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]

Nice use of the ivy generator, you can see a couple of areas where its hovering above the building but... it still looks effective.

( if the ivy generator hasn't been discussed on these forums, google it. its great )

biggest issue i have is how bright your people look, other than that, those are some nice images. Congrats.

[Thomas Holm]

MVP wrote:
Nice use of the ivy generator.

Ah! That explains the speed of Maxwell! Even with lots of fertilizer, I've never been able to generate sufficient ivy in less that three months!

On the other hand, I like bright people...

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the comments and critique!

Peter wrote:
The planting on the roof's great. Are they something found in Maxwell or are they Onyx trees. The shrubs have a nice sense of 'danglyness' and the ivy stuff has a nice 'climbyness' to it!

I've got a feeling the girl at the front is stalking you. She must have run quickly to the back of the building while you weren't looking! Be careful, she looks dodgy!

Textures are mostly arroway and the planting up on the roof is photoshoped, except the ivy.

I'm afraid that the girl is local anomaly, what else explains her constant existence and a static pose 😉

Thomas wrote:
Very nice! The only thing I miss is the sky reflections in the windows. Compare to the existing building to the right.

You are right, the contrast is quite distinct. Only excuse I would have is that bigger windows let more light in and lighter background behind glass makes reflections stand less out.
If I remember correctly I tried to tweak the glass material in maxwell but the environment was just to different from a real situation to produce the same effect. So called "venetian blinds" where distracting to edit the reflections in the photoshop afterwards so I didn't bother.

MVP wrote:
biggest issue i have is how bright your people look, other than that, those are some nice images. Congrats.

People are 2D and 3D lowpoly and I wasn't satisfied with them neither but at the same time couldn't tell what was the biggest disturbance.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

sinatropus wrote:
........FryRender has some advantages but it hasn't got THE plugin. Rumors are it's planed. ..........

.....where did you hear these rumours? Not that I wouldn't want one but there's been absolutely no mention of anything like this in the Fryrender forums, even though we've been asking for it.

I always imagined that an ArchiCAD plugin would be a dead-end for them, since they decided that they are not going to port Fry over to Mac platform and ArchiCAD is a dual-platform software.
And it wouldn't make sense (to me anyway) for them to only develop a PC plugin and version and then to completely ignore the Mac version and users.

It would be great if it turned out that they were actually developing an ArchiCAD plugin, especially with their upcoming RC4 VR editor and technology to be released after version 1. It sounds exactly like the type of technology an architect could hugely benefit from in developing and even selling projects and ideas beyond still render images.

[Anonymous]

Bricklyne wrote:

sinatropus wrote:
........FryRender has some advantages but it hasn't got THE plugin. Rumors are it's planed. ..........

.....where did you hear these rumours? Not that I wouldn't want one but there's been absolutely no mention of anything like this in the Fryrender forums, even though we've been asking for it.

I always imagined that an ArchiCAD plugin would be a dead-end for them, since they decided that they are not going to port Fry over to Mac platform and ArchiCAD is a dual-platform software.
And it wouldn't make sense (to me anyway) for them to only develop a PC plugin and version and then to completely ignore the Mac version and users.

It would be great if it turned out that they were actually developing an ArchiCAD plugin, especially with their upcoming RC4 VR editor and technology to be released after version 1. It sounds exactly like the type of technology an architect could hugely benefit from in developing and even selling projects and ideas beyond still render images.

Sorry, my mistake. I misinterpreted it , actually it was in the list of a potential plugins for the future.

[Anonymous]

I have attached the following pics mearly as information to Archicad users in relation to rendering times in Maxwell.
There are many examples of what maxwell can do when left for long periods but when I wanted to try Maxwell I couldn't find anything to show expected times for a render that I could base decisions upon (colours, textures etc).

The settings are:
Render time 40 mins (obviously stopped early)
Max sampling 40
Size 15cm x 7cm x 200 dpi
Physical sky
Shutter speed 70.00
ISO 200
F Stop 15
I know very little about Maxwell so these are based on fumbling about in the dark.
Materials are Maxwell.

I still can't get grass to work either.

