Maxwell for SU VS Twilight

[massimo]

Well I don't know Vray or Maxwell and usually i don't use biased presets. Anyway if you like Vray output (btw I cas see some AA issues) just let it cook longer in Twilight's 09 preset and... 30 sec in PS.

[jason_maranto]

Jason, is there a new version of Maxwell for SU?
I understand that the Free version is not a demo version, but this basically means that the paid version of Maxwell for SU can not be tested. Before I pay the $100 for the paid version of the plugin I would like to test it, and the free version does not allow me to fully test it because of the luck of the production engine and the inability to properly render artificial lighting. How about a time/resolution limited trial of the paid version? Even 1-2 weeks would be enough.

Yes, there is a pre-release version being tested now... IES lights are included as well as a few other nice new aspects to the plugin.

I am just a user like you so I have no influence over how they decide to limit the plugins -- I would think buying the production engine sight unseen is a bit of a stretch and currently the only way to test it is to download the demo version for the full Maxwell Render Suite. Perhaps this will change in the future -- everything is still so new that I'm sure there will be lots of adjustments made over the next few months as they get a better handle on how best to do something like this.

Best,
Jason.

[ledisnomad]

What I am rendering is my future home. I started with sketchup to test out different ideas before even going to an architect. The architect took my initial general ideas and developed them into a plan. Using those plans I created another model which was used to fine tune the plans.

Now we are at the stage where we have to decide about materials, lighting etc, and I need a render engine to be able to test those. Like you I need something that can render fast so I can test many different ideas quickly. A bit of noise doesn't bother me, what I care most is that the lighting and the rendering in general would be as natural as possible. My aim is not to create pretty pictures but renderings that can help me make decisions.

Unlike you I am not a professional so I wouldn't want to invest in something expensive and difficult to learn. This is why I excluded V-Ray.

Jason, is there a new version of Maxwell for SU?
I understand that the Free version is not a demo version, but this basically means that the paid version of Maxwell for SU can not be tested. Before I pay the $100 for the paid version of the plugin I would like to test it, and the free version does not allow me to fully test it because of the luck of the production engine and the inability to properly render artificial lighting. How about a time/resolution limited trial of the paid version? Even 1-2 weeks would be enough.

I understand about the price, completely. On the topic of price, you say that you hired an architect. How much time are you putting into this on your own? Why not have the architect you've already hired help you with the material and lighting selections through renderings, samples, etc.? You should have just hired a contractor if all you wanted was plans because you aren't getting the true value added for an architect without the rest of the design services IMHandbiasedO. If the architect you already hired can't do it, find another one that can.

That said, if you are doing it because you are really enjoying it and have the time, for my 2 cents--and I have used V-Ray, Maxwell, Twilight, Podium, and many other render engines--don't sweat the $100. I really think Maxwell ($100) or Twilight will do what you need it to do. Personally, I'd choose Maxwell because I like the interface. You're not going to get the quality you want with the free version, you've seen that. And as suggested, you could try out the demo of the full version of the Maxwell Suite to get a feel.

Good luck with your house! Post some renderings and pictures, too, so we can all see how it's going.

[andybot]

Well I don't know Vray or Maxwell and usually i don't use biased presets. Anyway if you like Vray output (btw I cas see some AA issues) just let it cook longer in Twilight's 09 preset and... 30 sec in PS.

Thanks Massimo. In that regards, I don't know twilight or maxwell that well, so I'm glad you took the time to run on a better setting. How does that render look before PP?

FWIW: I didn't have the vray one on the highest noise threshold settings, so yes, it's not as clean as it could be.

Edit: hmm, I just opened twilight to see what 09 setting is. FYI I used the 10 setting, and it ran 39 passes.

[massimo]

How does that render look before PP?

It's just the unbiased version you posted here with a bit of noise reduction and tone&color and gamma correction in PS.
Presets 09 and 10 will have quite similar outputs for that kind of scene IMO but 09 should be a bit quicker.

[andybot]

Well, I guess that's a whole 'nother topic about post processing... in the same vein the maxwell render could use some NR for similar results. My goal was to show the render engine output as a side-by-side comparison.

[massimo]

Well, my point was just that I think that Twilight or Thea have more "neutral" outputs than Vray, so you can easily change the image with a bit of post pro if you like.

[andybot]

Just curious - is there a way to control the blue-ishness of the twilight output. That's one things that's bothered me that I can't seem to figure out. With vray and maxwell, there are ozone and haze settings that can control that. You can change the sun color, but the physical sky is a very strong blue.

