Maxer

I thought you may be interested to hear about Mike V's presentation of Maxwell at the Vismasters convention. He gave his talk during lunch on the first day, it was a packed house and he had everyone’s undivided attention. The table I was sitting at was very interested to see this software demo, many of them had heard about Maxwell and I was surprised to find out that only a few had any knowledge of NL's past history. Not wanting to spoil the show I thought it was best to let NL's software speak for it's self so I didn't bring up any of their past problems. I found that I was actually nervous anticipating what Mike would do and because it was the first live demo of Maxwell that I had ever seen. Mike started out the presentation by showing how simple Maxwell’s render controls were and to demonstrate this he compared it to Mental Ray. Once the Mental Ray's render settings were fully open it was easy to appreciate how simple Maxwell is in this regard. I would have called this a successful comparison if it hadn’t been for the low whispers at the table I was at. Several of the people there were obviously Mental Ray users and were quite upset that Mike was "bashing" Mental Ray in that way. In Mikes defense I don’t think he intended to insult everyone in the room who uses Mental Ray but I had the distinct impression that they weren’t to happy about his insinuation that they were all stupid for using such a complex GI engine. His point was that since you didn’t have to spend all your time tweaking GI settings you could devote that time to perfecting materials and in general making the entire scene better. He proceeded to demonstrate how easy it is to set up an exterior daylight scene, and he dropped a few spheres in and applied a few simple materials to them. Most everyone was impressed with this demonstration; even the previously humiliated Mental Ray users couldn’t deny that Maxwell seemed to be extremely easy to use. Toward the end of the presentation Mike had about 3 or 4 Maxwell engines open at once, each was rendering a different scene. As he went through them to close them down it was obvious that there was still quite a bit of noise on the more complex scenes. After he was done the people at the table had many questions but most were about the noise that never seamed to clear from his renderings. As you can imagine once I explained how long it took to get print resolution images, or heaven forbid animations out of it they weren’t as enthused as they had been. In the end most of the users were impressed with Maxwell but were apprehensive at the thought of such long render times. I think for NL it was a good showing of their product, but the presentation didn’t really touch on render times which is Maxwells single biggest weakness, but in that environment I wasn’t surprised that it was skipped over.

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crazy homeless guy

hey maxer. i was at your table. i was very impressed with Maxwell. ....besides the GI, the dynamics of the materials were impressive also.

i can't say that i was offended that he was criticizing GI engines for being overly complicated, i was more surprised that Maxwell would let itself be marketed in this manner.

....but i think the single biggest weakness that you pointed out is more than enough to make it completely useless for my daily work flow.

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travis schmiesing

Ray

Hey Maxer,

I wasn't at your table, but I did hear Mike say that the biggest complaint about Maxwell was the long render times. He also said that the longer render times were balanced by the short (and almost non-existent) setup time thus equalizing it with other render engines. I'm not supporting it one way or the other, just reporting what I heard. I'll leave it to others to decide if he succeded or not.

Brian Bradley

Hey All,

Pointing out the flaws of others peoples products
has always seemed like a fairly pointless marketing
strategy to me. If you have a good product, it
will stand on its own if you let people see what it
can do. IMHO.

New slogan: Don't bash me cause I'm a Mental Ray user.

Regards
Bri

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crazy homeless guy

i appreciate the nonexistent setup times, but as to saving you time.... it depends on what environment you work in. we were making changes on a project this morning that needed to be rendered and out the door by noon. even if i saved time early in my work flow by not tweaking settings, i might have wound up being screwed in the end.

i am all for a rendering engine that is this easy, but until either the software is highly optimized, or computers become 20 times faster at rendering, i will not be able to use it.

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travis schmiesing

Vince Paske

I didn't pay too much attention to the Maxwell guy, my table was having too much fun and I wasn't very interested. On the other hand - the mental ray break out session with Chris Bullen was really great and I'll be experimenting with that when I become unburied with work.

Maxer

Hey Ray, you’re right what Mike said is true from a certain point of view and that is really the misleading part of it. If I were rendering a scene like the one he showed in his demo with the metal or wooden spheres in it I could probably render out a perfectly clear screen resolution image in 4 hours like he said. The problem with Maxwell is the larger the resolution is and the more indirect light there is the slower it gets. For instance I could render out an almost noise free exterior scene of a complex building with lots of glass using cooperative rendering and 10 dual core CPU's in less than 15 hours. Now if I tried to render out an interior scene with lots of shiny and blurred surfaces after 15 hours and 10 dual core machines my image would still be pretty noisy, in reality it would probably take more like 24 hours to reach an acceptable level of noise. If you work in the prototyping industry then Maxwell will serve you well because your working with small objects usually at lower resolutions and lots of direct light, that's not the case for architectural spaces. So while what Mike said about setup times is accurate he just glossed over the render time issue giving you a best case scenario which would never apply to arch viz.

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Ernest Burden

My biggest issue with the MWR session was that I wanted to talk to the people I was sitting with. On the other hand, it was a way to allow a sponsor to show off their stuff without cutting into conference time.

I missed the start and end of the demo, so I had to work out that it was Mike Verta from the face (minus the Darth Vader mask) and presentation style.

I think it would have been more effective with a presentation more focused on arch-vis, even with a simplistic demonstration scene. The rendered sphere is so 1989. At least it wasn't a chrome sphere on a chessboard. Maybe I missed it, but a discussion about the glass issues with the light-path render method would have been good.

The conference needs sponsors, so as long as what they are offering is relevant to our work, I'm willing to listen. But the sponsors should also listen to us to be sure they are approaching us in the best way, and not attacking one another. If I want to see a fight, I'll go to a hockey game.

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Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

BrianKitts

I got to hand it to him, he sold the product well..... I was even sold on it, and if I didn't have the knowledge about it's render times I would have ran home from the conference uninstalled vray and bought maxwell.

What got me the most is how he said at one point, "oh I just rendered this out this morning in about three hours".... referring to an image that took up maybe 60% of the width of the screen.... running on a projector meaning he was at most probably 1024res width making his image, like 600 pixels wide???? As maxer mentioned he didn't make any reference towards print res... which is pretty much why when he was done I spun around at the table and just said what a bunch of BS.

I've been trying to convince alot of the people in our office to present our stuff using projectors and go paperless.... for two reasons, one enviromental, and two I'd rather render out 1200 pixels wide than 3000 if I know they are only projecting. Under this circumstance maxwell could actually become a possibility for production, but if it's going to paper....forget it.

I won't dwell on the bashing style of his presentation since it's been mentioned already, I am just curious to know what next limit said after they heard about how he presented and if he tainted their reputation..... oh wait, nevermind

Maxer

I'm pretty sure Mike was at Siggraph with Juan and Victor and I would think that they know him pretty well since he has been involved with Maxwell from the beginning, so I doubt his presentation style or anything he said came as a surprise to them.

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