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An article on Deathfall discusses the work of Joseph Francis, a great photographer that composes his scenes entirely in software and renders them with Maxwell Renderer.

In 2006 the new Maxwell Renderer caught my eye, and I started testing it. I loved how realistic it looked, and I thought I could use it to create elaborate backgrounds without building elaborate sets. I spent a fair amount of time looking at user-created Maxwell materials, which are available to share on the company’s web site, and imagining possibilities. I really wanted to use CG in an invisible way as much as possible, rather than make obviously CG things like living mermaids or aliens. I feel as if I’m doing it right when someone writes to me assuming the set is real and asking where I shot an image.

Warning: Article contains artistic nudity.

via Death Fall – Nothing is Real but the Girl.

Graphics art, maxwell, photography

Last year, NVIDIA told the world about its upcoming GPUs in 2011 and 2013. These GPUs are codenamed Kepler and Maxwell, respectively. Kepler will be released sometime in 2011, and will be manufactured on a 28nm process. Kepler would be approximately 2.7 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

The follow-on GPU to Kepler will be the Maxwell. Maxwell will be released sometime in 2013, and will be manufactured on a 22nm process. Maxwell is approximately 7.6 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

NVIDIA has also told us about Project Denver, which combines a GPU and an ARM CPU in one. The question is, when will that be available? Will it be on Kepler, or will it be on Maxwell? Hexus.net has provided the answer in an interview with NVIDIA’s Tegra General Manager, Mike Rayfield .

Lastly we asked about Project Denver: the surprising announcement that NVIDIA will be designing a CPU in partnership with ARM, with a view to using it in high-end computers. We asked Rayfield to elaborate.

“As well as licensing Cortex A15, we also have an architectural license with ARM to produce an extremely high performance ARM CPU, which be combined with NVIDA GPUs for super-computing,” he said. When we asked for timescales, Rayfield revealed: “The Maxwell generation will be the first end-product using Project Denver. This is a far greater resource investment for us than just licensing a design.”

Hexus also speculates that NVIDIA may launch Tegra 3 at Mobile World Congress next month. Tegra is, of course, a system-on-a-chip developed for mobile devices such as smartphones

via : Exclusive: NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 primed for MWC launch @ Hexus.net

Hardware arm, cpu, denver, gpgpu, gpu, hpc, maxwell, nvidia

Yesterday Randall posted on the Nvidia product roadmap. Let’s take a little bit deeper look at the new GPU chips that were announced. However, before we do that, let’s also take a look at the latest GPU chip to help estimate what we could see in these future chips.

Tesla was named about Nikola Tesla. Fermi was named after the physicist Enrico Fermi. We know a lot about the Fermi GPU since it is publicly available. Fermi has 3.0 billion transistors, and is manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process. The Tesla C2050 / C2070 GPU Computing Processor can do 515.2 GFlops and consumes about 247 watts of power. The only difference between the C2050 and the C2070 is the amount of memory. The C2050 has 3 GB and the C2070 has 6 GB. That makes the GFlops per watt ratio for the C2070 to be approximately 2.0, and the C2050 to be approximately 2.16. Taking a look at the chart, the C2070 coincides with the top line of the Fermi chip.

The next GPU from Nvidia is code named Kepler, which is named for the mathematician Johannes Kepler. Kepler will be released sometime in 2011, and will be manufactured on a 28nm process. If the top of the chip is the correct value, then Nvidia is estimating that the double-precision Gigaflops performance of 5.7 GFlops per watt. Using 250 watts to represent the maximum amount of electrical power that Nvidia can use, then the Kepler C3070 will be able to compute at 1.425 Tflops in double precision. Yes, I made up the name C3070. I just followed Nvidia’s standard naming convention, which will likely change. That makes Kepler about 2.7 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

The follow-on GPU to Kepler will be the Maxwell which is named for the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell will be released sometime in 2013, and will be manufactured on a 22nm process. If the top of the chip is the correct value, then Nvidia is estimating that the double-precision Gigaflops performance of 15.7 GFlops per watt. Using 250 watts to represent the maximum amount of electrical power that Nvidia can use, then the Maxwell C4070 will be able to compute at 3.925 Tflops in double precision. Again, I made up the name C4070. That makes Maxwell about 7.6 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

Let us further suppose that we want to know how much computing this would give us in a rack, and use that to build a high performance computer.

Read more…

Hardware feature, kepler, maxwell, nvidia

If you’ve been wanting to try Maxwell Render, you won’t find a deal better than this.  To honor Spain’s big win in the 2010 World Cup, the Maxwell Renderer is 50% off for 1 week only, ending Monday 19th July.