[Zoom123]

I understand about the price, completely. On the topic of price, you say that you hired an architect. How much time are you putting into this on your own? Why not have the architect you've already hired help you with the material and lighting selections through renderings, samples, etc.? You should have just hired a contractor if all you wanted was plans because you aren't getting the true value added for an architect without the rest of the design services IMHandbiasedO. If the architect you already hired can't do it, find another one that can.

That said, if you are doing it because you are really enjoying it and have the time, for my 2 cents--and I have used V-Ray, Maxwell, Twilight, Podium, and many other render engines--don't sweat the $100. I really think Maxwell ($100) or Twilight will do what you need it to do. Personally, I'd choose Maxwell because I like the interface. You're not going to get the quality you want with the free version, you've seen that. And as suggested, you could try out the demo of the full version of the Maxwell Suite to get a feel.

Good luck with your house! Post some renderings and pictures, too, so we can all see how it's going.

The architect can and did some 3D, but I like to test several different ideas and the easier way to do that is if I do it myself. It would take a lot of time (and possibly a lot of money) if I was asking the architect "try it like this, lets change it like that, what if we do this" etc. How do you work with your "picky" clients?

I will definitely buy one of the $100 apps and when I have something decent ready I will post it here. Since many of you are architects maybe you could even give me some input on the architecture and the design, since I care more about these than the quality of the rendering

[Zoom123]

Jason, is there a new version of Maxwell for SU?
I understand that the Free version is not a demo version, but this basically means that the paid version of Maxwell for SU can not be tested. Before I pay the $100 for the paid version of the plugin I would like to test it, and the free version does not allow me to fully test it because of the luck of the production engine and the inability to properly render artificial lighting. How about a time/resolution limited trial of the paid version? Even 1-2 weeks would be enough.

Yes, there is a pre-release version being tested now... IES lights are included as well as a few other nice new aspects to the plugin.

I am just a user like you so I have no influence over how they decide to limit the plugins -- I would think buying the production engine sight unseen is a bit of a stretch and currently the only way to test it is to download the demo version for the full Maxwell Render Suite. Perhaps this will change in the future -- everything is still so new that I'm sure there will be lots of adjustments made over the next few months as they get a better handle on how best to do something like this.

Best,
Jason.

Thanks! Can you give us a link to this pre-release version?

[jason_maranto]

Actually I can't -- you would need to register for the Maxwell forum and locate the 2.6.1 Preview thread in the SketchUp subforum... those are the rules and I didn't make them.

Best,
Jason.

[andybot]

How curious - I ran the preset 09 - I got 40 passes in the same time - so no speed difference, but interestingly, the noise went way down...
Anwyay, it's sort of academic, since I only have used twilight because of its quick biased presets and the ability to use it for rendering animation.

woy_twi09-40passes-preset09.jpg

[massimo]

Just curious - is there a way to control the blue-ishness of the twilight output.

Well as far as I know the sun color will change with time of day if you leave the sun to the default white and the sky itself will appear differently depending on the situation or location. Also you can play with brightness and turbidity of the sky or the sun color (I always use a pale yellow in that way you can reduce the blue cast that comes with the default physical sky).
Off course you can also use a colour instead of the physical sky. Finally you can also save a template in SU with your preferred sky settings.

[massimo]

How curious - I ran the preset 09 - I got 40 passes in the same time - so no speed difference, but interestingly, the noise went way down...

Isn't that a speed difference?

[jason_maranto]

I made some changes to your scene -- I added a white ground plane to provide more natural looking lighting and neutralized the sky dome, also several of the materials exceed what I would consider the realistic RGB to Spectral (XYZ) color space values of RGB 225,225,225 (which is the brightness value of a white sheet of paper)... this will lead to extra noise and "flatter" looking renders so I dropped the brightness (in the offending SkletchUp materials) to 87%.

Also I did a once over for all the materials since one was missing the linked MXM (galvanized).

I'm rendering to SL21 with the production engine now -- I'll time it but I doubt it will have much relevance since we are running different systems.

Best,
Jason.

[andybot]

jason, good tips. Thanks!

Massimo - less than a minute out of 30 is essentially the same time...

[massimo]

Massimo - less than a minute out of 30 is essentially the same time...

Absolutely, but you have a lot less noise so it will require more time with the previous preset in order to have the same clean output no?

[andybot]

Massimo - less than a minute out of 30 is essentially the same time...

Absolutely, but you have a lot less noise so it will require more time with the previous preset in order to have the same clean output no?

Well, that's just me not being familiar with the presets. Why is the 10 setting more noisy than the 09??

[massimo]

Well, basically 10 setting is better for caustics and it will produce caustics also from sun&sky only while 09 will not. Also preset 10 will work better in technical/studio renders and/or with difficult condition of lighting to solve. The cons is that it is slower so this means much more time to clean the noise.

