Max 5 raytrace

[devlish]

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

[Garett_Haight]

Image isn't working

I like to use brazil, but I hear that Vray is good for raytracing.

[Morzog]

For architectural it is said VRay is the best.

Check out some of these links,

http://www.evermotion.org/forum/sear...=motiongraphic

http://www.evermotion.org/forum/view...b7ecb5390477df

chaoticdimension,
http://www.chaoticdimension.com/forums/phpBB2/

[devlish]

sorry ... forgot to attach the file. I never actually got it to render.

follow this link for image of attached Max file

http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?threadid=24607