If i put it like this, the people who find Bryce slow, should really give Maxwell a try. They will never complain again. Ever.

Funny thing is, these renders were made with RC5(release candidate), and it´s actually much faster than the final 1.0 version.  :glare:

wow really? damn.. I guess I must be spoiled then with mental ray..

Maybe I shouldn't feel so bad about my last Cinema render - 63.5 hrs (radiosity, several large area lights and three major xfrog trees, lots of glass and reflections)

I'm rendering a 6 second product presentation animation right now with final gathering at PAL resolution in mental ray, and the whole animation renders in about the same time as it would take to render 1 or 2 frames in bryce. And then the brycean version would have banded shadows on the GI simulation dome while my mental ray render is smooth and clean :-P

I wonder how long Maxwell would take to create a noiseless render...

Quote - I wonder how long Maxwell would take to create a noiseless render...

There´s no such thing as noiseless in Maxwell Land, only different degrees of noise...

Any idea what would that take with sky and radiosity in AR?

AR would probably take a long time to render these out as well. The true advantage with Maxwell (at least with RC5 and not using Maxwell materials) is that you have very few settings to make. Adjust fstop, determine a location for the sun and hit render. Fine tuning can be done during render.

...of course the downside is render time, a tideous scene setup for Maxwell, tagging etc.

Rochr,
I used to use something I believe it was called Dreamhouse by IMSI . It would take about an hour to render a room but the results weren't anywhere near as impressive as Maxwell. It was probably cheaper by a factor of ten though.. You could add building materials costs and have the write out a log file of expenses, materials sources etc.I believe you could add your 3ds furnature objects too..  The program has matured since I used it - you might check it out for architectural stuff that isn't going to end up as artwork.   

Rayraz,
Nah I'd end up spending all my time in court and in most cases a judge would kick a suit like that out of court. If I did win then I'd get a big head and try to get qualified to pass the bar - No one wants that!!!!.

There's a lot of those clowns out there. I finally found a decent free firewall which blocks these jokers out and lets me know about it. I guess that and being knowing how to complain to the abuse sites will have to do.   

There´s also Indigo, which looks promising. And it´s free. :)

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/nickamy/indigo.html

Bike , since most of the intrusion attempts happens on an autopilot, it's dubious whether abuse complaints would really achieve anything. BTW, I specifically told ZoneAlarm not to notify me about intrusion attempts, just to stop them. There's been something like 50 since this morning and I'd go crazy with pop-ups if I asked for the notification.

Quote - There´s also Indigo, which looks promising. And it´s free. :)

And it's also S.L.O.W. Ewww. That cupboard and the window were done in 24 hours on four machines. Why are such interesting renderers so slow?

Quote - There´s no such thing as noiseless in Maxwell Land, only different degrees of noise...

Ok, then, how about "visually clean"? Like, a degree of noise that isn't obvious (I'm easily annoyed by too much noise when i render something hehe)

Thanks - I'll check it out!

Erlik,
Yeah, Indigo is slow, but consider that one guy is doing this for for free. Pretty much what Next Limit are trying to achieve with a whole team, and they want $1000 for it. ;)
And i honestly have a feeling that Indigo is going to surpass Maxwell at the end, both in quality and speed, if it haven´t done so already.

Ray,
To get a noise free image from Maxwell is close to impossible, and on a single machine, you´ll need to count a minimum of about a week or more even for the simplest scene. Most people over at the Maxwell forum rely on plugins like NeatImage and Noise Ninja to clear out some of the noise.

...unless you have a renderfarm at home, which would help out greatly. :)

wow... damn. makes me wonder why people even bother to spend so much cash on buying it... I could so not live with a render engine that would leave me noisy pictures unless it renders for a week or more.

That 1 man vs. a whole team bit reminds me of this 13 y/o kid on CGtalk who programmed a monte carlo ray tracing engine :-P

Quote - Yeah, Indigo is slow, but consider that one guy is doing this for for free. Pretty much what Next Limit are trying to achieve with a whole team, and they want $1000 for it. ;)
And i honestly have a feeling that Indigo is going to surpass Maxwell at the end, both in quality and speed, if it haven´t done so already.

Oh, well, from what I saw of Maxwell and Indigo, the latter is very close. They'd need to incorporate some more advanced stuff like subpoly displacement and, seems to me, something not so advanced as Diffusion. but if it continues like this, it will be very useful and quite nice.

Quote - wow... damn. makes me wonder why people even bother to spend so much cash on buying it... I could so not live with a render engine that would leave me noisy pictures unless it renders for a week or more.

A whole lot of people are actually quite pissed on Next Limit for not keeping their end of the deal.
The thing is that it´s supposed to be a fully working plugin, but somewhere along the line, NL came to the conclusion that they couldn´t speed up the current engine, and started from scratch again. Then they also decided to put most of their effort in making a Studio version instead. This wouldn´t be a bad thing, if it weren´t on the cost of the plugins, which really was what people payed for, and what the majority of the customers want.
This is also one of the reasons they´ve pulled some of the previously planned plugins for a number of programs.

The sad part is that no matter how many times people point this out, NL simply don´t listen, keep working on the Studio, "forget" about the plugins, and still refuse to pay refunds. Not so long ago, even the most loyal users started to get fed up and protested on their forum, resulting in every other thread beeing deleted and mass banning of anyone posting "uncomfortable" questions/pointers. Quite a sight actually, and a threatment of customers i haven´t seen before.

Ok, have to admit that when you get Maxwell to work(RC5), it can produce some extremely slow but fantastic renders. Unfortunatly i could never recommend it to anyone in its current state.
It´s still buggy as hell, has to many limits, lacks several crucial features, scene setup is far to tideous, and you wont get faster renders until the rs2-engine, which will be sold with 2.0(perhaps). ;)

Just for my own interest, I did a quick model of your main room and took a cut at rendering it in AR with sun/sky, radiosity, AO. It's cooking at the moment.  If you're interested I will post it.

Wow.. maxwell sounds like a soap series haha. Is it not possible to force NL to refund? After all it seems that they have not supplied the goods that people were told they'd get for their money right?

Kinda makes me glad I didn't go for it.
BTW I got a bunch closer with some tweaks to my sun, the AO gradient settings, radiosity levels and the color correction effect. Thanks for the challeng (even if it wasn't one) - I have learned a bit of new stuff!

Ooh, C4D has AO gradient settings? What kindsa settings are those? Does it allow you to actually fully customize the gradient between brightest and darkest color? In 3dsmax i can set the light and the dark color and the sensetivity to occlusion but i can't adjust the actual curve.

Yes. They have control gradients on just about everything. You also have scene AO and material AO. In AO, all the colours are set via the gradient.

oooh that's kinda cool! In 3dsmax you have an AO shader which u can apply to any channel on your material you want (though it'll obviously not be usefull everywhere), but i dont think it's got a gradient control assigned... Though probably that could be bypassed by introducing a falloff or gradient shader to one or both of the color channels of the AO shader... I'll have to run a test with that some time.

You can also, by varying the min/max sample rate and min/max raylength get a seriously cool dirt effect.

Attached Link: http://www.aqsis.org

Nice pad if I am in the neighborhood. Hmmmm.

Quote - You can also, by varying the min/max sample rate and min/max raylength get a seriously cool dirt effect.

I think that should be possible in 3dsmax also yeah.