We are so enthusiastic about football that we want to celebrate the World Cup tournament with you, and hopefully Spain’s success. That’s why we are running a Maxwell Render promotion which sees prices dropping the further Spain progress in the tournament.

Maxwell Render :: Maxwell Render Promotion.

Graphics maxwell, sale

A bit day for Maxwell Render and Nuke fans, as now there is a native plugin that connects the two simply and beautifully.  The new plugin brings an MXI Reader and MXI Multilight Mixer for Nuke, allowing you to load full 32-bit color information and light emitters into Nuke for interactive editing.

Jon Wadelton, Nuke Product Manager at The Foundry, is equally pleased, saying: “The Maxwell Render plug-in for Nuke is very easy to set up. It quickly enables you to adjust your lighting interactively inside Nuke, resulting in a speedy workflow. We’re excited by the possibilities that Maxwell Render presents the VFX industry and how tight and simple the integration with Nuke is.”

It’s available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, and free for Nuke license holders.  You can view tutorials and demos at this website.

Maxwell Render :: The next generation in rendering technology capable of simulating light exactly as it behaves in the real world..

Graphics maxwell, nuke, plugin

If you’re watched a lot of Cartoon Network lately, you might have seen Meindbender’s work.  Using Maxwell render, they previewed a short 30s spot on CGSociety’s forums that eventually turned into a paying gig with Cartoon Network, and they’ve written some tips and tricks on using Maxwell to achieve their clay stop-motion look.

“Maxwell is awesome,” says Michael, “but it’s kind of sad for me as I once was completely obsessed with building complex shader trees. I can now basically throw that hard-earned knowledge out the door, as the setup in Maxwell Render is extremely easy and straight forward.

“Rendering using an unbiased software takes longer to calculate of course, but I could honestly say that we gained back that time in setup. Using the software’s multilight function, it allowed me to render out the lights separately and do all the fine tuning in comp, which was another big time saver.

via CGSociety – MEINDBENDER.

Graphics advertising, maxwell, meindbender, television, vfx

Felix, a renderer developed in partnership with Next Limit technologies (creaors of the Maxwell Renderer), aims to bring renderfarm power to everyone via the Cloud.  Similar in concept to vSwarm, you buy “credits” and then submit your job to be rendered on 40 to 160 cores in the cloud.

Unfortunately, it currently does not support Animation, only still renders, although that feature is coming soon.  The results are impressive tho, rendering the Benchwell scene in a mere 55 seconds.

felixrender.

Graphics cloud, felix, maxwell, renderer

Maxwell has released a free trial-version of their Maxwell Renderer for you to “try before you buy”.  The demo version has a 30 day time limit, and a few other necessary restrictions:

• Watermarked render
• Maximum render size of 800 x 600 pixels
• Network rendering disabled *
• Preview Rendering in viewport in Maxwell Studio disabled
• A limit of 5 editable lights when using Multilight™

Aside from the small render-size (Personally, I’ld like to test it on 1080p for a realistic benchmark), it’s a pretty full-featured version.  Fill out the form on their website and they’ll send you a demo license.  If you haven’t heard what’s new in the latest Maxwell Render, you can read up on it here.

via Maxwell Render :: Buy – Try Demo and Plug-ins.

Graphics demo, maxwell, software

Maxwell Render v2.0 is out of beta and now available for you to get!

This major new version brings you an arsenal of new features, enhancements and additions, among others:

• Major improvements in speed and noise reduction with optimizations in caustics, emitters, mirrors, HDRIs and more.
• Significant quality improvements in roughness, color output, light distribution, sunlight and more.
• Stacked Layers: Materials can now be stacked on top of each other, much like layers in a photo editing application. Each layer can hold a number of components and an opacity mask can be used to determine the influence of each layer. The Stacked Layers system makes it much easier to create extremely complex materials and materials that were simple impossible to create in V1.7.
• Thin SSS: Subsurface scattering in V2 now has a special mode which can handle single-sided geometry. This mode is very suitable for leaves, lampshades, paper, and curtains amongst others.
• An easier to use, more robust, and customizable network system.
• Support for IES and EULUMDAT files.
• Color Multilight™: It is now possible to edit the color of emitters in real-time.
• Built-in compatibility with RealFlow, enabling users to generate procedural geometry and meshes at render time, using Maxwell Render.
• A new plug-in for Modo.
• And much more….

Hit their website for all the details, but licenses cost only $245 for a standard rendernode.

via Maxwell Render • View topic – Maxwell Render version 2 out now!.

Graphics maxwell, software

Hot on the heels of the Maxwell 2 previews, CGArena has a tutorial on rendering a beautifull neoclassic livingroom suite with Maxwell.

Neoclassic Livingroom Lighting and Rendering using Maxwell Renderer – CGArena.

Graphics maxwell, tutorial