Hi all,
This is the 2nd work we made for testing Blender Cycles, now on gpu mode (we use a GTX 675MX).
Here you can find the first image we modeled with 3ds Max and rendered with Maxwell Render (little Photoshop post)
for comparison:
Maxwell time: about 4h
Cycles time: about 34min
c&c are welcome!
It is hard to beat Maxwell when it comes to light accuracy IMO but from a time savings vs quality standpoint you just can not count out Cycles nor deny its potential as it matures. Very nice comparison, thank you for sharing.
Nice scene. The Cycles version has more of a purple hue to it. Is that from different post pro, or is it a colour management type issue?
I think the whole point of an Unbiased Renderer is that it should get you physically accurate lightining, irrespective of whether it goes by the name of Cycles, Octane or anything else. The trick lies only in how quickly it gets there - whether calling it Monte-Carlo, MLT, PMC or something similar.
Coming to the renders, they both seem to be done with different light setups as the Maxwell image seems to have sharper shadows and a different look to the bump on the wall. Is that so? Given the time difference, Cycles really sounds impressive. I use Octane for its speed an simplicity, but Cycles really does seem like the one to watch out for.
And great scene, by the way.
Anuraag
Thank you all for your reply!
@Anthony C
you right say that Maxwell has better light accuracy; we only try to reach it with Blender Cycles.
the purple hue you see is made from different post, not for an issue.
for bump question, you are right, we use less in the Cycles scene, also because it seemed too much in the Maxwell scene…
for light question, we noticed that we have different shadows, probably because in the Maxwell scene we use a Daylight + sky-portal, instead in the Cycles scene we only use an emitter plane. We tried to use a Sun light in Cycles scene, but we don’t reach a result that satisfies us.
In addiction, we post the original Cycles render (without post-production) or other correction on the scene (in the first render we done some UV’s correction and some model correction - look at the papers on left-down corner)
Great work!!! This is a very useful comparison to show cycles’s potential in a relatively simple scene.
…instead in the Cycles scene we only use an emitter plane
Yes!!! This is a “problem” in Cycles. It is difficult for Cycles to find the light source in these cases. Emitter planes at the windows are a good solution to the problem. You could find useful information about these problems and noise reduction in the wiki page of blender.
I’m not sure if I understand you right.
This is the rawrendering from Cycles ?
Kind regards
Alain
Yes, this is the first rawrendering for this scene…
I did not read through all the previous posts, just did a little comparison:
Cycles postproduced:
-Looks flat
-Missing diffuse shadows on the pink areas. It’s brighter there instead of being darker.
-Brightness of wood of floor and furniture is ok
-Wall: Not enough Bump compared to Maxwell
Cycles raw rendering
-Wall: Bump is good
-Diffuse shadows are good
-Furniture and floor to dark
Maxwell
-The best of all from the first impression
Conclusion
Cycles raw rendering is pretty good compared to Maxwell.
Maxwell has still some kind of realism which Cycles doesn’t have.
Cycles postproduced is the badest of all three.
Kind regards
Alain
you guessed all of our impressions!
…maybe we overdid playing with the raw image…
thanks for posting these, it’s a great comparison.
Oh and by the way welcome to the forums 
I can’t wait to see more of your work!
It would be a good comparison if you used same scene, materials, bump, lights and no postproduction.
Use the light falloff nodes to quadratic in cycles
