Maxwell for Vray - the environment conection

[Micha_cg]

Hi,

for all of Vray and Maxwell users, here my experience with the Maxwell environment at Vray for Rhino.

The Maxwell environment is very nice to use for arch viz. It give a nice color gradient at the background and better colored shadows.
It's very simple to conect Vray and Maxwell. I can open two rhino tasks, one for Maxwell rendering a mirrored sphere of the environment at 100x100 pixels and a second in Vray mode, that is linked to the Maxwell output (environment in mirror ball mode). I can use the Maxwell output after a few seconds in Vray for Rhino. Only the sun must be set manual.



Here my Maxwell scene file ready to render an environment for Vray for Rhino.
http://www.simulacrum.de/download/MaxwellEnv.3dm

And here the environment file for everybody, Maxwell is not needed.

This map can be used at the environment options with mirror ball mapping type, horicontal rotate 270 (beta 12) and intensity 10.

Good luck and much fun.

-Micha

updated

[flipside]

Maxwell for Vray - the environment conection

Hi Micha, wouldn't it be better to render out the environment in hdr format? Now you're using a LDR image as GI environment which isn't very correct imo.

[Micha_cg]

Maxwell for Vray - the environment conection

No problem with the ldr image. If you look at my posted map you will see, the contrast of a heaven environment is not so high. Only the sun could be a problem, but hdr images with a strong sun are not good for rendering, because it would bring noise and long rendertimes. Better it is to use a distant light source. So, if Maxwell could output HDRI, I would not use it.

[Micha_cg]

Maxwell for Vray - the environment conection

Update: in my last VfR version the map must be set to "environment", 270 vertical rotated and mirror_ball mappping.

[Syllogism]

it's just black?

So I d/l the file which is just a sphere, apply the map as an enviroemnt, vertical rotation 270, enviroment, mirror ball, intensity, and it's all black? what am I doing wrong?

[Micha_cg]

Maxwell for Vray - the environment conection

Hmm. Black? Did you see no lighting and no background. Does the texture preview show an image? Did you enable GI? Have you set GI and background environment?

[merlik585]

Re: it's just black?

So I d/l the file which is just a sphere, apply the map as an enviroemnt, vertical rotation 270, enviroment, mirror ball, intensity, and it's all black? what am I doing wrong?

Horizontal rotation not vertical

Renee

[Micha_cg]

Maxwell for Vray - the environment conection

... if somebody need a sky without the usage of Maxwell - per HDRShop and the sky plugin it can be done:

http://www.banterle.com/francesco/download.html