Maxwell Render

Hi,

after announcing the forum at the Blender Conference 2012
(http://www.blender.org/community/blender-conference/) and
spending over a month to define some rules to keep the spammers out
I'm happy to announce a render forum (for comparing different
approaches and renderers):

http://janwalter.com/renderforum/

Let's see how it goes. I invited a couple of professionals I worked
with as well as some people who do this as a hobby (that's how it
started for me). I hope the people get along considering their
different background. Don't start render flame wars, please ...

I always try to include Maxwell in my talks. During
FMX I actually had time for it (in a 45 minutes talk):

http://www.janwalter.com/Download/PDF/fmx_2012_slides.pdf

But this time I had to compress everything into 25 minutes and
focus on the Blender side of things (and just three renderers:
Radiance, because we all owe to it, Arnold, because
that's where I currently make my living with, Cycles, because
it's the new Blender rendering engine and it's a Blender conference):

http://www.janwalter.com/Download/PDF/blender_conf_2012_slides.pdf

Anyway, you are invited to participate. I provided the
infrastructure, and I have a couple of repositories I
could open (hopefully soon) regarding using Blender (and other,
commercial packages) to do render tests (with commercial and
non-commercial software), but it's hard to find time (in my spare
time) to publish more and more advanced scenes, so that's why I
try to motivate people to have one place where they can share,
pitch their own software, and compare against others ...

I think it's time to think about some simple tests to calibrate
each renderer. Any links I could dig into how to set up something like
that?

Cheers,

Jan - http://www.linkedin.com/in/janwalter

P.S.: Here are still some ongoing updates (draft -
mostly images) for a comparison, which hopefully gets one day more
structured and will have a download section for everyone who wants to
test render as scene for him/herself ...

Here the repositories being used (which should open to the public the
day Arnold is officially release to everyone - or ask me on a per
renderer basis and I provide the neccessary files):

https://bitbucket.org/wahn/radiance_vs_younameit
https://bitbucket.org/wahn/blender-add-ons
https://bitbucket.org/wahn/arnold_shaders/wiki/Home
https://bitbucket.org/wahn/mental_ray_shaders