| Author |
Message |
    
Craig Williams
Senior Member
Username: Craigwilliams
Post Number: 419
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008 - 04:13 pm: | 
|
Some recent Maxwell images of a new High School media center.
A closeup of the book stacks created using a Maxwell displacement map.
Craig |
Peder Lindbom
Senior Member
Username: Peder
Post Number: 456
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008 - 06:03 pm: |
|
Looking great!
I would suggest burning the sunlight a little more perhaps adding a slight glow? Also the intensity of the fluos in the middle picture looks weak at least on the white diffusor plastic.
The books look fantastic, did you make them yourself? Would you mind sharing your technique in that case?
Peder |
Adrian Gracia
Junior Member
Username: Agracia
Post Number: 38
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Saturday, July 19, 2008 - 12:02 pm: |
|
Craig, those are great looking images!
I've been thinking about jumping into maxwell, so a couple of questions...
1- How long did these renders take?
2- What resolution did you use?
3- What are the specs of the machine you use to render or is it a render farm?
Thanks and congrats on the images. |
Craig Williams
Senior Member
Username: Craigwilliams
Post Number: 420
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Monday, July 21, 2008 - 10:01 am: |
|
Peder,
I completely agree, In fact I had already experimented with some diffraction settings.
I've always had issues with large numbers of similar lights such as the fluorescents. This is mainly because I'm distributing the intensity of a single light fixture across multiple fixtures when I join the emitter objects in FormZ. Setting the intensity to 10,000 in the multilight settings sometimes helps but not in this particular case. To overcome this I believe I need to create a new emitter material with a very high intensity (Essentially multiplying the number of fixtures times the wattage for one fixture).
Thanks for the comment on the books. I just uploaded them to the Maxwell materials site so they should be available for download sometime tomorrow.
Adrian,
Thanks! I highly recommend learning Maxwell. It's pretty easy to pick up and makes a winning combination with FormZ.
1- 80 hours each. This is only because I was able to set each to render over two long weekends. I could have gotten acceptable results if I had let them render over just one night as well.
2- 4000 x 2250
3- Render farm (two machines):
machine 1: Xeon 2.66ghz, 8 core, 8gb RAM
machine 2: Xeon 2.66ghz, 4 core, 8gb RAM
Craig |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 239
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Monday, July 21, 2008 - 08:04 pm: |
|
Craig,
What SL did you reach?
THX |
Craig Williams
Senior Member
Username: Craigwilliams
Post Number: 421
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 - 09:14 am: |
|
Aaron,
16.12 |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 240
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 - 04:02 pm: |
|
Thanks Craig,
They look clean at 16 SL.
This is a progress image of a restaurant rendering I am currently working on. It is about 95% complete. Rendered in Maxwell.
Would anyone know if this is a true assumption?
The posted image is 800x533. It reached 20.25 SL in 16 hours. My final image will be 2700x1800. That is 3.38 time as large. So, it is appropriate to assume the final rendering would take 3.38 time as long? So about 54 hours?
Thanks,
Aaron
 |
Craig Williams
Senior Member
Username: Craigwilliams
Post Number: 422
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 - 04:54 pm: |
|
Aaron,
Check this link out...
http://www.klausbusse.de/mxc/
It's a Maxwell render calculator.
I came up with 7 days 13 hours and 33 minutes when I input your test specs.
Craig
(Message edited by craigwilliams on July 23, 2008) |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 243
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 - 05:56 pm: |
|
Interesting..Thanks for the link. Have you found it's calculations to be in the ball park with your rendering times?
Thanks,
Aaron
(Message edited by aarons on July 23, 2008)
(Message edited by aarons on July 23, 2008) |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 245
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 24, 2008 - 12:53 am: |
|
Here are some of the custom Form-Z modeled elements up close rendered in Maxwell.
 |
Silicon
Member
Username: Treebeard
Post Number: 72
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, July 24, 2008 - 03:44 pm: |
|
Aaron,
I really like the caustic + shadow affects you set up for the wine goblets. Very nice image
one note about render times. When you are comparing rendering times, one way to visualize it in your head is to image that the the renderer has to look at and 'paint in' every pixel in the image. So if you double the height and width of an image you actually have 4x the number of pixels the render has to 'paint' so it's going to take ~4x as long to render.
So in your example you want to multiply the increase in size for both height and width together. 3.38x3.38 = ~7.6 days (ouch) Which is essentially what he maxwell calculator gave you |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 246
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 24, 2008 - 07:08 pm: |
|
Silicon,
Thanks.
I was excited to get the caustic effects. You were able to see them in one of the earlier restaurant views. The view changed. Now you do not see them.
I may have to use a render farm. |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 247
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 12:59 am: |
|
Here is the final image for the restaurant I have been working on. It is rendered in Maxwell Render.
