorites were produced with VRay. So I guess I know how to use it. Anyone who uses Vray and particpates at their forum, has seen my work. They can decide for themselves if I know what I'm doing.

My original workhorse was radiosity, but bump mapping is funky and forget about glare on your wood floors. But Vray has issues too - small, skinny stuff gets messed up. Things get aliased against a background image. Color mapping is way weird - either your burn everything or there's a grey cast or serious over/under saturation. Blurry bitmaps. And the noise. The main gripe from the client was the noise on the tables in the Vray render. I spent ALL DAY yesterday searching the Chaos forum and trying endless tweaks to fix the blurry bitmaps and get rid of the grain.

I forgot to mention that I had set MW up to render overnight. When I got up this morning, I found that it had crashed after 58 min. It's like having a snake by the tail sometimes.

[Eric Lagman]

When is this project due. If you can hold it out for a few weeks you may have a more stable copy of Maxwell in your hands. I have seen your past work with vray Frances, and it is very good. Why does your vray render not look like your past vray renders. Did they change up the software on you? If you are using that "unbiased" setting vray has now to compete with maxwell why not go back to the reliable radiosity route. It just seems like texturing in the rhino plugin would suck bigtime since you cant even see a preview in the open gl viewport of what the texture will look like. Good luck whichever route you go. Keep us updated with samples if you can as the work progresses.

[tom]

Very nice work Frances!

[Frances]

Hi Eric,

I switched to Vray 1.47 from 1.09 a couple of months ago. Like I said, I spent a lot of time trying to fix the problems I was seeing.

For the preliminary Vray render, I had done the following:
- glass excluded from GI and shadow-casting to prevent noise
- bitmap filtering basically disabled to fix blur (the fabric and carpet are good, high-res textures)
- upped samples on Vray lights and glossy reflections to 30 to prevent noise
- tried every variation of QMC and AA settings I could think of to prevent noise, get more distinct textures and better bump-mapping

I introduced a direct light to see if more "hard" light would improve bump mapping. I was in the middle of tweaking contrast and saturation when I got a call from the client about the preliminary Vray render. So I knew that the scene needed a lot of tweaks when I sent him the image, but I had indicated to him that is was just to check the scale of some of the furniture.

Sometimes I don't like my job. The Vray process was still in flux, but I had to send him progress and he wasn't happy with it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that this is due like, Tuesday.

[Hervé]

..... I've made over $50K with it over the last 12 months. That's working part time from my home......

Wow I think I'll move to Virginia...

Bravo Frances !
(I'll never make money really... I am so lazy...)