Maxwell and Vray / huh?

[percydaman]

what kind of siggraph presence did have maxwell have? or brazil for that matter?

[jujubee]

Cebas had a small booth in a corner. I think they were showcasing their other products more than FR. I met Edwin - as soon as I mentioned that I was a Vray user and knew nothing about FR, I think he blew me off. And I was genuinely interested in what they had to say - not a very good sales tactic.

As for Maxwell, I 'heard' they were in the other corner showcasing their other Nextlimit products with Maxwell more or less subdued. I didn't see them there.

Brazil - I didn't notice but perhaps someone else can chime in.

And after meeting Vlado, Peter, and the other members of the forum, I would have to say that the Vray programmers and users are the best group. They are very friendly, caring, provide great tech support, and have a great sense of humor. Not only that - they have a great renderer. Vray has been the best purchase I have ever made and I am happy to support them.

[rpc212]

Ya, I'm interested in where Brazil has gone, because it seemed to be huge a couple of years ago and has now seemed to have slipped. Were the Splutterfishes there at SIGGRAPH?

[studioDIM]

their "1.5" is version 2.
Announced a long while back, fo a siggraph.
Released the main informations on the site, then procastinated to infinity.
There's always that damnable hard choice to make: do i match up competitors for features, clean up my code to have less bugs and a bit more speed, or do i wait until things settle (that push to +#INF)?
An excerpt from the new features page is in order, i think:

"Brazil r/s 2.0 is due for release in fall 2005. So what's included? Here's just a partial list:

* Advanced, flexible shaders allow for creating everything from photoreal to highly stylized cartoon renderings
* Seamless integration in 3ds max/VIZ, which offers the most natural and efficient artist workflow of any renderer available
* Production proven, scalable, full-latitude, and reliable core that delivers on jobs large and small
* Complete lighting system including area lights, ambient occlusion, and 2 methods for full GI
* Rendertime displacements, 3d motion blur, and implicit surface rendering
* Core-level caching and on-demand buffer generation for irradiance, baking, and nearly infinite data handling
* Enhanced workflow and comprehensive settings management tools for further streamlining artist workflow
* Improvements throughout the system resulting in reduced memory footprint and better performance when combining disparate features
"

1 ) sure, we have that too.
2 ) i'd have to object, but sure, we have the same if not better level of integration with max
3 ) arbitrary BS, but we'd trust them. and we have proxies for very big numbers, they don't...
4 ) Lol really? Area lights as well? They forgot to say that instead of leaving it to the sampler, they ask the USER to figure out where to put samples, which i find fairly boring.We have just to set ONE subdiv for the arealight, and use a quasi-universal settings setup. And i lost count of the GI methods combinations available (that refinement thing on irmap has just blown me away)
5 ) we had this from when Vlado was at the youth school, and not yet 12...
6 ) more incomprehensible BS. Do their chests ever stop heaving and hurling?
7 ) it's BAD english to repeat a wordtwice in the same sentence, BAD english
8 ) Sure, and we got faster and more efficient too. Only we already were
9 ) what, no number 9? And the unified QMC architecture? Oh, didn't think about it back then? awww. Stuck with adaptive under-oversampling? aaaawwww! Well chaps, it's been fun for the first 10 or so meters of the race.

I don't know, the forums are just as bleak...
And i was taking some pleasure in comparing where they SAID they were two years back, with the lack of any announcment as to their partecipation to siggraph this year.
I'm guilty as charged

Lele

[joconnell]

In fairness brazil does do a lot of things nicely - their area lights for examples have a really intuitive interface where you drag the size of the light and then use further mouse input to define the spread of the area light whereas with vray you make a light and can't know how much of an area it'll affect straight away - Again its a minor thing but the set up of brazil stuff is a little more intuitive. Also having support for nearly every max map and setting means its maybe a little easier for new users to get into - theres no problems using raytrace materials / shadows and so on.

That said though vray beats it in every other area and it's been ahead for years in terms of speed, quality and features.

[ene.xis]

yeah those area light are great!
i could have made use of those in many cases!

[deflix]

It is an interesting area, and MAXWELL is an interesting renderer. Personally I think that its most profound feature is the multilight process. In many ways the technology is ahead of its time but wheres the sense in creating a product whos biggest down side is its snail-like rendering speed and then charge people to use cpu's, thus paying for this deficiency?

