Maxwell Render - The Light Simulator

[Anonymous]

If you are interested in a new rendering engine for ArchiCAD, check out Maxwell Render.

Gallery at:
http://www.maxwellrender.com/

If you want THAT TYPE OF REALISM in your images, you need to take the jump into the Maxwell universe.

You might be thinking it is difficult. I used to think that way. Guess what? It isn't all that difficult. Within just a few hours I have been able to come to grips with the interface, navigation and material editor.

"But isn't it Slooooooooow?", you quip... No. In many ways it is actually fast. The reason it is so fast is because it is predictable. You don't need to think about Global Strength, Occlusion, Shadow Sampling settings, etc, etc.

It is extremely architectural, place your crosshairs on the hires Earth globe, think google earth, now position your project with north arrow - specify the year, month and time of day. Check Physical Sky and you have just successfully finished the lighting of an exterior.

It has a function that takes just 1 or 2 minutes to generate a fuzzy preview. Very fast and useful.

Here is the clincher, you can also do much of it from within ArchiCAD 10. Yup, NextLimit is working hard to create the connections (plug-ins) between ArchiCAD 10 and Maxwell. PC will come first (as usual Mac comes next) What's exciting about the Mac development is Universal App - Mactel support. Have you heard about the Quad Core Intel chips coming out soon? Imagine a MacPro with dual Quads. All of them working on your images at once. The future is looking kinda bright.

I will post within this thread more info as it become available to me, and I will give you a peek at some of the programs more useful features.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Kjverine. What brand of camera do you use? I like to imagine mine as a Hasselblad 503CWD

- - - -

Continuing on with the tile laden home. Importing it from AC10 into a .3ds and then into Cinema4D causes no real headaches. However imagine the tiles showing up in an object list numbered sequentially. Every single one of them, you can barely see the ONE TILE I selected and colored.

The rendering again was done on a 1.8MHz Mac. It is a raytraced image, two lights which only takes 2 min. - the Stochastic Global Illumination - would take about 1.5 hrs.

At least this heavy polygon count model did not bring C4D to it's knees the way it does for Maxwell. In fact I duplicated the entire house model 7 times to create a neighborhood of heavily tiled objects, it rendered (raytrace) in Cinema4D within 5 minutes. However an attempt to use radiosity brought a crash.

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for the invite Mark. I have been in touch with Pavol the developer building the AC10 plug in. He was contracted after the marginal success of the first plug-in beta to rebuild from scratch the Maxwell Plug-in for AC10. He apparently is now working on the OSX version and will hopefully hadve something for us in the coming weeks. Of course, we all know how that goes..

Anyway, here is a selection of my trial renders in the last few months on my design projects. I really need to work on compositing my renderings into some real images so I dont always have a building floating out in spacer, but I just dont have the time to go much furthere than this. With the new workflow in AC10, i imagine things will be more efficent.

I find the best way to work is saving out of AC10 into .3DS and selecting:
MATERIALS
10mm
7 letter object name

This brings the AC10 model in at the correct scale which is critical for correct lighting. It does however require a re-orientation of project north by rotating the whole model so that north is to the top of the screen. This has been a slight annoyance.

Here is a selection of redering studies, some good some not so good.

http://web.mac.com/danielhruby/iWeb/Maxwell/Maxwell.html

[Anonymous]

This weekend I tried out the ArchiCAD 10 beta - Maxwell plug-in on my Dell Precision 340. It works great on Windows. The Mac version is still under development and I really look forward to the stable release of that version.

FINALLY! A rendering developer finally figured out a good, solid, simple method of using a major 3rd party rendering engine. Hats off to Pavol.

The work flow method is brilliant, basically the Maxwell render engine just shows up in the list of available rendering engines in ArchiCAD. You see the internal, the sketch, LightWorks and Maxwell. It feels as if it is a part of the program, also Maxwell materials can be applied to the model in ArchiCAD. Smart! Brilliant! Just render your scene and Maxwell launches a new window showing the full Maxwell interface. You can also choose to just export the scene and launch Maxwell later.

After you start to see the rendering, after about 45 sec., if you don't like what you see, or you need to change the geometry. Just stop the rendering, go back into ArchiCAD, make the changes and hit the photorender button again. It is that simple.

Like I said, the Maxwell material names can be created in ArchiCAD and when you render with Maxwell, it will apply the actual BSDF materials. See the following example which illustrates this.

The top image shows an export using Maxwell body paint on the ArchiCAD cars, plus I place an emmitter material to the headlights and tail lights. I also changed the time of day to dusk. The ArchiCAD cars never looked so good.

The bottom image is exported with ArchiCAD materials.

[Anonymous]

You got my attention now.. Mark! As does Maxwell.

+pablo

[Anonymous]

Some recent studies w/ Maxwell.

[Anonymous]

A study of a gold leaf texture I created.

[Anonymous]

Another view, w/ differnt multi light settings. This is an awesome feature of Maxwell. Fading lights in near realttime to balance the perfect scene lighting.

[Anonymous]

Personally, I prefer Artlantis for it's ease of use and short rendering times. I have tried the Maxwell demo, ut didn't care for it too much. I just couldn't see spending 2 or 3 hours on a scene that could take 15 or 20 minutes in Artlantis and a few minutes in photoshop to doctor up. To me it was a "no brainer". But, it all has to do with what works best for you and your company.

[Anonymous]

Please tell us why your specific image is so motivating. Was it the time to render? The time to set it up? We need technical facts here.

[Anonymous]

Don't get your panties in a wad, I meant no offense. I was just stating my opinion. If I am not allowed to do that, please tell me. Mine is bigger than yours.