New FryRender Release just out...

[Lone Deranger]

Looking good. They've added some much needed functionality.
I like the idea of 'Aeronoise'.

Anyone else that cannot get over the "suspicion" that Feversoft and Next Limit are in league together? Their feature lists are so remarkably alike. :curious:

[Rhs_CG]

Yeah, I noticed that too. But, Fry doesn't run on linux and mac os x.

[RoyalT]

Random Control 4
Coming VERY soon:
experience the power of our
Virtual Reality technology,
unleashed. Stay tuned!

I'm wondering what VERY soon really means, cause this has been on theyer site for VERY long now. I want to see this stuff in action.

[macsupremacist]

A mac version would be cool...

[Lone Deranger]

Hm... I see. Hadn't noticed that. Time to drop a mail to the developers about that. I suggest other Mac users with a mind on FryRender do the same.

But, Fry doesn't run on linux and mac os x.

[milohas3Dee]

is there are Render Passes like in all serious production render engines? in maxwell u have only few basic passes. i mean, there is no amb.occ, specular, reflective, refractive, separated lights pass etc. and i think that`s main problem with all unibased engines today.
without passes they are more,less for home or small studio using (playing).

Best,
milohas

[Ernest Burden]

without passes they are more,less for home or small studio using (playing).

Playing? I agree that render passes are important, but lack of them does not take away from logical workflow and visually excellent results. These engines are so intuitive to work with in most cases that you don't spend endless hours testing biases and ray factors and shadow leaks etc. They also have the neat trick of being able to adjust lighting AFTER the render, including having daytime and nighttime lighting encoded in the same file.

And Feversoft is not in any way related to NextLimit. Unless they are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

[LemonNado]

Nobody says that you have to use a single render engine. Professionals usually comp passes from various render engines and solutions together to achieve the look they can sell.
Back to playing around for a living
Lemo

[^Lele^]

is there are Render Passes like in all serious production render engines? in maxwell u have only few basic passes. i mean, there is no amb.occ, specular, reflective, refractive, separated lights pass etc. and i think that`s main problem with all unibased engines today.
without passes they are more,less for home or small studio using (playing).

Best,
milohas

www.fryrender.com -> click on "what can fryrender do?" -> click on the "render" image.
Voila', passes.
Sure, not a zillion, but definitely a few which'll help (objId, MatID, normal, Z, AO, matte, Volume, Velocity).
Assuming without looking for infos isn't good practice, imo.

[Oddgit]

Maxwell has a pretty good amount of render channels and options too, Render(which is beauty) Alpha, Material ID, zBuffer, Shadow, Opaque, ObjectID, it has specific layer functions for caustics and illumination. It has multilight which is all kinds of cool =D And then all of the cool post render functions. Im sure Fry has alot of those optiosn too. How i mean how many layers does one need?

[ThirdEye]

How i mean how many layers does one need?

Surely lots more than the ones you mentioned.

[Jozvex]

<judo chop!>...i mean, there is no amb.occ, specular, reflective, refractive, separated lights pass etc. and i think that`s main problem with all unibased engines today.

It's the main problem if you want those passes, yes. What is ambient occlusion? It is a fast way to fake the look of shadowing you get when lit by the environment. Fast and fake are not in Maxwell's list of objectives at all. And besides, you can get an AO/specular/reflective/etc pass out of Maxwell if you really want to, you just have to set it up manually.

Have fun waiting for a few hours for each pass! If people want fast, fake passes they use a fast, faker/biased renderer.

[mattFoley]

How i mean how many layers does one need?

You need as many as you need.

That isn't meant to sound cute; it's the only true answer. You're asked by a director/art director/visual effects supervisor/etc. to create a given look. You do whatever is necessary to achieve that look. If that means 500 layers, then you need 500 layers.

And, yes, I have seen visual effects shots with that many layers. I think the most I've worked with is around 100.


without passes they are more,less for home or small studio using (playing).

Having said that about the number of layers you need, this isn't true either. You can still achieve stunning beauty in a single pass. The main drawback is that you become a slave to the renderer and it can be time consuming for iterations versus breaking it down and doing your ideation in a comp. Of course, a potential fix for this is a real-time interactive lighting engine that takes advantage of some tasty GPU action.


It's the main problem if you want those passes, yes. What is ambient occlusion? It is a fast way to fake the look of shadowing you get when lit by the environment. Fast and fake are not in Maxwell's list of objectives at all. And besides, you can get an AO/specular/reflective/etc pass out of Maxwell if you really want to, you just have to set it up manually.

Have fun waiting for a few hours for each pass! If people want fast, fake passes they use a fast, faker/biased renderer.

Not entirely sure where you're going with your comments, but judging by your signature I'm guessing this is a defense of Maxwell. Keep in mind that while a 'real' look is great for a lot of applications like architectural rendering, it's not really a frequent target of visual effects and animation. I am neither attacking nor defending any particular renderer here, just pointing out that everything has its place.

Having a separate 'fake' ambient occlusion pass can be very handy for things totally unrelated to ambient occlusion.

And why would you have to wait hours for each pass? The data exists as separate parameter values at render time and and each parameter can easily be directed to a specific channel/file. One render can produce and unlimited number of passes. The only real delay might be the additional file write time if you're writing to separate files, which is still going to negligible. And if your pipeline supports file formats like the 128-bit EXR format, that's a lot of 8-bit channels for writing passes into a single file.

