Maxwell learning edition+blender plugin

[J the Ninja]

From the "keeping up with the 'competition' department"

http://www.maxwellrender.com/education/learning_edition

NextLimit has released a "learning edition" of Maxwell. It has no network support and you aren't supposed to use it commercially. Says the max res is "Full HD". No more specifics, but usually that term refers to 1920x1080 (respectable enough). Cost is 95 dollars for a 1 year license, or 195 dollars for a non-expiring one. Might be fun to play around with it a bit.

Also, Ton Roosendaal tweeted this today, someone's been working on a Blender exporter for it: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bmaxwell/


EDIT: Fix formatting since someone installed fancy math plugins into the fora since I wrote this OP.

[Rickyx]

That is not the only one exporter:
https://github.com/al3p/BtoMW
-> http://www.blendernation.com/2012/05/24 ... ith-btomw/

Soon compatible with Maxwell 2.7.

Ciao,
Rickyx

[BURGINABC]

I recently heard a classmate at my graphics class in college say that Maxwell is "like 10x faster" than Lux.

This seems questionable to me unless some sort of faking is involved, but Maxwell is supposedly a physical renderer. He's also of the opinion that Indigo is also better than Lux, just not to the same degree as Maxwell, but I understand that indigo achieves some of it's speed through faking also, such as it's so-called light guiding portals actually being adaptive area lights or something. It would be interesting to get to the bottom of the mystery of why Maxwell is so much faster (and maybe imitate it ). But of course, whether it's a fake or something truly innovative they're probably trying very hard to keep it a secret.

For all we know maybe they've already mastered the art of Vertex-Merging/Unified Path Sampling and just didn't tell anyone And then the japanese guy who wrote that paper on it came up with the same thing independently, later.

Or not. I have no idea. Oh, but I do love futile speculation. What fun, what fun

[Pilchard123]

J, did you realise that dollar signs mess things up until the next one is typed? Th$ere are $ some$ dollar$s in $here$ and it looks odd.

I recently heard a classmate at my graphics class in college say that Maxwell is "like 10x faster" than Lux.

Ask him for evidence. If he's going to be that disparaging, at least he should at least be able to show where he gets that attitude from.

Eesh. Look at me - I don't even know the guy, I barely use Lux and I'm getting all ragey about some comment.

[pixie]

I recently heard a classmate at my graphics class in college say that Maxwell is "like 10x faster" than Lux.

This seems questionable to me unless some sort of faking is involved, but Maxwell is supposedly a physical renderer. He's also of the opinion that Indigo is also better than Lux, just not to the same degree as Maxwell, but I understand that indigo achieves some of it's speed through faking also, such as it's so-called light guiding portals actually being adaptive area lights or something. It would be interesting to get to the bottom of the mystery of why Maxwell is so much faster (and maybe imitate it ). But of course, whether it's a fake or something truly innovative they're probably trying very hard to keep it a secret.

For all we know maybe they've already mastered the art of Vertex-Merging/Unified Path Sampling and just didn't tell anyone And then the japanese guy who wrote that paper on it came up with the same thing independently, later.

Or not. I have no idea. Oh, but I do love futile speculation. What fun, what fun

You know Lux doesn't fake it, lux has real light!

[Steeve Osteen]

I've been using maxwell render which is unbiaised render engine as lux.
MR is slightly more fast than lux but because of one thing : it is a commercial engine with a team of 20 or 30 engineers and programmers which works all day long on the design of the software.
that way they can go faster than lux in render and in the developpment since they have people to do it...

MR is quite a good software I've been working with (using SolidWorks) but even if the software is slower, i would prefer to run open source free software...

[SATtva]

J, did you realise that dollar signs mess things up until the next one is typed? Thereare somedollars in here and it looks odd.

This is due to LaTeX Math forum plugin. When i find these i enclose the dollar signs in [color=#000000] BB tags.

As to the topic, i think the main sell-out feature of Maxwell is their vast materials library.

[Rickyx]

Hi,

I'm a Blender user that often uses external renderer to make my project.
As you may foresee I often use Maxwell Render.

I write here because with the aim to do constructive critiques...

About materials in Maxwell the nice things is that you don't have to deal with different shaders:
you only have one shader that make metal, glass, diffuse, plastic, coat, satin, ecc...
This intuition is really clever an for the end user is amazing. This system has been recreated in Cycles using a huge amount of nodes. Have a look at:
http://www.blender.org/community/blende ... /speakers/ -> Francois Gastaldo - Make your own Physically Correct Shading with Cycles

The other fact is that it just works. One of my student, that make the thesis about Luxrender, had some trouble in finding the correct setup for the material:
viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8694&p=83130#p83130
viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8701

About speed I find it faster but I really don't have done any test that can prove it. And my pc is very slow, so it can took weeks to have decent renders with both...

My quarter cent,
Rickyx

[Abel]

About materials in Maxwell the nice things is that you don't have to deal with different shaders:
you only have one shader that make metal, glass, diffuse, plastic, coat, satin, ecc...
This intuition is really clever an for the end user is amazing.

It's interesting to hear that, but for me it is different. As a user, I actually prefer LuxRender's material system; back in the day when I was using Maxwell I regularly had to check in the manual what certain variables are for, whereas in LuxRender the main materials are very fast to set up. Normally I just use glossy, glass and metal, but when thinking of something like glossy translucent I would have a lot of trouble creating that in Maxwell.

I can imagine the list of materials in LuxBlend to be daunting though, particular when seeing both glass and glass2 and metal, metal2 and shiny metal.

As to the speed, I haven't used Maxwell for a while, but I've always considered the difference (in whatever direction it goes) to be small enough to not be a significant consideration when deciding which program to use.

[B.Y.O.B.]

but I understand that indigo achieves some of it's speed through faking also, such as it's so-called light guiding portals actually being adaptive area lights or something.

Lux supports portals too, and though they are an important optimization for interiour scenes, they are in no way "fake" or add bias to the render.