Maxwell V2 is out
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@whaat said:
@kwistenbiebel said:
The fastest workflow I experienced using any render engine,especially in terms of material and light setup!
That's a very strong statement.
True, though. Kwist is absolutely right.
I own both Maxwell and Indigo, but I hardly use Maxwell anymore. This is due to SkIndigo.
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@whaat said:
Time for new computer!
The MacPro (using Windows) that I bought a year ago has proven to be my best investment ever. The 8 core Xeon costed twice as much as the usual 4 core rig, but it easily tripled the joy of working and productivity. I took the thing with me to Australia as I can't miss it.
@whaat said:
Any chance we could quote you on that on the Indigo website?
I meant what I said. Material setup is literally a 2 second thing. I always start with clicking one of those material presets and quickly change some numbers. Done. (I am using Skindigo 1.1.15 for now but I want to upgrade to 2.x).
Feel free to quote . I feel special now
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@unknownuser said:
I own both Maxwell and Indigo, but I hardly use Maxwell anymore. This is due to SkIndigo.
I can say the same about Fryrender. Bought it, but hardly ever use it anymore.
Developers should understand that the bridge to the host app (in this case Sketchup) is crucial!
You can have a superb render engine, but with a crippled SU plugin, it's worth nothing. -
Hm, yes. At the very least, both NL and RC should implement a material making workflow similar to SkIndigo's. That, I think, would make their respective products far more usable to SU users. Or at least to the ones who, like me, couldn't care less what the IOR of a mat is, or how many layers of varnish it has in real life.
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Yeah I'm probably over critical from past experience with Indigo and admit to not having tested the latest version. I was always waiting for a dumbing down of terminology before I went there again.
I did download the latest version the other day prompted by chris the new zealand distributor so will give it a run again!
I think I gave up earlier (though I liked the results) I couldn't get my head around the material blending setup for including weathering and dirt maps that required me to have all materials in scene and the problems that caused when doing a purge and the inherant issues of large maps in SU! I should investigate more I guess OR just not make niave comments. Hopefully those issues are overcome now!
I do wonder though how without a studio type feature you guys do quick tweaking of materials - does this mean you need to open each material individually in the editor? and how you adjust light intensities without a Multilight type feature or is there one? And how do you handle heavy poly scenes?
Must say I really do like the auto subdivide feature for displacement - one of the benefits obviously of having a good plugin developer!
Whaat BTW have you seen the MXM reporter pluging that a guy posted to the forums here, makes material linking so easy and something work considering in Indigo's workflow!
Kwist? I'm not sure what you mean about distructive? You don't have to use studio, though for me on a recent project it was a godsent (stack of similar renders for one project builder 30 scenes), I just modelled my scene in SU with materials named and then exported the scene out shut down the render and then dragged into a fully setup MXS (studio file) where I had all materials to be used over the range of renders and then just used the "replace all new with existing" feature and then tweaked material colours or drag / dropped alternatives. Really simple and amazingly fast!
I just modelled in SU using feally bold colours or low res B/W bump maps with wild colours added through SU material editor (like blue or red, green etc) so modelling, nav and that darn SU material browser popup (f...!!!) is all kept fast - no linking, no fuss! This I guess is one of the things that I do enjoy about MR the ability to work in a stack of different workflows!
I'm also keen to see now how the material blending works as said earlier just couldn't get my head around it earlier and the distructive issue of the UV's then if the geometry was edited was a downer! Though it is one feature that has it over the others that UV's for each blend map can be assigned in model! Also to see how weight mapping is handled, I've come up with a simple way of making all my lowpoly interiors for exterior scenes use just the one map and one MXM - beats the pants off having multiple materials to deal with!
BTW is there a multilight type feature for Indigo?? These days I'd be a bit lost without that, I've become very lazy!!!
Seriously I'll check out Indigo out again, I haven't gone through the documentations or all the features but clearly from the comments it has seen some major improvements!
@ brodes - mate I've only tested on XP 32bit at this stage, will test on Vista 64bit soon!
I'm blown away by the improvements in Bump map results by the way it's almost like your using displacement now! And the new AGS wizard (although I didn't like it at first) is so cool once you play with it, so easy now to set good glass!
Still I yern for a better way to handle IBL's with respect to location and channel intensity!!!
Not so happy with the conversion of 1.7 materials > 2.0 materials.
And hopefully soon they overcome the bug when using physical sky that the first emitter in the emixer has to be turned off or the scene turns to snow!