Rendering time was 126 hours to 19.25 SL at 2400x1600 on my machine. The set up is dual E5320's (14.88 Ghz total) with 4gigs of ram.
 |
Allan Leclaire
New member
Username: Allanarch3
Post Number: 17
Registered: 12-2007
| | Posted on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 05:19 pm: |
|
Man, that looks great! I hope your client appreciates the quality! |
Dan Shear
Senior Member
Username: Redrngr
Post Number: 210
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 03:08 am: |
|
Agreed!
Fantastic Job Aaron!
Dan S. |
Richard Rush
Senior Member
Username: Rwrush
Post Number: 303
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 09:01 am: |
|
Very, very nice, Aaron. And just to zero in one thing, those glasses in the overhead rack look fantastic.
But 126 hours!!! I surely would have gone with Maxwell a long ago if it were not for the long render times. If that restaurant were my project, the client would invariably want to change a color, or a fabric, or a chair, or a light fixture, and then expect to see a revised image by tomorrow morning. Or they may want to see several images with different options. And on and on it goes.
Lets say I use reduced quality renders that take maybe a third of the time at 42 hours, I couldn't live with that either. How do you deal with these issues, or don't you have them with your clients? My work with architect-clients tends to be part of the design process, so the renderings evolve along with the design.
Richard |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 248
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 10:20 am: |
|
Allan, Dan and Richard.
Thanks for you comments!!! The client did like the renderings.
Richard...I would be glad to share with you how I handle my work flow using Maxwell Render with Form-Z.
At first I was nervous adding Maxwell Render to my tool set because I was not sure how I was going to handle the long rendering times and deadlines with that. My clients have always liked my RenderZone renderings as RenderZone has evolved superbly over the years. But I felt like I needed and edge or something else to grasp the attention of new clients. I wanted to get into doing more interior renderings. Once I started learning and using the demo version I was hooked. The material editor is very nice and to set up a scene is quite easy because you do it all in Form-Z.
My clientele is also architects. I am now working with an Interior designer. Honestly, they hired me because of Maxwell Renders quality. I most likely would not have landed this new client if I did not show them some Maxwell Images.
The restaurant and the Mountain Mine House renderings were both design assist renderings. Meaning, there were many design changes along the way. What I have learned is that I can show decent enough progress images along the way for simple fact that Maxwell starts rendering the whole image right away. It is not like RenderZone where it shows partial pieces of the image as it renders. So I can make some changes send the low res rendering to my one rendering machine and keep working on the model on my other computer. In a few hours I can have an image that is good enough to show the client the changes. So, you really only have to deal with the long render times at the end. What it has helped me to do is work faster. So I am trying to save as much time for final renderings as I can have.
But there is rendering help as well. Maxwell Render is set up on a few very fast render farms. There is Ranch Computing, Render Rocket and Rebus Farm to name a few. We are talking any where from 600 GHZ to over 1200 GHZ of processing power at your disposal. I have only used a render farm once but it worked very well. I used Render Rocket. I rendered the Mountain Mine House renderings on Render Rockets Farm. It took 30 hours each for the renderings. But they rendered simultaneously so I got them both in 30 hours. To give you an example how fast it is using a render farm. The total CPU usage was 1,900 CPU hours for one image and 1,300 CPU hours for the other image. So basically if one of their machines rendered each image that’s how many hours it would have taken for each image. But I got it in 30 hours so that's very good. I was on low priority as well so you get a better rate that way.
So, I would give it a try. And if you have you own render farm you can get the render client for Maxwell Render as well.
Aaron |
Richard Rush
Senior Member
Username: Rwrush
Post Number: 304
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 10:54 am: |
|
Aaron, thanks so much for your reply.
When you said "In a few hours I can have an image that is good enough to show the client the changes" do you mean two or three hours? Do you have an early two/three hour render of the restaurant that you would be willing to post?
When using the commercial render farms, do you give up the ability to use the Multi-Light feature? And can you see the progress? - and if not, how do you know how long to let it "cook?"
Richard |
Craig Williams
Senior Member
Username: Craigwilliams
Post Number: 424
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 12:41 pm: |
|
Richard,
The thing to remember is that when Maxwell is rendering, the image file (tif, jpg, etc.) is really for preview purposes only. More importantly, the rendering is developing a MXI file. This file contains all the rendering information including the Multilight shadow maps, resolution, and sample level. This should not be confused with the MXS file which contains all the geometry and project settings that the formZ plugin creates.
Although a MXI file can get quite large, you can always keep this file and open it at any time to readjust the multilight or lens settings. Very large MXI files can take several minutes to open, but adjusting the lights and saving out image variations is almost instantaneous.
So, a commercial render farm will create the MXI file that you can open on your own computer to adjust the multilight.
Craig
(Message edited by craigwilliams on August 05, 2008) |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 249
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 01:19 pm: |
|
Hi Richard,
If I render an 800x600 preview image for the restaurant in looks decent in about 3 hours. I will try a 3 hour render and see how it looks and post it. You can also render blow up regions to show a client a change as well.
