Rendering, possible alternates to PhotoWorks?

A couple of questions for the resident rendering geniuses. From an
absolute beginner at ray tracing --- I have only dabbled with PhotoWorks.

Do you use PhotoWorks if not what do you use and why?

There appears to be a few “Distributed” network rendering engines /
agents. Is anyone using one of these? How hard are they to set up? I ask
this looking around my home office with 3 half-decent ex SolidWorks PC’s
lying around doing nothing but collect dust. Seems they could be used to
reduce rendering times.

It would be nice to learn from those with experience as it takes a long
time to learn from my own bad ones.

With thanks

John Layne
Solid Engineering Ltd

 

I (my company) am actually using PhotoWorks with very good results.
Sometimes the results are frustrating and time consuming but we are
producing some very nice renderings. Before settling on PhotoWorks we
demoed some other packages. It really comes down to what you need for
features and the price you want to pay. The SW website has some rendering
partners on the solution partners page. One that comes to mind is
www.okino.com they offer translation and rendering software for SW. There
is also another company on the solution partner page "ART" they offer a very
high end rendering software/hardware package.

Something to remember if you're not using PhotoWorks for rendering SW models
then you will need to translate your files into another format so the
rendering software can read them. This typically breaks the link between
the rendering file and the SW file. Meaning any changes to the SW file
don't update the rendering file. One of the biggest reasons we use
PhotoWorks is because of the file link and compatibility guarantee. I
believe Okino and Alias have translators that actually keep the link between
the rendering and Sw file? You could also have translation problem.

As far as rendering specific software...there is lots out there. Lightwave,
3D Studio, Maya, Okino, Alias, Blender are just a few off the top of my
head. They would all work with SW files with some sort of translation.

 

Hi Rob

Thanks for the reply; do you have a link to a website? I would be very
interested in seeing examples of your work.

That whole data translation mine field is something I'm very wary of. I
would like to see how others work with data translation.

Checked out Maya and Okino they both seem to support distributed network
rendering via a third party plug-in --- could have it’s advantages?
Although learning curve could be steep.

Regards

John Layne
Solid Engineering Ltd

 

I'm working on a website but it's not quite ready yet. I could e-mail
you some renderings if that works for you. You could also check out
www.zxys.com www.mikejwilson.com www.bxhdesigns.com they all have some
PhotoWorks rendering examples.

PhotoWorks does not support network rendering but it may in the future.

 

Hi,

Check out www.maxwellrender.com
It's on alpha but the SolidWorks plug-in is available to early adopters.

Marc

 

Hi Paul,

Only way to test it is to buy the alpha... You get the full software and all
the plug-ins when they release.
It's the same engine for all the plug-ins so we should get the same results
from Max, Rhino or SolidWorks. It's not very usefull in SW2005 but will be
fine with 2005 that has a real camera.

Marc

 

Thanks conj

Maxwell is very impressive, I'm totally blown away. I spent 20 minutes
looking at all the images. I swear some are just to real, it's scary
I'll try not to become paranoid when watching the News.

It seems to include Network rendering, have you tried this?

In your post did you mean it's not that great with SWX 2005 but will be
with SWX 2006? If so what problems are there with SWX 2005?

Regards

John Layne

 

Just joined the Maxwell forum, I see the limitations in SWX 2005
regarding cameras--- And I really didn't want to upgrade to SWX 2006
until SP5 after the ongoing issues with SWX2005 SP2 etc.

Network rendering seems to be available, but a little bug ridden at the
moment, but hey it's Alpha. I await with interest, to see if it improves
speed of rendering over 4 PC's (of varying speeds)

If anyone out there is running the BETA of SWX2006 I'd be very
interested to know if there are improvements to PhotoWorks.

John Layne
Solid Engineering Ltd

 

Hi John,

As you found, the images are great. But those were made by folks who paid
for the alpha!!! So those folks are serious and probably could make stunning
images out of any renderer. It's a great way to have talented and willing
people help develop the software; they paid so they want it to be good.
It's a bargain at $395 right now but you have to be confident in it's
future.

Ciao,

Marc

 

heres a link to some renders

done in brazil 3ds max and mental images mental ray maya

btw im moving to nz in may

 

heres a link to some renders

done in brazil 3ds max and mental images mental ray maya

http://www.mikerender.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/directory/index.html

btw im moving to nz in may

 

http://www.mikerender.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/directory/index.html

link

 

Thank for those Mike

Where in New Zealand are you going to be based?
Have you got a job lined up?