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Richard,
Good comments. I'd have to agree that Studio is definately a plus. As you say, one doesn't have to use it (it would be nice if the plugin was such that this were more true than it is) but it's there if you want it. As I've said before, I don't know how one would do an arch-viz scene with lots of trees/cars without it.
I hope vista doesn't have the problems you've had with XP. But you're just getting Vista 64? Man, Windows 7 is coming out in, like, a week! By all accounts it solves a lot of the crap which Vista has.
I am excited about the bump. I haven't had much chance to play with it in the demo but it's exciting that it and normal mapping are working as they always should have.
-Brodie
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@unknownuser said:
I hope vista doesn't have the problems you've had with XP. But you're just getting Vista 64? Man, Windows 7 is coming out in, like, a week! By all accounts it solves a lot of the crap which Vista has.
I am excited about the bump. I haven't had much chance to play with it in the demo but it's exciting that it and normal mapping are working as they always should have.
-Brodie
No mate my laptop runs Vista (grrrrr, shit!) yeah I've been waiting for 7 before I spring for a new machine!
BTW B/W bump maps seem to do REALLY well now too! I think they heard you and I ranting in that long bump issue thread!!!
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@richard said:
I do wonder though how without a studio type feature you guys do quick tweaking of materials - does this mean you need to open each material individually in the editor? and how you adjust light intensities without a Multilight type feature or is there one? And how do you handle heavy poly scenes?
I usually do it by going back in to skindigo and editing the material there, you can then re-export just the materials in the scene (so you dont have to export the mesh again, big time saver with large models.)
@unknownuser said:
BTW is there a multilight type feature for Indigo?? These days I'd be a bit lost without that, I've become very lazy!!!
yes, its called light layers. When your creating emitting materials you can assign them to a layer, then when your rendering you just go to the layers interface and tweak away. You can change the colour as well, a la colour multilight in v2.
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I guess thats one of the things that having a studio feature has at advantage, it is so fast to go through a list of materials for editing where one can drag and drop maps from other materials and / or replace materials to geometry. And of course to do this without full entourage where it can be gragged in later.
The light layers functionality sounds great!!!
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Most likely using proxies. If you call your tree component "tree" then make a new component of a tree shaped box and call it "tree_dummy", all the "tree_dummy" components will be replaced with "tree" components on export.
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I just downloaded SKindogo and I am impressed. After working with Maxwell since it came out I think its time for a chance. NL(Maxwell) has a company-character bug that could be described as indifference toward their clients. Maxwell by itself is a rather superb application but the userinterface just does not make sense. That is because they hire the wrong people to do the job. They don't see it themselves and due to the amount of modeling app's they cater to they can not really provide service or decent plugin's update to keep up with the bugs.
I now own the v2 of Maxwell but can not use the appropriate plugin to render with, I have to reinstall the old plugin to export to Studio and render from there. If they had tested this at all on an OSX system they would have fixed it before releasing the update. Another problem is that NL markets Maxwell v2 as something big for a while so you get all excited. It feels like having tickets for a big show and when you have seated yourself to watch it happen a curtain rolls down before your OSX-SU seat that reads sorry we did not expect you here, wait till the next show.....
For how many times would you put up with that. I do not give up so easily were I should have quickly moved on. I am going to seriously look into Indigo, tx Kwistenbiebel for showing me your examples. How did you do the trees rendered in SKI ?By the way Richard, you are right about the rather messy new layout in Studio. even though it is advertised as comletely new and rewritten it still lacks hiärchy. Its hard to find what you need and it is needlessly complicated to work with.
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I didn't use proxies in those images.The tree in the front isn't really that high poly and there's a 2D clipmap tree line in the background.
The whole scene doesn't weigh more than 11 Mb. -
I have to agree with Whaat.
Indigo, even though it is unbiased, works very well in a design workflow of trial/error and constant design changes.
The biggest advantage of Indigo over Maxwell is that the workflow is 'non-destructive' as you don't have to export to a 'studio' every time you do design changes.
Also, you can easily launch several renders at the same time (I sometimes launch 5 simultaneously on my octocore using Indigo 64 bit, while still being able to continue modeling!).The only disadvantage of Indigo, but that counts for Maxwell as well, is the render time to get things clean.
That is the reason why I also use Vray.An example of how I use Indigo for pre-design (extension of an existing office building):
Those 4 images were rendered simultaneously. Launched all of them in the evening, put together on a sheet the next morning, ready for review.
The fastest workflow I experienced using any render engine,especially in terms of material and light setup!
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Ok I've had a play with Indigo again and see there has been some huge development on that side!!
