Maxwell Render

wow, great work again!

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many limits team
:: twitter :: Gallery :: My 3D products :: ...and ::

Incredible work and very inspirational. Good job.

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Visario / web > blog > twitter > youtube > gallery

Beautiful!!!

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Next Limit Team

GE General Electric - Two Letters

Hello again,
Our latest commercial just went to air for General Electric. Maxwell Render was used exclusively to render a challenging amount of instanced letters, G and E, as part of General Electric's new campaign. It was very tricky initially to get the two letters texture mapped and surfaced while still taking colours from the destination object. The Maxwell team was crucial in helping us with the task and the result is a subtle, but en mass, incredible visual style matching the company's products well. The letters were a combination of metallic and thin film substances which allowed for a variation of glint response from the lighting.

Spot Page:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/index.php?page=project122/GE%20%7C%20Two%20Letters&mode=html

Direct Video Link:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/data/project/122/mov_00.mov

Some of my favourite frames:
(see the Spot Page for more frames

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Matt Hermans
CG Supervisor
Fuel VFX
http://www.fuelvfx.com

hey very nice...

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sing with me.... la la la... la la la

Really cool!

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Next Limit Team

Awesome!

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Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

it's an another level !

Thanks all

I'm very passionate about Maxwell Render. I love what it has opened up to us and what potential it has in the future; that as computers get faster and faster - why not get it in one shot ?

Matt

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Matt Hermans
CG Supervisor
Fuel VFX
http://www.fuelvfx.com

Hi again,

We complete a spot for John West recently which I thought I'd share with the forum

John West recently launched their new “No Drain” range of Tuna and wanted to work with us on a stylistic spot indicative of the uniqueness of their product. The concept was to create a documentary look, grand in scale, as if a stormy ocean was actually draining out of the can.

The entire length of the project was about two months, which was a while but because of the unusual nature of the job requirements I handled everything except finalling in Flame. I wanted to exploit the benefits of Maxwell and the new features of Realflow; and I couldn’t be happier with the result! Modeling the scene took less than a day and having the camera move locked the day after meant lighting could be organised on day three. This is one of the time-saving aspects of Maxwell; to have lighting done so quickly and reliably enabled me to move on to the larger tasks. At any point I could drop a new simulation into the Maxwell setup and see it in situ at near-final quality in only minutes a frame.

The most challenging aspect was getting Maxwell to render the splash and foam; a task usually meant for a more traditional ‘particle rendering’ approach. Meshing the particles to multi-million polygon splash objects required some guess work, but I had set the project up to iterate progressively in detail so it was always fast to work on. For the data set I bought Solid State Harddisks so I could get the gigabytes-per-frame data into the renderer as fast as possible. Hopefully I could do better sprite rendering with Maxwell in the future and still benefit from the raytracing strengths it has.

The surface of the ocean was a combination of high detail geometry and a composite of the procedural wind from Reaflow exported as a displacement map mixed with a melting tin lid. As there was a need for a seamless blend from tin to ocean to whirlpool, some magic maps needed to be blended together and applied as displacement.
Splashes and foam were straight forward substances; but the submersed foam was a subsurface scattered material refracted through the ocean surface. I feel that made a subtle effect on the scale of the look.
A fun (and a little unusual) part of the job was photogrammetising Tuna cakes and recovering a point cloud mesh which became the final Tuna plateau which rises out of the ocean at the end. Water subtly runs through the grooves and drains away.

I’m pleased to have used Realflow and Maxwell to closely in an ideal situation and to be able to push scale and detail levels above anything I’d ever done; even into the realm which Realflow/Maxwell’s competition are usually considered the only option.

Attached are my favourite frames.

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Matt Hermans
CG Supervisor
Fuel VFX
http://www.fuelvfx.com

Very nice work. Would love to see a comp breakdown if you have time.

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mo cores, mo problems

wow very cool ... great idea with the tuna

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Mac Pro | 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon | 8 GB
Mac Pro | 2 x 3.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon | 16 GB
MacBook Pro | 2.66 GHz Core i7 | 8 GB

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2igUkmYe46c

Fuel has just completed Leggo's "Pasta Loves Leggo's" commercial for BWM Melbourne/Revolver.

The spot was 90% CGI and of that, Maxwell Render was used for almost everything.

Because of the scope of the commercial, which is a sequel to a 2008/2009 job we did also in Maxwell, we were able to make use of *every* Maxwell Render feature available. Extensive use of MXS references, instancing and Multilight were critical in enabling us to grind through the many shots in high definition and on a short time budget.

I employed MXS References for the large, static objects which we could develop in a fast look-dev environment and bake out as versioned assets; sometimes altering the asset where necessary for a specific shot.
Instances were used for all the vegetables and pasta which were developed in a similar look-dev envionment for critical light/substance testing. Most of the time material references were used to simplify the building of shots and consolidate the look-dev across the shots.
Multilight EXRs meant we could light a shot with more than enough coverage and compositing could isolate, with mat/obj IDs, certain objects and light them more dramatically - eg the vegetables were mostly lit from a single kinoflow light rather than the HDRI or environment for drama. We usually only rendered background from foreground and possibly an extra matte pass for simplifing the selections for colour grading.

Apart from the three main features of Maxwell Render, I was able to utilise a wide range of features some unique to Maxwell: Particle RenderKit to do all the splashes simmed in Realflow, Rendertime displacement for the drops on the vegetables (love the caustics), Hair for the fuzz on the Tomato leaves, Subsurface Scattering for almost everything!, Particle Instancing for the spice in the Sauce/SauceDisc, Accurate BSDFs for the Brass Horn, Motionblur, extensive Depth of Field...and most importantly the workflow for Maxwell was an incredible pleasure. We could render everything to Sampling Level 15 (1080p renders) and begin comping, if approved we resumed the renders up to final quality. This workflow left us time to concentrate on the creative challenges rather than the engineering of the renderer.

Thanks again Maxwell !! (and the very prompt and always appreciated support of Juan, Mihai et al)

Some of my favourite frames

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Matt Hermans
CG Supervisor
Fuel VFX
http://www.fuelvfx.com

Those tomatoes look incredible.....well everything looks incredible. I think you'll have to post some wireframes if you post this in other forums
The mushroom/onion at 0.7.....mama miaaa

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Next Limit Team
Merchant of happiness

Awesome work. What else can you say really?

/b

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Brett Simms
http://www.heavyartillery.com