[subaqua]

It would be really good if Maxwell can reuse its lighting calculations. Coz if you’re doing animation were only the camera moves, it would be nice to not have to recalculate every frame.

[Fernando Tella]

I agree. Don't know if it's easy to achieve, but would be great.

[Maya69]

i think nl work

but, may be maxwell render 2.0

[Maximus3D]

That's pretty much like baking, but baking the calculated solution and locking it so it won't need to recalculate every frame. It's a good one! it has my vote aswell. Although i have some trouble seeing how it could be done.. i think it requires some serious thinking heh

/ Max

[noouch]

This is another thing that could be filed under the category "every other renderer does it, so why can't maxwell?"

I believe vRay has something very similar called light cache, which is also similar to maxwell, with the only difference being that it traces the paths of rays and not waves.
I think caching the path of each wave would use huge amounts of memory, but it would surely be faster than calculating everything from scratch. And considering that most professional renderstations have more than 2 GB RAM, memory is less of an issue.

[Thykka]

Probably possible for fly-throughs, but not much else.. If anything in the scene (except the camera) moves, the lighting would have to be recalculated to keep it physically correct.

[-Adrian]

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i was under the impression that maxwell calculates lightpaths independent from the camera position so that the light situation is 'solved' no matter what angle you look at it (unlike GI methods). This would also explain why asmall adjustments to the camera settings (film iso, shutter, burn) can have an istantaneous effect on the render even if it used other settings in the hours before. Why depth of field isn't post-adjustable might be cause the effect relies on many iterations to clean up.

Could be all wrong though, i have only googled a bit about the topic

[Ernesto]

I do not kow if that is possible....
Due to the nature of image creation under Maxwell, it seems that is view dependable.
Meaning it should be calculated every time the camera changes...
Anyway in case I am wrong, of course I would love something like that.
We could render fast animations showing buildings or inanimated objects, like when using radiosity calculations....

Ernesto