Maxwell Render 2.7 released

[Kerro Perro]

Ok well right now i'm cleaning my workstation because i want to do a side-by-side comparison with Octane and as said it made it run really hot. I'll try again later tonight or tommorow.

EDIT: ok i got it working now, i needed to change the camera settings because the default is extremely dark! I already like the MaxwellFire thingy - nice fast preview! I should be able to do the side-by-side now but yeah an introductory video showing you how to avoid these type of pitfalls would be cool MihaiNL.

[Kerro Perro]

Well i'm pretty sold It's not the fastest but the GI is superclean and as Maximus said setup is a dream!

hehe....well I'm not spanish so I have no nationalistic, moral, sentimental obligations to root for Spain Well, I liked how they played in the beginning but their last two games were really boring.....pass, pass, pass......pass, pass, pass....zzzzzzzz. I thought Italy played with more guts. So just to say that I think it's going to be a really close final.

Haha yeah well "our" team was... I kind of misunderstood the promo btw: i thought the risk was more than 20% vs a base of 10% but it's more like 20% or more vs 0... so i'm trying to buy it now but of course having credit card problems... typical! I should've bought i yesterday from my local reseller, probably won't get any movement on this till monday so now i'm really betting on spain!

[mihaiNL]

EDIT: ok i got it working now, i needed to change the camera settings because the default is extremely dark!

Yes, the default camera settings are calibrated for Physical Sky renderings, so when using emitters at normal values, say 3000 lumens for your average softbox flash, you have to adjust the camera accordingly, maybe shutter 60, ISO 200.

A good place to start learning are the online docs, we worked a lot on them to make them clear and structured and easy to find related content. I STRONGLY recommend new users to first read the "Before you begin" section here:

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... +you+begin

There are only a few key things to keep in mind really, especially about keeping materials within realistic reflectance values to avoid loss of contrast and excessive noise in the renders. For this reason I prefer to set the color chips in SI to Hue Saturation Value (from Preferences>Units), instead of RGB, because I can control the Value independently and it's the Value (or how much light is reflected back from a material as far as Maxwell is concerned) that's important not to go over say 225 which is roughly the equivalent of a bright white piece of paper.

[Kerro Perro]

Whoohoo 4-0!

Maybe a good thing the creditcard got blocked this weekend - more discount now!

Btw Hirazi you getting it as well?

[Hirazi Blue]

Hmm, I hadn't decided yet (which is to say I haven't had time to play with the demo enough to make up my mind). Do you perhaps know if the special Euro Cup promotion even applies to Learning Edition? And have you decided between the 1-year option and the perpetual license already?


edit: just received a mail from the friendly folk at NextLimit expressly stating

This Euro Cup Promo does not apply to: Maxwell Render Educational, Faculty or Learning Edition licenses

Shucks, well at least it "buys" me some more time to decide...

[druitre]

The way I interpret the promo is that you should have bought the license yesterday before the match started to get the 50% discount the 4 goals have bought. I think if you order today you only get the 10% base discount? I was absolutely sure it would be a 1-0 so I didn't go for it...

EDIT: Hmmm... upon reading it now it looks like if you order between now and july 8th you will get a 50% discount... that would be very tempting...

[Kerro Perro]

The discount is now 50% for commercial licenses - not the educational one (i got the same email ) till 8th july.

@ Hirazi - well i've been looking for a predictable GI solution for very long now so after my tests i was so pleased that i'm just gonna buy the perpetual license. I see it as an investement in my passion project, wich is suspect i might be working on for more than a year. (ironically it was the thread about using complicated "fgshooters" to get flicker-free final gather in MR that pushed that decision for me, compared to setup with Maxwell that stuff is a nightmare!)

Must say that i think there are a lot more selling points to Maxwell - the option to "relight" your scenes in AE and PS seems pretty sweet to me...

Btw i'm not suddenly a fanboy but just very pleasantly surprised

[ximage]

mihaiNL - I would love to see some videos on this.

even though i have only literally downloaded the demo and put a sphere on a plane and hit render. i can kinda tell the setup is much more simple. but yeh the render time will be more. but like you said, its weighing up setup times and then getting a final render out of mental ray, vray will be quite long aswell for heavier scenes.

one question, if anyone knows. is there something similar to the shadow catcher material in mental ray. so you can easily integrate 3D in to images?

im am super tempted, the price is a steal tbh.

mihaiNL - do you have many customers who use softimage using maxwell? and what is the ice integration like?

cheers

[mihaiNL]

Hey,

I think I'll do these videos now and then maybe do an update video for the new version. About shadows, yes you just have to activate the shadow channel in the Maxwell render options (Maxwell "channels" are like render passes), then in the material that's applied to the object(s) that you want to catch shadows, like a floor, open the MaxwellLayeredMaterial node and check the "Shadows" option. The nice thing about the shadow channel is that it takes into account the full GI of the scene, and also if you have Multilight enabled, you can change the intensity of a light, during or after rendering, and the shadow channel embedded in the MXI file (Maxwells image format) will update accordingly, without having to re-render.