As Craig mentioned Maxwell creates three files an MXS, MXI and the image file. The MXI holds all the rendering information. The MXI and The image file update about every ten minutes. With Render Rocket I can go onto their server and download the a copy of the MXI and the image file when ever I want to check the progress of the image. So, lets say I have to PS a bunch of tress and stuff into my rendering. I do not have to wait until the image is fully rendered. I can go grab my preview image while it is still cooking and use that to start my PS work. Then when the final image is done, I just swap it out. Also, Maxwell can produce different channles to aid in post prodction work. It can render alpha, material and object ID channels, very helpful, just to name a few.
To know how long to let it cook on the render farm I render a sample image to say 7 SL at a certain resolution. I tell them how long it took and give them the resolution I want. They can give me a time estimate from that based on how many servers they will allocate to my job.
There is also a calculator that can do this for you on the Maxwell web site, as Craig pointed out to me in an eralier post.
Hope that helps.
Aaron
(Message edited by aarons on August 05, 2008) |
Richard Rush
Senior Member
Username: Rwrush
Post Number: 306
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 10:21 pm: |
|
Thanks, Aaron and Craig, for the very helpful information.
The creation of the MXI file that you can open later has to be a huge benefit. Conceptually, this is similar to what I've wanted to see for RenderZone post-process effects. As it is now, when using Imager, the post-process is only useful if you know for sure the settings you want ahead of time. Zweb, are you reading this? But I guess it's a LightWorks issue.
If I do end up moving to Maxwell, it probably won't be until the end of the year or later. I'm currently preoccupied with some non-modeling/rendering activities now.
Thanks again.
Richard |
Dan Shear
Senior Member
Username: Redrngr
Post Number: 211
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, August 07, 2008 - 04:25 am: |
|
Richard,
If you do end up of getting into Maxwell, then do keep in mind the following: I am sure you already have a Beefy Hardware configuration and I am confident that you will love the feature set in Maxwell 1.7. Yet, If you have a project with a Lot of Lights then more times then not, One needs more then 4 GB of RAM for such high resolution Maxwell renderings. Others can verify as I think Craig Williams mentioned some thing about this not to long ago in a thread.
Dan S. |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 251
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, August 07, 2008 - 06:48 pm: |
|
Richard,
I got a call from a client today who has changes for me to make on an old project. It is an exterior rendering. I made a few updates and sent him a progress image. It took 58 minutes on machine to spit this out at 1000x750.
 |
Richard Rush
Senior Member
Username: Rwrush
Post Number: 307
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Friday, August 08, 2008 - 03:13 pm: |
|
Aaron, thanks for posting that image. It is certainly an image I would be comfortable with showing for client review. That is much better than I would have expected for 58 minutes at 1,000 pixels in Maxwell.
Some questions:
During your process of setting up lighting and adjusting material properties in Maxwell, are you able to generate quick previews that provide sufficient feedback? And if you say "yes" could you define your idea of "quick"? The thing I find with test renders is that while doing one may seem quick, the time really adds up when doing them over and over and over until everything looks right.
Would I be correct to assume that after you set up your light-types/locations, then the intensities can all be adjusted with Multi-Light?
If you have worked with RenderZone 6.5 (or 6.6) using Ambient Occlusion and Final Gather (with radiosity), how would you compare the setup time for lighting/materials with Maxwell? I am somewhat frustrated with the time it takes me to repeatedly generate small test renders, especially when the radiosity has to regenerate.
Sorry for all the questions. I guess I should just download the Maxwell demo.
Richard |
Aaron Smithey
Senior Member
Username: Aarons
Post Number: 252
Registered: 06-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 13, 2008 - 03:05 am: |
|
Hi Richard,
Doing quick test renders form my self is very quick. Especially if I am working on checking with Maxwell materials. When I am working on the model, I generally will cut out the piece I am working on into another modeling window. That way I can render the individual elements fast and check them over.
As far as rendering quick previews for me, the typically I just render the image at 800x600. It seems to work ok for me. Each projects is different depending on it set up. Some take longer than others.
The light set up in Maxwell is very easy because it is all done in Form-Z. You just create emitter objects and give them an emitter material. There is no extra set up like what you have to do for GI in Form-Z. And with Multi-Light all the lighting can be adjusted in multi-light. |
Richard Rush
Senior Member
Username: Rwrush
Post Number: 308
Registered: 04-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, August 14, 2008 - 08:11 am: |
|
Thanks, Aaron! |
David
Junior Member
Username: Dmn
Post Number: 39
Registered: 08-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, December 04, 2008 - 08:53 pm: |
|
Nice images. Aaron, the texture on the spokes in the chair back should maybe be rotated 90 degrees to be parallel :D |
