Hey Christopher,
I
think i can give my 2 cents on maxwell, as i have been on its beta
as
well a few years back. This is from what was going on then. I
cannot
say anything about the current state of the engine as i have
not
touched it since.
Purely from a rendering standpoint, maxwell felt
slow, first and
foremost because it is an unbiased engine, and it
does not cheat its
solution. That means in order to get rid of the
sampling it needs to
do a ton of passes to get an accurate
convergence. What that meant for
me, as an individual, was that
animation was out of the question
unless i was willing to work with a
grainy image or if i chose to wait
a long time for the frames to be
rendered.
Most people these days rely on farms to render with maxwell
in an
animation environment (rendernet.se comes to mind).
This
was the low side of it, and i hear it is quite similar to arnold
from
this standpoint (good quality takes more samples which in turn
takes
a longer time to achieve). This is because both engines do not
precompute
or cache anything. Brute force is the word here, whereas
vray, even
if it does brute force well, it has a ton of other choices
to "cheat"
its way through, resulting in a faster rendertime, which in
turn,
unfortunately, requires greater knowledge from the user.
On the
upside, the shading system was nice, had the usual ubershader
approach,
tons of shaders available in the community. Did not use
light
sources, but instead turned objects into emitters using a
special
shader. That meant the shadows and everything else looked very
realistic.
Its preview system was way ahead of anything at that time
in terms
of seeing the final look of the image, in the first pass, so
you
could get a very good idea if you needed to adjust things before
waiting
for 2 hours. Now this has been updated to the maxwell "fire"
engine.
But most renderers today give you this (modo's preview or
vray's
light cache come to mind). By far the most useful feature of
the
engine for me, was its mxi image format (similar to a raw file),
which
stored lighting information from all the light sources. That
meant
if you had screwed up your exposure, lights etc, you could fix
everything
afterwards, and i don't mean brightness/contrast fix. You
could dial
the lights in and out, change their intensity, etc, and
everything
would update realtime in it's "image editor". I hear now
they have a
nuke plugin for this.
Worked for sequences of frames as well, and was
a lifesaver.
I remember this one time i had an interior to render
for a client, and
it had around 50 lights total.
The guy did a
dozen variations, changing colors and turning lights on
and off. Had
it not been for this feature,
i would have been rendering a week on
the project.
With it, i just waited a couple of hours, and then did a
dozen
variations in half an hour from the same render.
Final
thing i'd like to point out, was that its xsi integration was
not
that good nor stable back then.
Maybe now things have changed, but
last i looked, it was pretty much
the same workflow.
Cheers,
O
Hey Steven,
No
i have not directly.
But having looked at arnold videos on
the net, with computer specs given, i can state that from what i have
seen, arnold is close to mantra in terms of displacement speed (which i
have used). So it is close to a reyes renderer in that sense. Again,
this is comparing what i know to what i have seen (but you can't really
cheat rendering speed).
Vray is definitely not that fast.
you state that
like its common knowledge... i just wanted to know if you have compared
arnold's displacement to vray's? i haven't and would like to know.
Displacement is fast, but
obviously not as fast as a reyes renderer or arnold. Hair rendering has
also improved lately, and motionblur and dof are okay. Nowhere near
arnold but way faster than mental ray. The thing to note about vray is
that it requires a bit more knowledge about its inner workings to be
able to get the most of it. But it's an extremely stable and reliable
renderer. Also on the plus side it handles interiors extremely well, and
its ibl tools are stellar.
Don't get me wrong, i am not afilliated with chaos group in any way even
though i was on the beta. It's just my personal view on the engine. I'm
sure arnold's algorithms will improve with time, and when it starts
being less prohibitive , vray will have quite some heavy competition on
the freelance/small studio front. For that matter Redshift looks
extremely promising as well. But for the past couple of years, vray gave
me the piece of mind i never had with mentalray, and i'm thankful to
the peeps at chaos group for that.
Cheers