30 seconds
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b367/rslt/Illustrations/Render30sec.jpg

2.5 mins
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b367/rslt/Illustrations/Render25mins.jpg

5.5 mins
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b367/rslt/Illustrations/Render55mins.jpg

15 mins
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b367/rslt/Illustrations/Render15mins.jpg

[Anonymous]

The settings are:
Render time 40 mins (obviously stopped early)
Max sampling 40

Usually with my settings i just set the time to an impossible number eg 120000 minutes, because as soon as the image has cleared up enough you can always stop or resume as needed.

but more so, the sample level,

Usually exteriors should be fine and cleared by a Max of 16 - 18 SL ( very achievable if on normal priority, left for 16h - 24h, thats given theres a lot of transparency, reflections and even maybe lighting, Otherwise it can be cleared in 45 min - 1.5h with simple transparencies and environmental lighting )

Interiors .... Multilight ? well without a render farm hitting 20 + is going to be extremely long, pending on your sepc's.

Usually i settle for SL 17 - 18, this would be set to normal one morening and checked upon the next day. it will need Neat image on certain areas that require further clearing up.

IF you choose to use IOR , r2 or Displacement Materials, these will increase your total render time dramatically.

I still can't get grass to work either.

What grass material are you having trouble with ?

[Anonymous]

Hi MVP

Thanks for the advice with the settings.
The grass I'm having trouble with is the mxm by thxraph with this tutorial

http://www.maxwellrender.com/tutorials/grass_tutorial.pdf

1. It says 'beign by making a simple plane' - I tried it with a wall object that I made very thin (about 2mm),
2. then make a planar UV map, I have no idea what this is.
3. Copy and paste the plane (as per instructions), he ended up with 4260 planes per meter squared. Well, I tried it in Archicad (to be rendered in Maxwell) and the outcome was a very 'patterned' patch of green that did not look like grass. I deleted it so unfortunately I can't show you.
Archicad was starting to have trouble with this many 'walls' and really slowed down and this was only for 1 m2.

I would like to have the grass that can be seen on the pics of that tutorial. Looks good enough to roll in. Tee hee hee.
Any help would be appreciated.

[Anonymous]

rslt wrote:
Hi MVP

Thanks for the advice with the settings.
The grass I'm having trouble with is the mxm by thxraph with this tutorial

http://www.maxwellrender.com/tutorials/grass_tutorial.pdf

1. It says 'beign by making a simple plane' - I tried it with a wall object that I made very thin (about 2mm),
2. then make a planar UV map, I have no idea what this is.
3. Copy and paste the plane (as per instructions), he ended up with 4260 planes per meter squared. Well, I tried it in Archicad (to be rendered in Maxwell) and the outcome was a very 'patterned' patch of green that did not look like grass. I deleted it so unfortunately I can't show you.
Archicad was starting to have trouble with this many 'walls' and really slowed down and this was only for 1 m2.

I would like to have the grass that can be seen on the pics of that tutorial. Looks good enough to roll in. Tee hee hee.
Any help would be appreciated.

I'm afraid archicad is quite limited to make this kind of distributions, though it is possible to manually place grass planes (Drag a Multiple Copy on a mesh with gravity turned on) but without instancing and also you have to consider a rotation to have some randomness (depending from the camera position). And use a wall with thickness 0 because then you have only one or two polygons instead of 6. UV maps purpose would be that the grass texture would fit onto grass plane (small wall with 0 thickness) but you can achieve this by assigning texture size for the grass material same as the wall lenght and height to be used as grass plane.

I have used that specific grass shown on the pictures posted earlier and actually I wouldn't recommend it. It slows rendering times quite a bit because at that time there was no instancing support for maxwell (also with archicad plugin it isn't implemented yet if it's ever gona be?) and is not so easy to set up. I used cinema 4d for instancing and rotating grass planes. Ideal solutions would be only a grass cut out from a photograph with similar perspective and lightning situation and photoshoped onto the rendering. That's what I did additionally on top of 3D grass which was not so promising.
But if you really have to then I would recommend using cinema 4d, 3ds max or any other decent 3d packages with maxwell plugin which has basic scatter tools and so instances can be used.

[Anonymous]

Thanks to the advice I got, here is the first example of grass using the above mentioned mxm.
It rendered for 20 mins and even though it needs more work I'm quite happy with it. I left the rough ends to show the construction method.
It really does slow the computer down, this took about 5 mins to start rendering, there are 8386 walls with a thickness of 0 and height of 60mm and it covers a 10mx10m area.
One problem is when copying, the gravity selection doesn't work and doesn't carry over from the original object so I only have it working on flat surfaces.
MVP: If this is not a good material to be using for grass do you have a recommendation. I Photoshop grass but would like to get away from it, if I can.

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