[andybot]

thanks for the explanation

[massimo]

You're welcome.

[jason_maranto]

Here's my test with the Maxwell "production" engine left to render to SL 21 -- which took 2h 47m on my Intel i7 920 system (4 core hyper-threaded 2.66GHz).

50sample_maxwellproductionSL21.jpg

It could be rendered a bit longer to reduce the slight noise still present in parts but I personally wouldn't find this result objectionable... obviously you can adjust the exposure setting to whatever you need when setting up the scene.

The lighting is dead neutral here so any color you are seeing is due to the materials themselves... and I know that Maxwell renders absolutely pure nuetral.

I was also not happy with how the silhouette material you have was performing in this render (I've never used that effect before for rendering) -- so afterward I made a SketchUp material (Maxwellized of course) that you can use whenever you want that effect for better results.

silhouette_rendertest.jpg

silhouette.zip

Best,
Jason.

[andybot]

Thanks Jason for your efforts. I wasn't sure how to do the transparent material, anything transparent automatically gets a reflection - fine if everything transparent is glass... but I didn't know how to get rid of that so I changed it to plastic material with rough finish...
It's interesting to see this compared to the 5-10 minute vray output... just sayin' - if time is money, well, vray pays for itself pretty quickly!

Though I do have to say the RT view with Maxwell is pretty good and does save time.

[jason_maranto]

You are certainly correct on that count -- Maxwell has nothing on Vray when it comes to pure speed and there are no optimized engine presets (like Twilight) that drop complexity for speed (it renders everything all the time).

However the quality of light is better for sure -- everything fits together into the scene very well which is not true in the Vray render which tends to look a bit disjointed with parts looking "pasted-in". Also the Anti-aliasing of edges is superior to both Vray and the Maxwell "draft" engine.

I know that with some more time and energy spent on settings Vray could achieve similar results to the Maxwell render, but that is my point -- I would rather let the computer work than spend that time learning and tweaking all those arcane settings in Vray to attempt to get close to the same results that are simple in Maxwell.

I know I have a very odd way of relating to time compared to most render engine users -- but my sense is it is better to produce quality, because sooner or later the hardware advancements (multi-processor CPUs with multi-CPU motherboards) will allow Maxwell to render fast enough to where quality is the only deciding factor. Already if I had a dual CPU motherboard with 2 low-end 6-core i7s I would have cut the render time to less than 1/3 (I would guess 30-45 min) for the same results... those speed improvements will only become more drastic as time goes by.

Best,
Jason.

[andybot]

That's where conversations like this are useful It gives everyone more information to help in making their own decisions. Everyone will value these multiple things differently: quality, speed, ease of use, price, etc.

[jason_maranto]

Absolutely -- I really enjoy reading threads like this too.

BTW it's worth mentioning (once again) that this was done with the $95 version of the plugin -- If I was to use the full Maxwell Render Suite not only could I do it faster but I could also do it better (due to the material making limitations of the stand-alone plugin)... Not to mention at that point I could also make use of a network and render nodes.

Best,
Jason.

[srx]

I was curious...and this is Thea render TR1 in 30 minutes.

[sepo]

just to mention also TR1 is unbiased as well.

I was curious...and this is Thea render TR1 in 30 minutes.

[jason_maranto]

A couple more quickies... the first is render with the production engine to SL 19:

jmodsSL19_50sample2.jpg

And since I was getting bored with the blown out windows look I switched to the free sample HDR from http://www.hdri-locations.com/ -- if you want to try to match this I offset the HDR X axis by 43 degrees and dropped the intensity of the background channel to .25 (so it wouldn't blow-out)

The first one was rendered with the production engine to 30 minutes:

jmods_50sample_30m_fire.jpg

The second one is the same scene rendered in the full Maxwell Render Suite to 30 minutes -- this shows the full render suite is not only faster than the stand-alone plugin but also shows what can be done with MXED to make a better looking material for the wood floor(which was the only semi-complex material in the scene).

jmods_50sample_30m_suite.jpg

As I said before measuring these comparisons by time does not make much sense since we are all working off of different specs -- but here at least you can see that the full Maxwell Render Suite has a speed advantage (among all it's other advantages) over the stand-alone plugin (which I would also expect to be true with any other engine that is not rendering within SketchUp).

Best,
Jason.

[zack mierza]

Hi,

Im a newbie here.I was also a twilight user.It's been a year using and exploring it but there's still alot to improve and learn.Hope u guys can help me with twilight render in the future.Thanks and here a some of my work using twilight render.