The basics,

Render out the scene, then select all the objects and render out an alpha mask as well.
Once it´s done, bring both scenes into photoshop, and use the alpha mask and the magic wand to delete all the background. The background will be transparent.
Use a layer with a sky photo, and place it behind the object layer.

Of course there´s more to it to make it look good, but i think Rod will be more precise. :)

Looks promising Rod.

I see that you also get those annoying black "contours" from the mask render. :)

A question Agiel, if this is something you can give an answer to.

Does this "sidegrade and get the corresponding Vue6 product"-offer end at its release?
(i assume it does, but still wanted to ask)

Most impressive. Especially the spectral atmosphere engine.
Think it´s finally time to upgrade that old Vue5 Esprit i have laying around here.

Happy birthday. Have a few pints of ale for me as well. :)

Personally i don´t care about the new Art Charts, but this is not exactly an improvement from the Hot20, it´s actually worse.
Apart from Czarnyrobert, Beton and very few others, it´s pretty much naked flesh all the way. And somehow i doubt that will change...

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). ;)

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. :)

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

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

Beautiful model, and a damn realistic render i must say. Excellent work!

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.

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...

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:

Yep, two of the best animations i´ve seen. Enough to make you drool all over the place. :)

That´s what you can call a goldmine. Great link Rod!