John Layne

 

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:41:59 +1200, John Layne

John

I've been lookinging into the ART Pure card - It is expensive and
from what I gather one also needs Maya or Viz so that has to be paid
for as well. I have spoken to a gentleman from ART and there is no
direct link to SW in the immediate future - but he would not elaborate
on future development.


However the upside is that the renderings are done so quickly that it
is just easier to incrementaly change settings untill you get the one
you want.

The main problem I see with renders that work outside SW is that one
has to deal with translating files all the time and for most jobs
there is not the budget to spend that time in organizing this side of
things to get excellent renderings - when Photoworks adequate
renderings will do.

I have just looked at the Maxwell site - it seems to have a real
community and the developers seem keen to make a product people want.

Photoworks used to use Lightworks renderer but PW2 swapped to Mental
Ray for some reason - Lightworks has a real community with also sorts
of material libraries and textures for people who's software uses the
Lighworks renderer - but Metal Ray seems to be very remote and PW2
just languishes on the side of the road.


Regards


Jonathan

 

john my apologies to all for the half hearted message it was a problem
posting and something called solidworks google beta that was causing
the problem ive never seen it before and its not my usual way of
posting

the rest of the message should read

pw2 is a good renderer i unfortunately dont use it that often anymore
after i switched to maya and max 2 years ago

it is capable renderer and i think its good for around 90% of the
engineers and designers that want to produce realistic images of their
designs however it is a cut down version of the mental images render
engine and doesnt quite exploit the advantages of mental ray except
for one thing mental ray is slow

recently i have been working on catia and this has a fully blown
version of the mental ray renderer and will support all the feature
that are good for lighting scenes hdri etc more on that later i dont
know if solidworks will introduce the big deal but i wish they would

So why did i switch and what was the learning curve involved

it got to a point where most of the people were asking for images to
sell their products and animation to boot and we had pretty much maxed
out the animator and pw2 addins which left us investigating the bigger
packages it also helped in that maya was dropped in price to the same
cost as the pw2 and animator add ins

we bought maya and after months of trying to import large cad file
data sets in iges and stl both of which maya could read we had to
figure out a pipeline to get ged models in and set up to render and
animate, maya was problematic that it didnt like masses of cad data as
it works in a completely different way polys and mesh

polytrans was the key here we tried deep exploration but found okino
handled cad data better

after this we were running but found whilst the mental ray renderer
was pretty much supreme and there isnt anything out there to beat it
was slow and needed lots of computing power recently they included a
new version 3.3 which has cured the speed problem and now it handles
large lighting computation hdri images etc in no time at all but in
investigating the speed problem we also came across brazil for 3ds max
so we tried that and to be honest it is very very fast and is a good
renderer several leaps ahead of pw2 but the same cad pipeline exists
you have to get cad data in the other advanntage to brazil is that
its very quick to set up a render using real global illumination and
hdri

what this really means in my experience is that as above pw2 is good
for designers and engineers it provides material librarys and you are
in the same cad environment for rendering as opposed to having to
create your own materials and make your own library(though the
materials are far superior once created and you have infinite
control)and that every time a change to the design is made you have to
reimport to the rendering program maya or max which can take as much
time as just rendering in pw2

distributed rendering is a way of using multiple pcs to half quarter
the render time this is well worth it when your making animations and
have render times of 30 minutes a frame but if its a still image then
i think the time and effort taken to set up a distributed network and
some work far better using the command line learning command line
rendering for maya isnt really worth and a lot of the time a
dispatcher can cost as much as pw2 does
though maya now comes with its own limited dispatcher meaning less
cost

as for me im off to auckland NZ may the 9th and i do have a job and a
number of further job offers,trying to be poached i think if you know
of anyone thats offering more than 70k nz$ dollars let me know

im trying to get a site up with som pw2 rendering aids and tutorials
set up before i go as im pretty bored here in the uk doing nothing
with my time

anything further drop me aline

mike

 

Thanks for all the responses.

For the time being I'll stick with learning PhotoWorks--- since I
already own it!

I will keep an eye on Maxwell, once it's out of Alpha I will definitely
consider it. Network rendering has a lot of appeal to it--- we shall see.

Now I'm of to search the Web for info/tutorials on PhotoWorks and do a
bit of drooling over the work of Paul Salvador and others of his ilk.

Thanks again

John Layne
Solid Engineering Ltd