Maxwell for SU VS Twilight
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Right now the options are to use an emitter material or an HDR emitter material.
The emitter material allows you to set the light power parameters the same as a real light fixture -- so you would want to apply the material to the same surface area as a real light to achieve the most realistic results. Keep the material roughness at 100% unless you are planning on showing it as turned "off" in another render and need the "glass" look.
The HDR emitters are bit more flexible IMO and I would tend to use them for any complex light effects (computer monitors, TV's, fireplace, etc.) -- basically any 32-bit image will do.
Coming soon are IES lights which are already supported by the engine but are not available as an embedded type in the current stand-alone plugin release... this would be the best choice for light fixtures, especially if the light source will not be seen "on camera".
Point or spot lights do not exist in Maxwell because they are considered Biased approaches to lighting -- so IES would be the alternative, which is why I am excited to see they are coming.
I've been helping alot of new users lately and the most common issue I am seeing is the geometry they are using is not Maxwell-ready... Maxwell really will only give as good of results as the geometry you feed to it. Generally any shortcuts taken in the modeling will yield poorer results with Maxwell -- it wants the model to be as the real thing. Emitters are not excluded from this -- for instance if you want to do a flame you can use a regular emitter material but you would need to model the flame to scale with details (probably with artisan or similar).
At one point in time I was better versed in the various rendering packages, and I really enjoyed comparing (which is why I try to read whenever something is posted about other engines and participate in the "render this" threads when I can) -- but these days I have my hands full trying to stay on top of all the software packages I already use, so I'm not personally testing other engines.
There are a number of really tremendous unbiased engines -- I'm not so crazy about the biased engines in general, but with good post processing skills almost any engine can produce usable to excellent results these days.
Best,
Jason. -
Jason,
I'm curious, I don't know if you've posted about this elsewhere, what do you see as the major disadvantage of biased renders? Kinda leading I know, but you keep putting down biased renders, so I'd be interested to hear why. If you've already written extensively about it, can you point me there.
Andy
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Nope I tend to avoid the subject since I'm far from an expert -- I already have 2 biased renderers myself, but I prefer Maxwell by far and use it almost exclusively when I have a choice.
It's really as simple as the quality of light for me -- I just think unbiased renders generally look better (more realistic) out of the box... but the thing that aggravates me about the biased approach in general is the arcane terminology that is used so often for many parameters (this is present in some unbiased engines as well). Probably the thing that appealed to me most about Maxwell was the simplicity and relate-ability of the parameters and the quality of light.
It's really the same thing that appealed to me about SketchUp -- I'm not a big fan of the typical "CG speak"...
Best,
Jason. -
Thanks Jason. I suppose I'll just have to see for myself when I have a chance to play with it and compare some scenes. This has been a helpful thread to get a general idea of where the strengths are of Maxwell.
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off topic but maybe interesting: motiva colimo+ Thea render is almost a miracle, has anyone tested it? (Thea as a hybrid engine and motiva as a time saver!!)
I also like the relight system of Thea:
fymoro models are good for almost every render engine (maybe not good for hypershot that has a weak interior render result)
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@majid said:
off topic but maybe interesting: motiva colimo+ Thea render is almost a miracle, has anyone tested it? (Thea as a hybrid engine and motiva as a time saver!!)
I also like the relight system of Thea:[attachment=0:ofhpbqth]<!-- ia0 -->1-relight.jpg<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:ofhpbqth]
fymoro models are good for almost every render engine (maybe not good for hypershot that has a weak interior render result)
I'm curious about this. I couldn't find a page to download a demo from motiva colimo but I'd like to try it out.
Maybe you could post some more thoughts, insights about it's usefulness?Edit: I just found the demo download link.
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I tried again the free maxwell plugin version, still too noisy for interior. I got a reasonable result out of twilight with biased 0unbiased settings...on my old crappy machine
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@majid said:
I tried again the free maxwell plugin version, still too noisy for interior. I got a reasonable result out of twilight with biased 0unbiased settings...on my old crappy machine
Hardly surprising since I just spent pages of posts telling you that it will not work -- and why, and what the solution is (pay the $95).
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@jason_maranto said:
@majid said:
I tried again the free maxwell plugin version, still too noisy for interior. I got a reasonable result out of twilight with biased , unbiased settings...on my old crappy machine
Hardly surprising since I just spent pages of posts telling you that it will not work -- and why, and what the solution is (pay the $95).
I see I see, I am comparing both demo versions of maxwell and twilight(IMO twilight has a good demo, fully functioning, biased + unbiased engine, more light options..., with a watermark and size limitation, while maxwell has no watermark, but not good quality, etc...)99$- 95$
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There is no watermark because it is not a demo -- there is no demo for Maxwell except for the full Maxwell Render Suite. It is a fully functioning render engine unlimited in both time of use and of watermark and very capable of producing excellent (and relatively fast) results for what it designed to do... all for free.