Speed of initial clean up (my biggest concern) I'll still stick with my initial thoughts that it's slow in that regard, rendering out at 640 x 480 res allowed by the demo seemed very slow in comparison to Maxwell when rendered in any of the unknown terms!
There certainly are thing that REALLY shined in regards to the tonemapping, camera, film etc settings once rendering and these seem to be the real beauty of indigo though man are there still so many darn tech terms and thing for me that could be made so much more simple!
Being able to select from multiple film responses and adjust sky and sun levels independantly was a beauty though I so wished these and other lighting layers could be named rather than trial and error! How does on zoom in on the render window?
Still have little understanding of the material editor eg is 20 for bump high? (who knows without reference limits), what does the power slider do? Is it an exponent increaser for all settings? And for god sake why does Indigo have to utilise every single terminology adverse to the norm if x=R, y=G, Z=B why not just RGB and have it done with it! Not an individual biggy but just reinforces I guess my belief that the developers have always just taken the tact of proving one up on the understanding of all the techno talk that goes into producing an engine!
Material blending is still feeling clunky and the need to go back into SU each time to make a material change when preview is painfully slow
How does one stop the material preview for generating? And again the material preview is SO slow!!!!OK these are just initial thoughts but many however do in some way reinforce my earlier feelings, that said howvever I do see some of the inherant beauty of Indigo as a useful tool just seems it's still a ways off being particularly user friendly and still feels beta like!
Seriously I do't wish to sound negative I do see some amazing potential here but just wanting a much faster and intuitive workflow I guess! Well done has to be said on some of the Indigo features all round!
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@richard said:
How does on zoom in on the render window?
The plus and minus keys on the numberpad. Pressing 0 gets you back to the original view.
@unknownuser said:
Still have little understanding of the material editor eg is 20 for bump high? (who knows without reference limits), what does the power slider do? Is it an exponent increaser for all settings? And for god sake why does Indigo have to utilise every single terminology adverse to the norm if x=R, y=G, Z=B why not just RGB and have it done with it! Not an individual biggy but just reinforces I guess my belief that the developers have always just taken the tact of proving one up on the understanding of all the techno talk that goes into producing an engine!
bump is measured in meters, so yes, 20 is high
As a general rule everything in indigo is done in SI units, so usually something to do with meters or stuff per meter.The power slider increases the power in watts, although usually i find it a lot faster to use one of the presets and tweak that if necessary rather than faff about making a new emitting material.
Might be worth having a look at the material editor while your in the business of trying out indigo. Its much better at putting units next to everything, and has lot of nice little colour pickers etc. the interface is a little clunky, though.
As for the general speed concerns, i have a feeling maxwell has a separate preview engine (and indigo doesnt), although i might be making that up.
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@remus said:
bump is measured in meters, so yes, 20 is high
As a general rule everything in indigo is done in SI units, so usually something to do with meters or stuff per meter.Really? Oh.
Thanks!@unknownuser said:
Might be worth having a look at the material editor while your in the business of trying out indigo. Its much better at putting units next to everything, and has lot of nice little colour pickers etc. the interface is a little clunky, though.
I've been using the material editor I think (the material button on the indigo tool bar)!! How else can one set attributes for material values?
@unknownuser said:
As for the general speed concerns, i have a feeling maxwell has a separate preview engine (and indigo doesnt), although i might be making that up.
Yes mate you can chose either of two engines for material preview, the cleaning of the material preview is very fast and clear, I haven't really waited long enough for the indigo mat preview to clean to anything really that clear enough for reference!
I found something of a manual in the application folder though just covers render settings yet nothing about materials, I'll look through that and see what I can work out!
Thanks for your help mate!
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If you have a look in the forum the latest beta version includes a standalone material editor (although you have to look for it in the program files folder.)
Its a bit more comprehensive than the skindigo material editor and i think doing blends is meant to be a bit easier, although i havent tried it myself.
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Well a patch is out and SO many fixes! Will be good to see when Plugin fixed / improved with new developer!
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Richard, have you tried it with the new patch? Looked promising from the release notes but I haven't gotten a chance to test it yet.
-Brodie
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So far, I would like to say that MWR2 is amazing, but sadly, i cannot. I DL'ed it to try it to see if there was a boost in render speed and so on, but thus far, I cannot even render after DL'ing.
The Sketchup export no longer works for MWR1.7
I have no rendering functionality whatsoever as it stands. My opinion is to not update or even try MWR2 until these issues are fixed.
And, yes, I DO own a license and 2 seats.
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