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]

Sorry for interrupting yours disquisition, but I have some questions about maxwell.
First, is it easy to use, I saw some renders, and they are great, I want to know do you need to spent a lot of time to get that quality, like in v-ray
Second, is support for maxwell ok? I mean help files, tutorials...

[stefan]

Try the Maxwell demo. This is not time limited and fully functional and save-enabled. You just have a watermark.

I've tried a little bit and it feels still somewhat technical in approach. I've had some conflicts on my machine, since the Trolltech Qt libraries were not the same as my own compiled versions for my development work, so I had to uninstall. And I had a problem with the delivered material libraries, which could not find the texture paths.

The look you are receiving in the last example is, I assume, by using the ArchiCAD textures and not transforming them to native Maxwell materials, since they would provide a more realistic, less-saturated look and would improve your renderings quite a bit.

[Anonymous]

I`m trying to use MAXWELL RENDER but I having many problems.

If I try to save my 3D model using the ArchiCAD plugin exporting to Maxwell I always get this message:

C:\ work \ maxwell \ mxsvn \ src \ QTimage.cpp(227) : QTimage error (err:0) (gsErr:-7003)

If I try to render diretly from ArchiCAD the Maxwell console application open. Is it normal ??

In the plugin documentation there a rule that I could not undertand :

"The parent folder of mxcl.exe should be in your PATH enviroment variable if you want to start rendering directly from ArchiCAD". What does it means ?

Please, could someone help me?

[stefan]

Please do not post the same question in multiple threads.

I've answered in http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=77705#77705

[Anonymous]

Archicad 10 (Mac and PC) plug-in for Maxwell

The Mac version now has the same features as the Windows version; you can see the features list here:

http://www.maxwellrender.com/news/archicad.html

There are also some new improvements:

- Installation for ArchiCAD plugin was modified (the current installation allows selection of installation folder)
- Default project folder is correct even on international Windows
- Better error reporting implemented
- More stable support for ArchiCAD textures
- Fix: latitude/longitude ranges were wrong

You can get the updated plug-in from the usual customers download site: http://download.nextlimit.com/download.htm


NOTE: I had trouble with the download, my Stuffit expanded the file into a normal folder called MAXWELL - I needed to collapse the folder (close it) and then rename it MAXWELL.gmx - then it behaved like a normal super powered plug-in. This type of rendring engine plug-in is just what the doctor ordered. Great stuff. Enjoy.

[Anonymous]

As far as ease of use, C4D is fast and easy as long as you don't invoke Global Illumination.

I really like the physical sun of Maxwell and the real time adjustment of renderings while they process. I don't like the time necessary for a good clear image when the light level is low.

So far, I don't know how to get ArchiCAD billboard objects to render correctly and I haven't messed with Mxm materials inside of ArchiCAD yet. The materials in these example images are straight from ArchiCAD. I hope these image postings are not annoying. Now that most of the technical hurtles are over in regards to Macintosh version plug-ins. It might be a good time to create a better work in progress.

[Anonymous]

Another.

[Anonymous]

Another.

[Anonymous]

The last one.

[stefan]

The real problem of the integration in ArchiCAD is the low texture quality of the default ArchiCAD materials. You can make a nice model, but you have to either replace all textures with better ones (high-res, less visible tiling, less saturation) or define/load a Maxwell material for each used material. This can be cumbersome.

But if you want the best result, you should probably go the extra mile and make some thumbnail sheet for maxwell materials and apply them. Especially tricky materials such as glass, chrome, aluminium and velvet will never look great when you only use a default ArchiCAD material + texture.

In fact, that is often the problem with ArchiCAD renderings: try to apply decent textures or replace all materials with optimized materials for your rendering application of choice.

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I've tried the ArchiCAD 10 plugin to render with Maxwell and the process is smooth. I was struggling with the Maxwell textures in the beginning (the additional downloads), but once they were into place, the renderings using Maxwell materials were significantly better then the ones using ArchiCAD textures. Now I have to get rid of the demo-watermark 😉

(Actually, they offer an educational version, where you pay about $100 for three consecutive years and then you have a full license. Still, Autodesk VIZ 2007 student version is free and so is Artlantis Studio educational, so hard to sell to students...)