[Radiance-general] Maxwell-Radiance

[Rob Guglielmetti]

Martin Moeck wrote:

>A student of mine found this renderer - is anyone familiar with it? It looks like it uses some Radiance algorithms.
>  
>
Hi Martin,

I have been following the development of Maxwell for a little while.  I 
inquired with the President of the company a while back, about the 
ability of Maxwell to both work with actual photometric files and to 
supply real illuminance & luminance results. I received vague replies 
about this.  It's the same old story, us lighting people don't get any 
respect; we're the Rodney Dangerfields of the computer graphics world.  
A friend of mine who runs a CG news website has been asking similar 
questions of them and getting similar runaround.  A similar fate 
affected another well-known physically-based rendering tool 
(Lightscape).  Maxwell does look very nice, but so far the promise of 
being able to use it for lighting analysis remains a promise, a 
potetially broken one, and I'm an excellent skeptic, even during this 
holiday time. =8-)  That said, I have not looked at their website in a 
while or made any inquiries.

That website link you sent was interesting; the Maxwell engine does 
definitely look like it uses similar algorithms as Radiance -- noise and 
all.  Have a look here:

http://www.wahn.demon.co.uk/Maxwell/Images/

He's done a bunch of renderings of the tutorial scenes from RwR.  Very 
interesting!

- Rob Guglielmetti