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.

[Karl Ottenstein]

[Anonymous]

This is excellent news for me. I cannot wait to get back into my office. I'm stuck on this darn 4 day easter long weekend.

[Anonymous]

rslt wrote:
This is excellent news for me. I cannot wait to get back into my office.

I wouldn't rush thru traffic on the way to the office. The actual control of the materials can be tricky. It takes practice but I would really like to see your tests and progress posted here.

Below is a simple combination of a profile object (tube) a slab background and a few wall segments. Light the tube and render.

[Anonymous]

Another version of the test, this time with the physical sky and a few maxwell materials. The control of the bitmap size escapes me.

[Dwight]

Send me the model and I will do it in Artlantis to compare.

[Anonymous]

I wouldn't be interested if it was easy. It may be a long road, so I'm keen to make the first step.
I believe computer illustrations will be a constantly changing enviromnent and can anyone really imagine where it will be in, say 5 or 10 years?

[Dwight]

rslt wrote:
can anyone really imagine where it will be in, say 5 or 10 years?

Yes.

Entirely in India and China.

[Anonymous]

I've followed a lot of the advice that Dwight has given to others for lightworks, regarding lighting colors + setups, materials, and various post rendering techniques.

This greatly improved the results that i was getting from using lightworks.

but no matter how much time / energy invested into learning and understanding the techniques, the results always fell short of desirable

Yet after following the tutorials online for maxwell the end results are always more exciting to wait for.

Albeit its a very slow to render with but the fact that i can have 2 renders running in the background whilst i'm still continuing to work in ArchiCad with no lag or slowing down, is essential for the way work gets resolved here.

Interior shot shown took 20h to cook, which was done starting after work one night, just rendering in the background, stopped near the end of the following work day.

All objects are Cad Library parts with maxwell textures applied. ( lighting included )

[Anonymous]

Nice render, it is also informative to those of us using ArchiCAD to see the view as it renders with the internal engine or in the openGL just prior to rendering, for comparison. All ArchiCAD objects, hmmm pretty good.

Where I have trouble setting the stage in ArchiCAD is with the trees.

[Anonymous]

Trees trees trees....

Aside from using XFrog or Onyx trees (or Ivy Generator ) in 3DS or another 3rd party program, there's very little we ArchiCad users can do.

It would be great to actually render decent quality trees / shrubs with equally good textures, with ease through ArchiCad... but the polygons and ArchiCad just don't get along very well

I still resort to my collection of Alpha trees / people for Photo shopping in post render. Painful as it is some days.