What is your favorite overall rendering engine for SketchUp?
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@andybot said:
Hi Thomthom, did you see the thread comparing maxwell and twilight? I just don't see any way maxwell or any unbiased renderer can ever get in the ballpark in terms of speed. In those tests, it was about a factor of 6 for speed difference.
Andy
That's an interesting thread. I've really struggled to get to grips with these unbiased engines. I was wondering if I was missing some thing essential or if one had to be using a render farm in order to produce something within reasonable time.
The project I work on are under constant revision and I need to be able to render and re-render quickly. 2 hours for a 3000px image is my max threshold. Then it has to be a large complex scene for me to accept such. Otherwise I usually try to keep a scene rendering within 30 minutes. I have a couple of hex-core machines I use for complex scenes which helps when I'm in a pinch for time. (Too bad V-Ray has so many issues with DR in the current version...
)So many times when I read about unbiased people seem to be leaving the image to "cook" for hours - if not over night. Which just seems horrendously slow for me. A set of images needs to be sent out - I can't wait days for that. So I'm really curious of people's workflow. (I make architecture visualisation. Mostly exterior, but some interior as well. Quite large building and sites some times.)
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For exterior shots Maxwell could easily complete complex scenes of decent size within 2 hours using either the Maxwell Physical Sky or IBL (IBL preferred to me).
There are really only a couple of things to avoid with Maxwell if you want fast rendering -- true Dielectric/SSS based materials, Displacement based materials, and interior scenes.
There are a couple of workarounds:
- Use AGS and ThinSSS instead of Glass and SSS.
- Use Bump and Normal maps instead of displacement maps.
But when you set up your interiors, it's best to do so with the expectations that they will indeed take longer... sometimes much longer (depending on lighting setup).
Best,
Jason. -
I tried a few exteriors too, there was still at best a 2x difference, and that's only if you are willing to accept a degree of noise in your images. I didn't try any larger resolutions since I was only doing the free plugin.
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I guess the thing I always have to say about the "stand-alone" variant(s) of the Maxwell plugin is it is slower than the regular Maxwell Render Suite due to having to run within SketchUp's process -- regular Maxwell does not, so it has access to the full system resources.
Basically subtract a processor core and alot of RAM when using the "stand-alone" plugin(s).
Best,
Jason. -
Sure, incrementally you'll have a slight difference, but it's not going to be 6x faster. Also, whatever computing power you throw at it, it will still be a relative difference since that same computing power can speed up the biased renderers as well.
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No doubt -- I've never made the claim that Maxwell is a speed demon... but I think the speed issue is a bit overblown.
If speed is really your major priority then there are some very fantastically fast render engines (Like Keyshot and Lumion) that will get you there in no time -- and I encourage their use for that Market segment. To me V-Ray is more of a compromise -- it's not quite as good as Maxwell and not nearly as fast as Keyshot and it's harder to use than both put together.
But the thing that really burns my butt about V-Ray is how weak it is for SketchUp when it is actually quite strong for other apps -- and since a license for the SketchUp version does not translate to other apps (which the Maxwell license does) you are stuck with it. This is a real shame because I think a big part of V-Rays traction with SketchUp users is the name it's made for itself in apps like 3DS Max... but it's not really the same program, and doesn't deserve the same respect.
My point is all render engines have weaknesses and strengths, V-Ray included.
I only bring up V-Ray since that was the software you compared it to in terms of speed.
Obviously speed is an important issue, and one that cannot be dismissed lightly... however when used in a logical way Maxwell is a perfectly capable app for a good portion of the types of renders SketchUp users need to do -- all unbiased engines have similar issues and they each try to solve the problem in their own ways.
Best,
Jason. -
@jason_maranto said:
For exterior shots Maxwell could easily complete complex scenes of decent size within 2 hours using either the Maxwell Physical Sky or IBL (IBL preferred to me).
The same goes for Thea. I'm currently re-rendering one of my Villa PM scenes to use on my website and here is the result after just 40 minutes (1565 x 700 px).
It's already pretty clean and if you were in a rush you could run it through a denoise filter at this point and get very good results. The image will probably be good enough after another 20 minutes or so.
As with Maxwell the speed depends on the scene, lighting, materials etc. My night time shots with interior lighting took about 3 times longer to render.
Edit: I'm using a pretty ordinary i7 PC with 12GB of Ram.
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@jason_maranto said:
No doubt -- I've never made the claim that Maxwell is a speed demon... but I think the speed issue is a bit overblown.
