devlish
18-11-2004, 07:39 AM
I have been interested in 3D for a very long time. I have been playing around with Max for years, but have only gotten serious in the past year. I mostly use max for architectural renderings, since I am a licensed architect. I have used Max’s scanline renderer for everything. It has worked well enough for what I have used it for, especially with the addition of light tracer and radiosity.
It has recently come to my attention that max is PITIFUL when it come to raytracing. I have heard this in passing from some people, but never rendered anything that would cause me to put much wieght to the complaints. I figured while there may be better renderers available, scaneline worked well enough for me.
That has now changed. It happened just the other day. I created a scene, a simple scene, that made extensive use of ray tracing. I had even hoped to created a small animation of the scene, since it is sooo simple. I tried to do a render of the scene and though it said “rendering” nothing seemed to be happening. After about an hour I canceled the render and posted the scene on this site to see if someone with more experience could find my error. A very nice member, by the name of bobpuls did the render for me and posted a picture of the outcome.
Long story shortened … he managed to render the scene using ‘Final Render’ in about 20 mins on his athlon XP1700 with 2 bounces for raytrace and refraction. I reduced the scanline ray depth to 3(from the default of 9) and my dual athlon XP2400 had only gotten halfway through the render after 20 hours.
Poll time. I obviously need a better rendering engine. I have read a lot about final render and it seems to be able to produce very good result with a short learning curve. I need help choosing as these things are not cheap. I have max 5.
Thanks guy … by the way … I have attached the scene that was giving me fits
It has recently come to my attention that max is PITIFUL when it come to raytracing. I have heard this in passing from some people, but never rendered anything that would cause me to put much wieght to the complaints. I figured while there may be better renderers available, scaneline worked well enough for me.
That has now changed. It happened just the other day. I created a scene, a simple scene, that made extensive use of ray tracing. I had even hoped to created a small animation of the scene, since it is sooo simple. I tried to do a render of the scene and though it said “rendering” nothing seemed to be happening. After about an hour I canceled the render and posted the scene on this site to see if someone with more experience could find my error. A very nice member, by the name of bobpuls did the render for me and posted a picture of the outcome.
Long story shortened … he managed to render the scene using ‘Final Render’ in about 20 mins on his athlon XP1700 with 2 bounces for raytrace and refraction. I reduced the scanline ray depth to 3(from the default of 9) and my dual athlon XP2400 had only gotten halfway through the render after 20 hours.
Poll time. I obviously need a better rendering engine. I have read a lot about final render and it seems to be able to produce very good result with a short learning curve. I need help choosing as these things are not cheap. I have max 5.
Thanks guy … by the way … I have attached the scene that was giving me fits