There's no economy of design either - and sadly too often the case in our times:

Most people will agree that a ferrari is the 'best' car design going - its so fast, and beautiful, and ultimate. However from a design point of view it adheres to a much more simplistic brief then say a ford focus. The focus designers Have a ridiculously dense brief, with numerous criteria relating to cost limitations, saftey requirements, economy, handling, speed, space, comfort, etc etc.... Which is a 'better' design? - its obvious from an engineering point of view. And which is a 'better' car.....well which would you use to teach car design?


Talking about this reminds me of the old days when there was MAX's renderer which most people used, whereas a slightly esoteric platform called lightscape bubbled away in the corner. Achieving something like that is no surprise from the cornell people, but understanding a bit more about Dr. Greenberg and the centres history is revealing in the marketed world we live in.

For those of you too young to know heres a link to the birthplace of our trade : http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/

I get so excited by evolution in our sector, but am tired of the corporate model, and the money-centric style of some of these companies - and i just dont trust renderers that claim 'its as easy as taking a photo'! CGi is an immensly complex area, with a long history, and a beating heart that is craft based. Throwing a brute force spectral-based renderer at underpowered computers is not good design - its a marketing trick.

One of Vray's most powerful abilities is the way Gi can be economically calculated for animation sequences, and this is profound. Its quickly been taken for granted. Lightscape is 'still ahead of its time' in some senses - but Vray indirectly progresses much of the technology.

I think its sad that increasingly people start with a nice idea, and then rapidly cant see the wood for the trees. Thank goodness the VRAY guys dont have this problem in the slightest......

[vance3d]

As far as I know, splutterfish was not at siggraph this year. I saw no sign of the Brazil renderer but I may have overlooked it. Although the show was kind of small it was still possible to miss stuff.

V Miller

[vlado]

As far as global illumination rendering is concerned, there soon will be a time when any half-decent renderer will give you more or less the same (photoreal) results - hardware is fast enough now that even brute-force solutions that were unthinkable a few years ago, now can achieve useable results. Even speed-wise renderers are getting in quite the same boat, and the difference between waiting 5 minutes instead of 6 or 7 is not really that big (and to many people waiting 5 hours instead of 6 or 7 doesn't matter either if the results are still good).

The car analogy is quite a good one. In many ways, choosing a renderer will become like choosing a car. Like any model car does the basic job of transporting you from one place to another, any renderer will give you more or less the results you want. So choosing one instead of another will be quite a matter of personal preference. It remains for us to hope that people will still prefer V-Ray

Best regards,
Vlado

[mmikee]

The car analogy is quite a good one. In many ways, choosing a renderer will become like choosing a car. Like any model car does the basic job of transporting you from one place to another, any renderer will give you more or less the results you want. So choosing one instead of another will be quite a matter of personal preference. It remains for us to hope that people will still prefer V-Ray

I agree.
I certainly like VRay better than any other renderer I have used.
No one even comes close to Chaos in customer support. And this forum
could cost me and I would still use it.
Having emails returned by you guys personaly. Posting in this forum
nearly (if not) daily. Caring about what the users think and need from
your software. There is no price to be put on these things.

Regards,
Mike

[DaForce]

The forum and support ALONE, make Vray standout amongst the crowd.

Take a bow gents (and Tedi) **gestures towards the chaosgroup staff**

[jujubee]

Yep - that also includes the wonderful community of users here too.

[DaForce]

Indeed yes.

Take a bow people **gestures towards the forum population**

[throb]

Ya, I'm interested in where Brazil has gone, because it seemed to be huge a couple of years ago and has now seemed to have slipped. Were the Splutterfishes there at SIGGRAPH?

i saw scott kirvan watching vlado intently while he demo'd vray
from a corner of the vizmasters booth. was pretty funny.
unless brazil literally comes over to my studio and does all my work for me, there is no way in hell i will bother with their renderer. bad history...

[jujubee]

I spoke with Jorge from Maxwell at the Vismasters Awards ceremony. He was a very humble programmer with a lot of optimism - he was in fact a pretty fun person to hang out with. He also sincerely mentioned that he had a lot of respect for the people and programmers over at Chaos.

I really think this shows very good sportsmanship on everyone's behalf.