Luxrender 0.6, Indigo 2 and Maxwell 2 - A "fair" comparison.

[psychotron]

test scenarios looking good to me, great you don't use colors..
looking forward to new comparsion

[gagar]

...
And by the way, fry was the one who introduced portals and aero noise as features, then after
a while they made changes to the core so that those features vanished and where not needed
anymore. Very interesting isn't it. Maxwell never had portals and so I guess there is some kinda
way to speed up the core without those things. ;o))

Very interesting.
Would be useful to get info on techniques to get rid of portals. Does not look like a trivial thing to do.

[Repgahroll]

If anyone want, i can compare vray just for curiosity, because some limitations doesn't allow a fair comparison:

Doesn't have unbiased caustics.
Demo image height is minimal (450px).
Path tracing is probably one of the slowest ever.

Even after 20 min rendering without any sampling and caustics, the image was very noisy, so if someone wants me to compare i'm not going to compare vray unbiased (unless you want to see a black image with undistinguishable white dots).

I'm rendering right now and i'll post the images soon.

[Repgahroll]

Hello guys.

Sorry the delay... couldn't render on maxwell before.

Here are the images:





Simple light bouncing on diffuse surface:
Luxrender:

Indigo:

Maxwell:

Simple reflection from 100% reflective surfaces:
Luxrender:

Indigo:

Maxwell:

[Repgahroll]

Simple refraction through 100% transmissive surfaces (ior 1.5):
Luxrender:

Indigo:

Maxwell:

Here is a version of the first images with adjusted contrast and brightness in order to notice the noise:
Luxrender:

Indigo:

Maxwell:

[Repgahroll]

Here is an image that i rendered on Indigo and Lux but it's almost impossible to render on Maxwell... at least i tried exhaustively and couldn't figure out how to render it... the problem is it would take years to denoise because i rendered it for 10min and only 5 or 6 coloured dots of the rainbow appeared. Maybe there's some "secret" renderer configuration... dunno... anyways, not even on 1.7.1 it's possible to see a plausible portion fo the render after a lot of time.
If anyone is interested i can attach the mxs file.




The image is based on this one (real life):

Luxrender:

Indigo:

I don't think it's fair to compare yafaray / vray also... vray's unbiased solutions are very slow, and yafaray's ones aren't very accurate, because they are supposed to render <10 bounces. The default is 5.

Anyways, i couldn't notice where maxwell is 2~6 time faster than 1.7.1, as they claim at their website. Of course it's faster and has advanced features, but don't worth the price imho, it doesn't integrate with blender... indigo is a nicer choise in this case, (imho) because it integrates very well and has nice features also. It's a little bit expensive though.

I much prefer luxrender for jewelry / product visualization and yafaray (biased) for architectural. Luxrender's photon mapping is cool but it's not that fast.

Sorry my english.

[Repgahroll]

BTW... IMHO:

Diffuse:
Winner: Maxwell

Reflections:
Winner: Luxrender

Refraction:
Winner: Indigo

It's not a joke.

[psychotron]

great comparsion you done here
thanks for sharing

in my opinion
diffuse test: maxwell is very nice, cleanest of all so winner.. when you look at indigo's noise (on contrast/brightness manipulated image) it seems to be most 'sharpest' of all, but in result it seems clean too however.. anyway there seems to be more indirect light in indigo version (more bouncing?)

reflection test: luxrender is clearly winner, indigo version seems missing some reflections on certain faces or what... and maxwell oh what a noise - surprised

refraction test: on first sight it seems indigo is clearly winner but wait.. why there are an additional caustics? both lux and maxwell haven't those patterns.. maybe there is some error in indigo's calculation (or in lux/maxwell)
however I like how indigo's glass is nice transparent (why lux/maxwell glass is so dark?)
so here is winner maxwell

I'm stunned how lux is performing in this comparsion, it's very nice to see another open source project to chase it's commercial competitors
once more time thanks to all lux's devs... love ya

[Repgahroll]

reflection test: luxrender is clearly winner, indigo version seems missing some reflections on certain faces or what... and maxwell oh what a noise - surprised

refraction test: on first sight it seems indigo is clearly winner but wait.. why there are an additional caustics? both lux and maxwell haven't those patterns.. maybe there is some error in indigo's calculation (or in lux/maxwell)
however I like how indigo's glass is nice transparent (why lux/maxwell glass is so dark?)
so here is winner maxwell

I'm stunned how lux is performing in this comparsion, it's very nice to see another open source project to chase it's commercial competitors
once more time thanks to all lux's devs... love ya

The reflection scene is intriguing because the maxwell version has very smooth caustics and the diffuse surfaces has low noise, the problem is the reflected diffuse surface.

The indigo version of refraction test is very different, i noticed this and double-checked to make sure that such different patterns aren't reflections or some kind of effect due different material settings.
I concluded that indigo is blazing fast and maybe after a lot of time the others versions would become similar (clear glass and very complex refractions) but maybe you're right and indigo doesn't calculate correctly.

Yeah, Lux is very close to Maxwell.

I'm glad this comparison helped.

[psychotron]

yes helped a lot, wish for more comparsions like that.. finaly useful one
would be nice if you can do these tests with fryrender demo too

ad refraction test - could you please let lux converging longer to see if those additional indigo's patterns shows up? (hmm but I doubt so cause there will be at least some caustic spores present nope?)