As an arch-viz professional I respectfully disagree. Time is very much money. To only get a handful of renderings after running something overnight is just not viable for me. That's why I stick with vray despite its flaws. Its integration into sketchup is just fine for my purposes. I am constantly modeling and adjusting lighting/ textures/ etc. while a render is running, and when it's done in a few minutes, I can run another. I agree the fire preview in maxwell is pretty good and does give a decent real-time simulation, however, the light cache pass in vray serves a similar purpose and is just as fast.
Andy
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I'll be the first to admit I don't know squat about Arch Viz -- but I do know Maxwell.
This is a render of one of silver_shadows eye-candy models he shared on this forum -- I made no changes other than to turn on the Maxwell Physical Sky (I did have to crop it a bit because the forum doesn't allow images larger than 1600 pixel wide)... this could look alot better if I spent time tweaking the materials and found an HDR/EXR that suited the scene but my point here was about render speed for complex exterior shots.
I rendered this to SL 14 which took 36 minutes on my system (Intel i7 920 2.66 GHz) -- this is typically what I would expect from Maxwell for time to render such a scene (on my less than cutting edge system)... I did use the full Maxwell Render Suite here, so you should expect a bit slower time on the stand-alone plugin(s).
Best,
Jason.
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Got a link to that model?
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The original thread is here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=10549
You can get his models here: http://www.box.net/shared/4ao75395un
Best,
Jason. -
I use Thea's unbiased engine almost exclusively, but I believe the biased engine has been much improved as well. Does anyone have more experience using it? How does that compare to V-Ray?
I work at an Arch. firm but we almost never get hired for visualization -- the rendering we do is more to help design and persuade the client of what we'd like to do. For us, Thea makes more sense since it's pretty cheap. V-Ray might not cost too much -- for a specialization firm -- but for us it's not worth the cost.
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@jason_maranto said:
I'll be the first to admit I don't know squat about Arch Viz -- but I do know Maxwell.
This is a render of one of silver_shadows eye-candy models he shared on this forum -- I made no changes other than to turn on the Maxwell Physical Sky (I did have to crop it a bit because the forum doesn't allow images larger than 1600 pixel wide)... this could look alot better if I spent time tweaking the materials and found an HDR/EXR that suited the scene but my point here was about render speed for complex exterior shots.
I rendered this to SL 14 which took 36 minutes on my system (Intel i7 920 2.66 GHz) -- this is typically what I would expect from Maxwell for time to render such a scene (on my less than cutting edge system)... I did use the full Maxwell Render Suite here, so you should expect a bit slower time on the stand-alone plugin(s).
Best,
Jason.Hi Jason
Im not competing at all. Just was interested to see how long this render would take in Vray. I have the same spec comp you do (Intel i7 920 2.66 GHz). it rendered out at 1600x1200 in 5mins.
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I believe it -- and I wasn't pretending Maxwell could compete with V-Ray in terms of raw speed... in the same way V-Ray cannot compare to other render engines (like Keyshot) in terms of raw speed. My point was simply that the time frames are not out of the question, which is often implied with Maxwell.
It is slower no doubt, but still completely doable.
Best,
Jason. -
Reading through this seems like renders are like women and wine you like what you like for one reason or another. When I got into SU and this forum it opened a whole new experience for me and I have tried many of the trial renders to make my models look more realistic. I use KT because it was free since I don't do this for a living. Since I lost my wife and the kids are grown up need to find something to fill in the time. Sorry maybe shouldn't have said that. But just to say how much this community means to me. Thanks to you all.
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@jason_maranto said:
I believe it -- and I wasn't pretending Maxwell could compete with V-Ray in terms of raw speed... in the same way V-Ray cannot compare to other render engines (like Keyshot) in terms of raw speed. My point was simply that the time frames are not out of the question, which is often implied with Maxwell.
It is slower no doubt, but still completely doable.
Best,
Jason.Totally doable. Im actually looking at other options other than Vray. So disappointed at its development path compared to other renders.
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@unknownuser said:
it rendered out at 1600x1200 in 5mins.
It would be interesting to see the quality. Infact it would be good to see a test scene rendered using all of the software in the poll.
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Twilight have a Bauhuas lamp scene to test speed (or rather boast on your setup) that would make an interesting test here.
Though a generic Cornell Box scene would suffice.
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I agree that the Bauhaus lamp would be pretty good.
As another option I've got a challenging product-viz scene with difficult glass materials. It's based on a photo which would be good for this purpose, as the end results could be judged according to how closely they resemble reality (taking time - both set-up and rendering - into consideration). My only reservation is that different approaches to materials could skew the results.
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@hieru said:
It would be interesting to see the quality. Infact it would be good to see a test scene rendered using all of the software in the poll.
Well, if anyone wants to compare this test with other rendering software, I'd be curious to see other results.
@holmes1977: I'd be curious to see the image output too. If it's similar, I would say the roughly 1:6 difference between biased and unbiased speed still holds.
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