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]

rslt wrote:
I'm having a problem with displacements.
The example of the tile has quite deep grooves for the grouting yet doesn't seem to show in the rendering. It is a simple tile with a displacement for the grouting, a bump map for the texture and the colour map.
In the material editor it works well, it worked rendering the simball but not on anything rendered through Archicad or on objects exported from Archicad.
It's not just this tile but anything that has displacements is not rendering properly.
Any ideas?


http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b367/rslt/Illustrations/tile.jpg


http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b367/rslt/Illustrations/floor.jpg

Displacement needs triangles/polygons. All archicad slabs and straight walls etc have only few triangles and therefore you need massive precision as MaX_MaD stated to compensate lack of polygons . Maxwell's simball is spherical object and it has much more polygons/triangles than simple box. The higher the precision, the slower it will take maxwell to calculate. There wouldn't be any distinct difference when using bump or displacement map with those tiles if you aren't doing any closeups.

[Anonymous]

Thanks sinatropus,
That makes a lot of sense.

[Anonymous]

What I want to do is use the maxwell textures on the archicad model so that every time I want to do a rendering of the model I don't have to reapply the textures. I tried importing the folder of maxwell textures into the AC10 library but they don't show up as options. Does this mean I have to go through and create new textures in AC10 for all the maxwell textures? What do you guys do?

[Anonymous]

I cant quiet understand the question you're asking...but from my interpretation of it.

You have materials already made in ArchiCad and wish to continue using them as you normally do. BUT you don' wish to re-assign different materials to said walls / slabs etc just so that you can render with maxwell.

IF this is what you are asking then the solution is simple.

See image attached.

The material shown is the standard "Glass" the only difference is the render engine chosen in the material editor. The exact same as when you go to render, you define the render engine to use the attributes saved to a material.

This way i can go about modeling the exact same way i used to before i started using maxwell, still using the same 1 material that has different setting for each render engine, choose which render engine i want to use ( LightWorks etc ) and the materials are great for each.

ArchiCad does not need to load up the maxwell materials as a Library at all. ( cut down on those awful library loading times )

Let me know if i completely missed the point of your Question

[Anonymous]

How many materials with displacement have you guys tested in ArchiCad?

All of the one we're pulling in from the maxwell materials site are looking like this. (see below)

We're using 1.6 with AC 10 and I've tried upping the precision up to 30000 on the grass but to no avail. I've also tried converting the ground plane to a mesh, no dice. This is the case with all displacement textures. Is it safe to conclude that displacement and AC don't mix?

one image is 1.5 before displacement, the other is same model rendered in 1.6 so materials with displacement are rendering.

Any ideas?

1.6
http://bp1.blogger.com/_eFYfEXzoOLk/SCslcaSri3I/AAAAAAAAArM/HvU9pT1AQXw/s1600-h/grass+test+3.jpg

1.5
http://bp0.blogger.com/_eFYfEXzoOLk/SCslTKSri2I/AAAAAAAAArE/ZZNpiRSbw6k/s1600-h/grass+test+2.jpg

[Anonymous]

sanderarchitects wrote:
What I want to do is use the maxwell textures on the archicad model so that every time I want to do a rendering of the model I don't have to reapply the textures. I tried importing the folder of maxwell textures into the AC10 library but they don't show up as options. Does this mean I have to go through and create new textures in AC10 for all the maxwell textures? What do you guys do?

Apply your maxwell materials (mxm) to archicad materials once and afterwards import them into new archicad project or even place them inside templates using attribute manager (options - elemenet attributes - attributes manager)

flamingjawa wrote:
Is it safe to conclude that displacement and AC don't mix?

I would say yes. If you don't use any other 3d app to import your geometry, add more triangles and bring back into the archicad, then displacements like grass is quite impossible task and I would say most useless. Some different type of displaced materials might work, like stone walls etc.

[Moh]

Just tried the demo program, slow but impressive.

I was wondering if someone could shed some light on how the licensing system works for Maxwell. Is a particular license locked to a particular machine in the same way as Maya, or can it simply be installed on any machine? Likewise, are the node licenses locked to particular machines?

Currently with Maya we have a floating license that is locked to a particular computer. The disadvantage that we have found with this system, is that our office tends to upgrade machines so frequently, that to lock the license to a particular machine always leads to headaches & inconveniences when the time comes for an upgrade.

Thanks,
Moh

[Anonymous]

I would say yes. If you don't use any other 3d app to import your geometry, add more triangles and bring back into the archicad, then displacements like grass is quite impossible task and I would say most useless. Some different type of displaced materials might work, like stone walls etc.

Actually the trick was height. Once I selected absolute units and set it for somthing low, say 10-20 it seemed to work. Setting precision to "adaptive" (or absolute) also helps but slows voxelization down quite a bit.

I did notice that the grass material applied to high poly/small scale objects worked great. It seems like scale also has an effect on the material (similar to emitters) i.e. height in maxwell's material editor is proportional to the size of the 3d object in the model. Most displacement objects have been great it was only the grass one that really gave us trouble.

I'd still suggest not relying on displacement too much with archicad, seems like maxwell needs clean polys and archicad generates anything but with it's slabs.

[Anonymous]

without trawling through 40+ pages here, and other 100s posts - what is the best maxwell workflow?

Keep in AC, or export a model in Maxwell Studio? If the latter, what is the best export format to choose?

Thanks in advance

[Anonymous]

I would recommend to do as much as possible in archicad (textures, materials etc) and then import the mxs file that maxwell plugin creates when rendering or exporting to the studio and then add last objects or instances. Group the objects from the archicad in studio so you can delete them and import again when you have to update the archicad model.