You can see more details here: http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... ow+channel

There is a nice 'trick' explained on that page, when for example in most cases you have an object, and a floor, and you want to render them at the same time, but only have the alpha of the object, without the floor also appearing in the alpha. In this case you just add a Maxwell mesh attribute to the object (Property>Maxwell mesh attributes) and check there "Hide to camera". Now the floor won't be visible in the alpha channel, or the render, but the floor will still catch shadows so the shadow channel will have the proper output, and it will still influence the lighting/reflections on the object in the main render.

do you have many customers who use softimage using maxwell?

Not enough!
Which feels frustrating to me because I love both applications. I'd like to see more people using Softimage, and I'd like to see more people use Softimage with Maxwell

and what is the ice integration like?

Well, regarding topology, anything that creates a mesh, the plugin can export it. Regarding particles, anything that makes a point cloud is supported, either it renders with Maxwells sphere primitive, or you can ofcourse render particle instances (one object, or group of objects). Any Maxwell material can be applied to the point cloud. The plugin now also has Maxwellmesher (import a RealFlow particle bin file, set meshing params, and it will mesh it only at render time which is REALLY cool, and it also works with FIRE), or you can render these imported bin files using the sphere primitive. There are some new additions here for RF particles, like being able to map the velocity, mass, density etc. of several imported bin files, using a 'blendmap'. More about this mesh blending on this page (towards the bottom, "Blend Material"): http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... ell+Mesher
There are some things which aren't supported right now, not really about ICE, but for example driving a layer weight in a material with a weightmap instead of a texture, but we are working to open the material system more to these types of data.

[CiaranM]

Thanks for this - it looks like a really nice integration so far, I like it. Good job!
Just a couple of problems that I noticed during some quick testing with the latest demo.

- Maxwell Fire doesn't always update as expected. In Soft 2013 when I change some BSDF values, Fire won't update until I hit restart. This works fine in 2012. In either version of Soft, Fire won't update upon scene changes e.g. adding or deleting geometry, applying a material etc. or geometry changes e.g. moving vertices. Again I have to hit Restart. It does update fine when transforming geometry.

- Fire won't render standard ICE particles unless they have an instances geometry as their shape. It won't render as spheres as suggested in the docs.

- Fire won't render ICE strands. The docs also suggest this should be possible...any clues?

- When I launch a render with multilight set to Color+Intensity, the Maxwell Render application crashes ( it just disappears) soon after starting the render. It works well if multilight is set to intensity only.

- it would be great to have some better support for Softimage shader utility nodes e.g. Math nodes, mixer nodes, shading state nodes. I'm not sure how to work without programmable shaders...but most importantly I think you need to support the various ICE data shader nodes. All the cool stuff these days is being rendered out of ICE. I think Maxwell could lend itself perfectly to render this kind of photoreal, abstract stuff. But, without being able to at the very least change the color per particle or instance feels very limiting.

Thanks for listening!

[mihaiNL]

Yes I see there are some problems with Maxwell 2.7 and the older plugin, I guess it needs to be updated. If you have the Learning Edition or Render Suite versions, you can download 2.6.1 of Maxwell though from the Customer Portal and that will work ok.

Regarding the update issues, from what the plugin developers told me these are limitations in the SI SDK, regarding object creation, deletion, topology changes. They can't get a call from SI of what changed....hopefully this works better with the 2013 SDK.

- When I launch a render with multilight set to Color+Intensity, the Maxwell Render application crashes ( it just disappears) soon after starting the render. It works well if multilight is set to intensity only.

This usually means it's running out of RAM. Are you on a 32bit system? Color ML will need more RAM than intensity only ML since it needs to store besides the intensity of each light separately, also the color channels separately. So the more individual ML sliders you have (separate emitter materials) the more RAM will be necessary. A good way to save on RAM in this case is to use the same emitter material applied to several objects, in which case you will get only one slider for that emitter material, but ofcourse sometimes you simply need them to be separated. You should be fine on 64bit system with say 16GB of RAM for most renders, even huge ones with 10-15 ML sliders.

Thanks for the feedback! This is exactly the kinds of things I'm pushing the developers to expose in Maxwell in the near future

[ActionArt]

Very nice to see such great effort in a 3rd party render engine. I really like the concept of Maxwell. The one thing I really need is volume rendering (for smoke and fire). If Maxwell supported this I'd be very interested. Do you know if there are any plans for this?

[bottleofram]

@ mihaiNL: Any info on possible (expected) timeframe for the release of 2.7 softimage plugin? Rough guess would do it for me. Just need to know if its a matter of days, weeks, months... Thanks

[mihaiNL]

I would say a few weeks, at least not until the end of July, mostly because it's holiday season and a few people are away.....

[ximage]

could not pass it up at this price.
took the plunge, hopefully get to use it soon on a job.

cheers for all replies to the question mihaiNL

please do some videos if you can with the si intergration with tips and tricks, will be great to see how to optimise renders and stuff.

Daniel

[druitre]

I'd like to see more people using Softimage, and I'd like to see more people use Softimage with Maxwell

There you go! I couldn't resist the offer too. Fire + straightforwardness of material creation is what clinches it for me. The whole thing is so easy to get used to. And oh, predictable GI.

Thanks for the feedback! This is exactly the kinds of things I'm pushing the developers to expose in Maxwell in the near future

Great! Thanks for your answers here in this thread, you made the decision that much easier. And 1+ for any videos you could do, maybe to go along with the update to the plugin?

Jasper