My first "not bad" render in Maxwell Render if you're interested

Yup- as good as Photoworks renders get- the software is lagging so
sorely behind. It should be a matter of taking your model and
photographing it. Solidworks engineers are not renderers. They dont
give a crap. Not a creative drop there. They need to hire
photographers, CG artists anybody who would know how to use the
software!!!!

 

Ooops that was 1/15 sec

This time in glass, actually borosilicate BSC1 with RGB values of
210,210,210.

http://www.solidengineering.co.nz/maxwellrender/15-5.jpg

The render is still in progress, as I post this, they upper red insert
looks a little dark and the banding is probably because the items are
perfectly coincident -- I think. The red insert was modelled in context
to a converted edge of the upper clamp.

Because the render is still in progress I can still adjust, some of
settings, to modify the outcome in Maxwell. So I'll change the following
settings. To see if I can increase the overall brightness, to brighten
the the Red insert without (I hope) overexposing the image.

Burn was .5 changed to .1
ISO was 100 changed to 150
Shutter 1/100 unchanged.

I'll go have dinner and post the final outcome later.

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz

 

John - now your showing off!!

How do you manage to keep the noise down - when ever I have used a
dielectric the noise makes the picture unusable.

Jonathan

 

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 17:33:04 +1200, John Layne

John - has your wife forgiven you yet for buying Maxwell?


Jonathan

 

Hi Jonathan


1/ Lot's of light
2/ Set high RGB Values, in this case 224,224,224. For dielectrics you
can probably go to 255,255,255
3/ No U and V roughness on dielectric materials.
4/ You can set the adde number of the dielectric to above 150 that will
reduce noise but you will get no chromatic aberration, in this case I
left at the default setting.
5/ Cheat- Render at high resolutions 1600 x 1200 in this case, de-noise
in Photoshop and downscale the image to get back lost sharpness.
6/ If you have any diffuse or plastic materials in the scene that have
high reflectance values the whole scene will be full of noise. There is
an article in the tutorial forums on Noise "Avoid High Reflectance
(updated with plastics)"

You may already know about High Reflectance values but I'll summarise,
just in case I've got it wrong so someone else can put me right.

For white
The highest RGB value of 255,255,255 will create an unnatural colour.
Nothing in real life is that white. Bleached White paper is 225,225,225
since Maxwell is based on real Physics that is the absolute limit to
which you should set any Plastic or diffuse material

The max limits for diffuse should normally be around:
210 to 224 for each of the RGB values.
i.e. 224,224,224 for white
224,0,0 for red etc

The limits for plastics is the sum of the basic colour plus the specular
colour.
i.e. if the base colour for white plastic is
200,200,200
Then the specular colour should not exceed
24,24,24

So far I have only used grey values as the specular colour. Other
extreme values will produce those "weird car paints" that seem to have
two different colours dependent on the viewing angle.

I'm hoping that some of the noise / render time issues will be addressed
in the release version next month. Plus the new material "generator",
for wont of a better word, should help a lot.

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz

 

De facto wife, she wasn't too fussed. I convinced her (or more so
myself) it would eventually be good for the business.

Besides she sold, a hard to sell, house that day and was in a very good
mood.

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz

 

The final render not as I hoped, it did increase the brightness but not
in the area of the upper red insert.

http://www.solidengineering.co.nz/maxwellrender/15-6.jpg

I'll offset the mate to be a distance of .01 and see if it improves the
banding. I'll also change the colour of the glass from 224,224,224 to
255,255,255. And have play with prisms

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz

 

Added a Diamond Prism to the scene, with this added dielectric the
render time has shot up considerably, this is after 8 hours. It still
has a lot of noise.

http://www.solidengineering.co.nz/maxwellrender/15-7.jpg

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz

 

Just checked the Maxwell forum, there is a bug in the Beta with
excessively dark shadows through dielectrics -- hence the top of the
insert is too dark.

Can't wait for the release version of Maxwell, I feel like a kid waiting
for Xmas

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz