Maxwell rendering

[Michelle Gibson]

Very simple question. We're up to date with Revit Series, really amazed at the Maxwell renderings we've seen. Any comments or concerns with respect to creating in Revit and exporting to Maxwell Render? Don't know too much about the program but it's on sale for 1/2 price for a short while.

[sjsl]

Maxwell is a standalone program with various plug-ins. Unfortunately for Revit users no plug-in or export in the near future. Right now to get quality results, you need to export to Desktop, then to 3ds, (this way your materials will keep) and then into MR. Or, you can export 3dwg into SketchUp, use their materials (really bad bitmaps, poor results) and then into MR.

MR is a gluten for speed and memory, although it can create a render farm quite easily.

[Andre Baros]

Personally, I'm thrilled with the export process from Revit to 3D Studio Max to Maxwell. Maxwell charges right through the heavy Revit models I throw at it. I've heard that Vray can do the same and will have a plug in for Revit soon.

The renderings I added to the Gallery yesterday were all modeled in Revit and Rendered in Maxwell. For the school shots, I worked directly with the Revit Model used for CD's.

[BillyGrey]

Hey Andre,

Did you have a pretty good knowledge of rendering in general before you advanced to Maxwell?
Of course the reason I ask is that I have read many times that Maxwell takes care of most of the tedium involved with other "fakiosity" renderers, and so if your materials are dialed in pretty well, you just set your time of day and let it fly (interiors excepted)?

I know I am oversimplifying here, but if the learning curve is not to radical, like in so many other app's, then I could prob. justify buying two proggies to do the one job. I have no real PR rendering background, but I am pretty critical of mediocre renderings. Your Maxwell stuff if really nice.
I want to do nice stuff too.

Like so many, time is my most precious commodity, and so I will do whatever I can to keep time spent learning new proggies from scratch to a min. But if I have to pay my dues, I will.

TIA

Bill

[Andre Baros]

I've been rendering on and off for 10 years and have done renderings as good as these the long hard way so the benefits of Maxwell are very real to me. Rendering always comes in spurts and then goes away so each time I feel like I'm learning all over again. I've been using Max for most of that time and am only starting to get comfortable with it now. If I used Max every day the way I use Revit, it would be a different story. The reason I talk about Max is that until there is a plug-in to go straight from Revit to Maxwell, all of the setup is in Max and Maxwell is just a button you press at the end. 95% of the time, I use 5% of Max so it often seams like a waste to me to have this amazing program and just touch the serface. For a beginner, figuring out where to find the 5% you need is daunting. The tutorials and online videos are a lot better than Revit's but it's still a lot to learn just to get to Maxwell. I still use Max 5% of the time for things I can't do anywhere else, but when Revit's modeling gets a bit better and the Revit to Maxwell plug is out, I may not need Max anymore... and then the process really will be easy. Also, most of my time now goes into making materials, like the stone, which is all Photoshop and learning to see the world as Color, Specular, Bump, Glossy, Reflectivity, and Roughness maps. "Dialing" in materials is supposed to get much easier with the full release of Maxwell, if it does then I think I could say the learning curve is not radical.

You should ask Chirs Zoog about the learning curve, I think he just learned Viz pretty recently and has gotten up to speed very quickly. I've taken the long slow route of teaching myself in spare time, he might be able to comment on a more direct and focused route.

If you don't need the renderings right now, I would wait. This is total speculation on my part, but I bet that a year from now Revit and Maxwell will have grown enough that you won't need Max in the middle anymore.

[BillyGrey]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply Andre,

I might end up waiting if the wait isn't to long. I have been getting by pretty well with Revit, and NPR
to this point. The direct route out to Maxwell sounds like the ticket, although I've seen some killa stuff
coming out of Vray as well. It's just that seeing the stuff you posted is making me impatient to get
on with high quality rendering out of Revit! I really like your custom textures by the way.

Congrats of fine work matey.

Bill

[SkiSouth]

Bill, the release date this October. Only two more weeks left. The free standing version apparently allows for manipulation of geometry.


New stand-alone Interface
The Maxwell Render 1.0 release version is coming out with a new, stand-alone interface. This interface works cross platform and will include the following features:

New, powerful layer and spectral based material editor.
Full 3D environment, allowing the user object manipulation, curve editor, render parameters and many more features essential to the work pipeline.
MXI Viewer window: A complete viewer and editor for the Maxwell Image (HDR) internal format.
Maxwell Network: Maxwell is able to render in a farm, also single frame in coop mode over a network. NetManager and monitor are useful tools to control this process.
Command line version. (Maxwell can be used as a simple command line version without interface)

[markusb]

I've been working on this process, of Revit to 3ds to Maxwell, but Maxwell does not recognize the materials from Revit. 3ds does, if I render with Mental Ray, but if in 3ds or Maxwell and try and render with the Maxwell Renderer I always get the same error message. I'm doing the FBX file and everything, is there something I'm missing?

[Andre Baros]

You either have to manually swap each material (change the type to maxwell material, redefine the properties, etc... but keep the name so you don't loose changes when you reload) or you can download a script from the maxwell goodies site to swap them... but I never got the script to work. I didn't try very hard with the script since I needed to edit every material any way, it wasn't a big deal to swap and edit. Once you make the material a Maxwell material, don't forget that you can just load in the material definition from your library.

[markusb]

I thought the FBX file was supposed to maintain all the materials from Revit . . .

[Scott D Davis]

I thought the FBX file was supposed to maintain all the materials from Revit . . .

it does...and those materials are all mental ray Pro Materials. Since you are trying to use Maxwell, you need to swap the Pro Materials with something Maxwell can understand.

[dpasa]

I am another Revit->Max->Maxwell user.... It works great....