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]

Aaargh, frustrating...
So I'm trying the demo of Maxwell, with the option of exporting from Cinema 4D. I get my model into Studio, can run renders using Sky Dome OK, but it all goes black when I try to switch to physical sky, regardless of where I position the crosshair on the globe... Anyone know what I've done wrong ???

Edit: Bug ger... Isn't it always the way, when you email for help, you find the answer straight away It was in export settings from C4D...
Will post images if I get anything decent, but they'll only be 640x480 with a nice big Maxwell logo overlaid...

[Thomas Holm]

jp_walford wrote:
Will post images if I get anything decent, but they'll only be 640x480 with a nice big Maxwell logo overlaid...

That would be interesting. I find a mysteriously toyish cardsboard-plastic model feeling to all the Maxwell images presented above, (except Daniel Hruby's U4.jpg, which I find exceptionally excellent).

It's something like the feel of my childhood's toy electrical railway's plastic Faller house models, in scale 1:87. Why is that?

[Anonymous]

OK, here goes...

[Anonymous]

Your rendering is out of focus.
To focus right click and select autofocus.. or focus on a selected object.

[Anonymous]

Thomas wrote:
I find a mysteriously toyish cardsboard-plastic model feeling to all the Maxwell images presented above, (except Daniel Hruby's U4.jpg, which I find exceptionally excellent).

I agree. Although most of the stuff posted has been nice to look at, it does look a bit toy like. But as Mark keeps saying, it's still early days. Remember what Artlantis v3 renders looked like...

[Thomas Holm]

Tom wrote:
But as Mark keeps saying, it's still early days. Remember what Artlantis v3 renders looked like...

Sure. But I don't mean to criticize, I simply want to know why is it so? As there is one exception, apparently it's possible to avoid this feeling. So, what's happening?

[Anonymous]

Thomas wrote:
... I don't mean to criticize, I simply want to know why is it so?

Sorry - didn't mean sound telling off-ish.

I'd also like to know about the hazy, dream-like lighting that is common in most of the images - why? Is this some sort of default in Maxwell?

[Anonymous]

Some good news for all those who doesn't like to work in MaxwellStudio:

Dear Maxwell friends,

We have just uploaded an updated plugin that supports ArchiCAD version 9 and 10. You can download it from:

http://www.maxwellrender.com/qetuombczadgjlwryipmrnld/downloadmx.html

No username or password is required to access.

Please see list of improvements:

- Maxwell rendering: ArchiCAD add-on is fully integrated with ArchiCAD as an optional Photo Rendering engine. All Maxwell related parameters are integrated into the Photo Rendering Settings dialog of ArchiCAD and they are available as soon as Maxwell is selected as ArchiCAD's preferred rendering engine.

- In addition to automatic conversion of ArchiCAD materials there is support for Maxwell MXM (file based) materials integrated into ArchiCAD. MXM material can be associated with ArchiCAD material (interface is part of Material settings dialog) allowing the full power of Maxwell materials directly in ArchiCAD. ArchiCAD's Material settings dialog also allows easy direct access to Maxwell's native material editor (MXED) - thus Maxwell materials can be created right from there.

- Maxwell add-on provides full access to all Maxwell rendering parameters from Photo Rendering Settings dialog:

§ Engine parameters: project directory, scene name, image type, render time, multilight support

§ Camera parameters: shutter speed, F stop, ISO, film width and height, pixel aspect ratio, diaphragm, number of blades, angle

§ Environment attributes: sky dome (intensity, colour is taken from ArchiCAD's background), physical sky (project location, date/time, turbidity, ozone, water)

§ Layers/Channels: channels - render, alpha, zbuffer, objectID, materialID, layers - direct, indirect, direct reflection, direct refraction, indirect reflection, indirect refraction

§ HDRI parameters: background, illumination, reflection, refraction

- ArchiCAD 9 and ArchiCAD 10 are supported.

For any further technical information about this plugin, please contact http://www.nextlimit.com/tech_support.htm

Thank you,

Next Limit Technologies team

www.maxwellrender.com

[Anonymous]

Hello all.

Cool Pagoda!

A couple comments to posts below.

1. Toyland. The toyish quality is a direct result of the camera modeling that Maxwell does. It is not a fault, but a feature. We have been accustomed in our previous rendering applications for everything to be infinitely in focus. Not what happens in real photography (usually). In fact, even realworld scenes when photographed can look like toys. Here are some examples of real scenes that look like miniatures.

http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-06/rd/toys/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yongfook/sets/72057594076771629/

Play with this tool and you can begin to get an understanding of how Fstop, Shutterspeed and focal length / depth can affect scene scale.

http://atillaakin.com/maxwell/dof.html

Using higher FStop settings like 10-18 with a slower shutterspeed like 250 will approximate architectural photography.

2. Scale

Double check the scene scale by switching to plan view in Studio and reading the values (in meters) on the xy grid. you can tell real quick if your scene might actually be miniature. If units are mm or km then you may need to re-export. But the wrong scale will not render correctly. lighting is calculated in real terms so if you have a 100 watt light bulb in a scene that is 10 times too big, the light bulb will be emitting 10 times LESS light than it should.

3. Object grouping.

I am not yet using the AC10 plug in as I am a Mac user. I export from AC10 using .3ds and to reduce the amount of objects to ONLY the materials I placed in the model, I select the following settings upon export:

Materials (option 4)
10 mm ( brings in the model at the correct scale)
and the last choice for 7 letter naming which helps name the objects correctly.

This provides the easiest way of dealing with fewer objects to apply materials to in lieu of the flexibility in material placement with thousands of objects.

[Anonymous]

Still no Mac version. Well since the cat is finally out of the bag, it only seems fair that the Mac users get to see at least the PDF manual.

I would like to provide a link to the PDF manual so that Macintosh users can at least see the feature set of the plug-in. When I receive approval from Next Limit I will post a link here.


Regarding the "look" of the renders seen here. They are just a reflection of the users ability, the Maxwell Gallery shows many fine examples of realism. It will be nice to see examples of "MAXWELL RENDER" architectural scenes from the seasoned illustrators here at ArchiCAD-Talk group eventually fill this thread.