Maxwell 2.6 - anyone try it for Softimage yet?

[Rez007]

I just happened to see that Maxwell 2.6 came out. I was curious to see if anyone has used it with Softimage. I personally have never used Maxwell, but looking at it, it looks really impressive, especially the multi-light feature. I see there is a plugin for Softimage, but the feature list looks less than that of 3DS Max and so forth...so I was curious on how people like using 2.6 for Softimage. I am going to have to try out the demo here shortly when I get some extra time.

http://www.maxwellrender.com

[Paulrus]

I've tested quite a few of the various renderers on the market. Maxwell is extremely cool, and extremely slow.

I don't think it's really cost effective for animation unless you've got a massive render farm.

The material database is a very neat feature and could save a lot of time setting up shots.

If you do a lot of stills, it can do some very impressive work. Just be ready for render times measured in days, not minutes or hours.

Right now they've got a deal where they're including 5 render nodes with each purchase, so for the money it's a decent deal.

Paul

[Maximus]

In my opinion is the best integrated render engine in Softimage.
They did an outstanding job, FIRE works in viewport too, you got all render tree support for all maxwell shader network. Its really unbelievable.

i'd recommend to give it a try.

[SreckoM]

So this version supports all SI procedural textures?
How about ICE instancing?

[Maximus]

No idea if this version support procedural or ICE instancing.
I tried the demo months ago but never came to my mind to use Maxwell for those 2 stuff.

[Tekano]

lets see some renders or it didnt happen!

[Rez007]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I will have to give the demo a shot...some images would be cool to see if there are some available.

[SreckoM]

New 2.6.4 version is out that supports ICE instancing.
Maybe I am not using it correctly or because I am using demo, but it does not work for me.
Can anyone with full version check?

[mihaiNL]

Did you specify a model as an instance? Because the current plugin doesn't yet take into account child objects so you have to specify an object as a particle instance. The next version will have support for child objects as well.

[SreckoM]

Yes, I did try with objects.

I figured out that is working only with factory compounds like Emit from Geometry. But if you generate points using 'Add point' node and using 'Generate sample set' it does not work. So creating your own emitters will not work. I did not dig more to figure out why.

[mihaiNL]

I've tested quite a few of the various renderers on the market. Maxwell is extremely cool, and extremely slow.

Disclaimer: I do work for Next Limit, I thought best to mention that from the beginning.

I love both XSI (pardon, Softimage) and Maxwell and now with the plugin I think the integration has taken a huge step forward. I´ll post just a few examples to show the speed and you can see why I don´t agree Maxwell is slow. Keep in mind also you should take into account the time you spent setting up the scene and testing different settings with other renderers to try and figure out the best quality vs render time for a particular scene. Human time is more valuable than computer time. You have no worries with flickering, splotches etc in Maxwell and in fact, because it doesn´t render in buckets you get very quickly a low sampling level preview sequence which you can then import into After Effects, Nuke, or Photoshop using our plugins and start working on the post production while the rendering continues in the background. When the sequence has reached a higher SL, you just update it. This is really nice workflow I think, you don´t have to wait for the sequence to finish rendering and overlap the postprod time with the render time.

First example is the Dragon scene, I tried to recreate it as close as possible as other examples posted here, because I didn´t have that particular scene.

Render machine: i7 920 @ 2.67 no overclocking
Resolution: 1280x720
Time: 3min 30sec



Again this is practically zero setup time, I just added a plane, applied an emitter material to it, and hit render.

Second example is a 121 frame animation (1280x720) with about 3 million particles, with motion blur and DOF. Export time from SI was 1 second per frame. The particles use the new particle primitive in Maxwell 2.6 which renders a procedural sphere to which you can apply any Maxwell material to. I´m posting two different versions of the animation, one at SL 11, the other at SL 15. This is to show that even if there is a little bit of noise left in the SL 11 render, for an animation it will be impossible to see. The compression itself takes away more than any noise left in the render. (I´ll try to upload them to Vimeo too). Plus there are no flickering problems in Maxwell Render, even at low SL. In the worse case the noise can look like high ISO noise when shooting at night. The noise is not "stuck" across frames.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx9zEiugRD4 (All camera angles)

http://youtu.be/ICkcKVPS8t0 (SL 11)

http://youtu.be/7Mnm1-PkPiU (SL 15)

Still frames

Render machine: i7 920 @ 2.67
Resolution: 1280x720

SL 7 (1min 24sec)



SL 10 (4min 42sec)


SL 14 (23min 41sec)


The whole animation was rendered in cooperative rendering on 4 machines:
2 CPU Xeon 1.6 gHz
2 CPU Xeon 2.3 gHz
2 CPU Xeon 3.0 gHz
2 CPU Xeon 3.0 gHz

The SL 11 version of the animation rendered in 55min. The SL 15 version rendered in 7hours 36min.

[ActionArt]

Very interesting and it's great to see SI integration! Thanks for posting.

One quick question, does Maxwell support volume particle rendering? Just curious, I use it a lot so I'm hoping...

[mihaiNL]

Not yet, although there are some cool things you can do with the current implementation and there will be more shapes available soon and different UV mapping options. All these rendered shapes interact with all the lighting in the scene with accurate GI and shading. I have to render a few more examples to show because it´s great fun playing with particles

[ActionArt]

One of the most important things for me is the ability to render smoke and fire. The rest looks great so I'll be waiting to see if volume rendering for these type of effects are ever supported (and even better if they're GPU accelerated somehow).

[benoit81]

I have downloaded the demo version. It seems promising ! It is true that the integration in Softimage (custom viewport, materials, pass) is maybe not perfect, but the render engine is not slow. I really like the photographic settings ISO, Aperture, Focus... The glossy/reflection materials are very nice . I just try with few primitives, and will try with a complex CAD model (an helicopter with 20 millions triangles) to see if it can handle such scenes.

[gustavoeb]

cool tests mihaiNL