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]

Here is the Archicad model rendered in Maxwell with nothing else done to it.
I made a mistake with the settings for the render (set it for 17hrs and sampling of 100, I saw sampling 100 in a tutorial and had the impression it would never reach that high and would be stopped by the time limit, giving a high quality render), I came in this morning hoping to see a nice rendering and only got a low quality 30 min render ,so this is what I'm posting, it will do the job of showing what is working and what is not.






I am working on the same model using Maxwell materials, to get a direct comparison. I have done everything except the tiles at 45 (going to make a new tile at 45) and tweak the textures. hope to have it finished next week.
Any suggestions/comments are more than welcome.

[Anonymous]

Comparing the two images the maxwell shows the far nicer shadow falloff color. Albeit you need to spend a few minuets applying nicer materials

Do you prefer glass with such a high reflectance? ( could be your preferred style ) Just curious.

[Anonymous]

Applying the Maxwell materials is what I'm working on. I have only been using Maxwell for 4 days, so I'm a bit slow. I should have it done (with a high quality render) by next week.
Generally I don't make the windows transparent thus requiring internal 'decoration' on illustrations. Although a more realistic end product can be achieved I have had problems putting in, curtains/furniture etc which are not what people want or like. I prefer to put reflections of trees/houses etc.
Are there any better solutions? I'm always happy to learn.

[Anonymous]

rslt,

I am not sure how you embed the image inside the text, but if you upload (use the attachment feature in this forum) the image it allows the viewer to see a full size image in a separate window, useful for comparisons. Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hi Burginger

I saved it as a jpeg and uploaded it to Photobucket (on line photo album), then copied the [img] into my posting.
I think its the same way most people do photos.

[Thomas Holm]

rslt wrote:
saved it as a jpeg and uploaded it to Photobucket (on line photo album), then copied the [img] into my posting.
I think its the same way most people do photos.

Please don't do that. People on slow connections have a hard time reading these posts. Please attach images the normal way (using the add attachment procedure).

[Anonymous]

Sorry for doing that. Won't happen again.

[Anonymous]

Burginger wrote:
The Green Line trees create a convincing entourage element, but if you go straight from ArchiCAD to Maxwell you can see that the bitmaps render in reverse. Look closely the branches grow from mid air. I wonder where this can be fixed?

What version of Maxwell (and specifically Maxwell add-on) are you running? Is it 1.6 for Maxwell and 1.4 for add-on? There was a bug in older version which was causing this. I assume you are on OSX - is that correct? I will test in the evening as I do not have Mac with me at the moment.

BTW - for those of you who do not know 🙂 I am the developer of the ArchiCAD add-on for Maxwell. I do not have a whole lot of time to monitor ArchiCAD forums regularly (I do that obviously for Maxwell forums) but if you have questions/comments/requests you can let me know via PM.

Pavol

[Chazz]

Thomas wrote:
Please don't do that. People on slow connections have a hard time reading these posts. Please attach images the normal way (using the add attachment procedure).

rslt wrote:
Sorry for doing that. Won't happen again.

No no please DO do that. But instead of putting the image code in, put the image link snippet in from PhotoBucket. This way you have a picture that potentially loads faster than the forum's method and is linked to an image that is larger than the forum allows for those that want to se the high rez version. A curtsey would be to mention the file size in your post...... PhotoBucket rocks!

Rslt, don't be cowed by Thomas just because he's super helpful, comes from a civilized northern country and has 30x your post count. You are right!


Relax, it's only 80k

[Anonymous]

Pavol wrote:
BTW - for those of you who do not know 🙂 I am the developer of the ArchiCAD add-on for Maxwell.

Isn't that what makes ArchiCAD-Talk so useful? Thanks for stopping by Pavol. Yes, I am on an Intel Mac with Maxwell version 1.6.1 and Maxwell Plugin for ArchiCAD version 1.4 - I'll go look at your Maxwell Download section to see if there is anything more current.

Don't you like that? Pavol uses a PC at work, but at "Home" he uses a Mac. Kinda warms your heart.