However it was not made to do what you are trying to do. which is stated clearly on their webpage and I have said over and over again on these forums -- but the good news in not everybody needs to do what you are trying to do... for those users it may be a perfectly usable piece of free software.
I get the sense you are trying to prove a point, but what you seem to fail to grasp is that it is not a comparable software -- it was never designed to be. The Twilight demo (and all other demos) are demoing the full software -- this is only a small subset of Maxwells capabilities.
The $95 version of the Stand-alone plugin is more comparable in quality for the types of renders you want to produce, but it too is simply a subset of the full Maxwell Render Suite.
If you cannot understand it's designed function then you cannot prove it fails -- your conception of what it should do is totally flawed. I've proved elsewhere on these forums that the free version of the stand-alone plugin can render exterior (daylight or IBL envirnments) shots with extremely large and detailed geometry to a very high quality level very rapidly (see below for an example).
Best,
Jason. -
The best and most straight forward free ware I have tried has been Kerkythea without exception. I was rendering within a couple hours of playing around - that was without using any tutorials or watching any videos. The output and ease of use with sketchup is amazing. I have just started looking into Thea which looks incredible. I will be ordering that as soon as I get back in my office early next week. My hats off to the developers of both those programs.
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@unknownuser said:
My hats off to the developers of both those programs.
And probably not incidentally, that's basically the same person.
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@gaieus said:
@unknownuser said:
My hats off to the developers of both those programs.
And probably not incidentally, that's basically the same person.
Excellent! I guess my transition should be that much easier.
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@unknownuser said:
The best and most straight forward free ware I have tried has been Kerkythea without exception.
in my opinion too. KT is the best freeware available ever there for rendering.
i spent less than 48 hours from learning both SketchUp and Kerkythea to send 3 models rendered to a friend. who ask for a favour to give an idea for a quite small building to develop.
back then there was only SketchUp 6 available to download and learn
here's one of them that still left[attachment=0:2d336y5i]<!-- ia0 -->3 x 11 C lights.jpg<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:2d336y5i]
if there's any other 3D modelling and a render application that would allow you to download-learn-modelling-render and send 3 models in less than 48 hours, please let me know (not to mention they are the freeware ones). i might give it a thought to try them
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Well, I finally had a chance to try the Maxwell free plugin. I like it! The user interface is great, and I like the preset material types. The adjustments that I want to make are all there - environment settings, material reflections, etc. In a few tests, it is actually not as slow as I feared compared to vray. I did try some interior daylit scenes, and while the speed is not too far off, the output quality is significantly more noisy with Maxwell. Overall, I like the lighting quality better than twilight, but I didn't see a whole lot of difference compared to vray. Of course, with vray, it is much more complicated to control material qualities, so it would be more difficult for a newbie to use out of the box.
In any case, it was nice to try, and I can certainly recommend it to those looking. For me though, Maxwell doesn't appear to offer anything that I can't get with vray. -
No doubt, the standalone plugin was never meant to compete with VRay -- for that you would want the full Maxwell Render Suite.
BTW did you try the new pre-release version from the Maxwell forums or just the older download from the Maxwell website?
Also if you care to share your test scenes I can show you the difference between the "Draft" engine and the "Production" engine (since you can only test the draft engine with the free version).
Best,
Jason. -
I will post a test scene and some examples of renders from the scene as soon as I get a chance.
Thanks for the interest!Andy
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Which render plugin to use is a constant debate around here. I tried to start a spreadsheet for collaboration here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3220&start=45. We could keep updating it and anybody is interested...
There is one really big thing I see missing from this conversation, though:
zoom123, what do you want to render and for what purpose?!
Even if you are only doing this for fun, it can make a big difference in your choice.For example, I'm an architect and 99% of my renderings are for quick design studies. Somebody said that Maxwell allowed for quicker scene setup and that they didn't care how long it took, because they could run the rendering overnight. That may be true for some types of presentation images, but for me, I often need it ASAP, setup and all, exterior or interior. I don't have time to let a rendering bake long enough to remove noise in Maxwell or any unbiased engine (that said, Maxwell would probably be OK for many of my exterior renderings, but since I need it for both exterior or interior, I don't want to deal with two renderers). So for me it's biased all the way, V-Ray specifically. Now with V-Ray RT like Maxwell Fire, I have even faster setup times.
So, zoom123, what are you rendering and why?
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hi there,
sorry for interrupting your discussion on Maxwell vs Twilight.
i've tried to remove my post, but cannot find the erase button.anyway, if you already have v-ray with that kind of results,
what is the point discussing Maxwell vs Twilight?have a good time people.
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