[^Lele^]

Why would anyone wish to use an unbiased, spectral renderer for VFX eludes me.
Just checking the Fry website (again, hey!) it seems obvious to me that the tool is aimed to arcviz, product viz, and some technical illustration, possibly.
I would say that for the average user involved in those fields, having too many passes would be counter-productive, and well off the mark.
They way *I* see it, the beauty of tools like Fry resides in the way one goes about setting up a scene: cheat nothing, do it like you would in real life, and get similar results to what you would in real life.
In other words, just load the model, add a few light panels here and there, point a camera, add materials, shoot.
Done.
That's how most of the images on their site are done, anyway.
Bloom, glare, diffraction, it's all done "in camera", with no need to do any further post on it.

I'd rather this discussion developed on the pluses of such a tool, rather than the perceived bads, which are non-existent given its market positioning.(Fry users correct me if i am wrong here, please)

And no, I do *not* own Fry, do not use it (aside from toying with the demo from time to time) nor am I in any way related to the company.

[mattFoley]

They way *I* see it, the beauty of tools like Fry resides in the way one goes about setting up a scene: cheat nothing, do it like you would in real life, and get similar results to what you would in real life.
In other words, just load the model, add a few light panels here and there, point a camera, add materials, shoot.
Done.


Wisdom!



I'd rather this discussion developed on the pluses of such a tool, rather than the perceived bads, which are non-existent given its market positioning.

More wisdom!

--
mF

[milohas3Dee]

it`s not rare situation, on the finishing phase (or some other part of the process), that beside or behind compositor artist actual client or art director from advert. agency is sitting! during the polishing phase of the shoots, comments like: "is it possible to have more specular highlights here?" or "this is to much reflective !" or "can u just blur reflection and refraction on that object, it`s too sharp". in cases like that, if u don`t have all passes separated u have a problem because u cannot tell them "yes, of course... come back in 5 days because my unibased rendering engine need to re render all over again !"
that`s why u need to have all elements separated, so some of changes can be solved quickly. all these are examples from real production environments and believe me I tried to use Maxwell and i was very stressed by lack of real render passes like in FinalRender or Renderman.
is there are any Maxwell or Fryrender experts who can explain how to get these all passes out?

Best,
Borko

[Jozvex]

Not entirely sure where you're going with your comments, but judging by your signature I'm guessing this is a defense of Maxwell. Keep in mind that while a 'real' look is great for a lot of applications like architectural rendering, it's not really a frequent target of visual effects and animation. I am neither attacking nor defending any particular renderer here, just pointing out that everything has its place.

I wasn't defending Maxwell specifically, though that's where my unbiased rendering bias lies. :p What I was getting at is, you buy a renderer (or any tool) which is tailored to suit what you need to do. You don't look at a hammer and complain that it's missing the ability to weld steel, you just buy a welding thingy instead! Maxwell (I'd say Fry but I don't want to mis-speak) isn't designed to spit out all the passes that Renderman/mental ray etc can, it's a different type of tool.

Having a separate 'fake' ambient occlusion pass can be very handy for things totally unrelated to ambient occlusion.

Of course, so for that pass I'd use a different renderer designed to efficiently give me such passes. More likely, I wouldn't be using an unbiased renderer on a project requiring that level of tweakability in the first place.

And why would you have to wait hours for each pass? The data exists as separate parameter values at render time and and each parameter can easily be directed to a specific channel/file. One render can produce and unlimited number of passes. The only real delay might be the additional file write time if you're writing to separate files, which is still going to negligible. And if your pipeline supports file formats like the 128-bit EXR format, that's a lot of 8-bit channels for writing passes into a single file.

You're talking about what's the expected capability of a biased renderer like mental ray or VRay etc. Maxwell/Fry isn't like that. Maxwell doesn't know what ambient occlusion is, or what a specular highlight is opposed to a glossy reflection. All it knows is light interaction.

To get an ambient occlusion 'pass' out of Maxwell you'd have to apply a plain grey/white material to everything and render the scene separately that way. It would take the length of a regular beauty pass to render and it would be unbiased with many levels of light bouncing etc. Completely impractical compared to a mental ray framebuffer or Renderman AOV because it's just not part of the Maxwell workflow! It's not an omission that needs to be corrected, it's a choice to keep the renderer unbiased.

[LemonNado]

This thread was meant as a simple NEWS information for the fact that Fry Render has a new release out. Please, for the sake of the higher being you daily pray to.... don't extend this into a discussion about rendering.
Lemo

[Mauritius]

You're talking about what's the expected capability of a biased renderer like mental ray or VRay etc. Maxwell/Fry isn't like that. Maxwell doesn't know what ambient occlusion is, or what a specular highlight is opposed to a glossy reflection. All it knows is light interaction.
Well, the concept of a ray being blocked is called shadowing. You can tag such a ray (or store the amount of light it lost) to be able to output that as a pass later. A ray being reflected within a certain cone can be tagged as a "specular" ray. Just some examples. You can very well do that in an unbiased renderer as well.
A renderer being unbiased also doesn't change the fact that any BRDF is a sum of terms which can be factored out into separate passes.
You can not correctly factor out multiplications in any case, biased or unbiased, (e.g. amount of light or shadow/occlusion or the texture color). But then people do that all the time and get away with it (many not even understanding what they're doing).

Of course, if you need to re-render a single pass, you need to re-render all passes to get a "correct" unbiased result in such a renderer. But that is the theory.
If faced with missing or making a deadline (and their client happy), people would probably accept a little bit of "unbiasedness" in a re-render happily. And even if that wasn't possible, being able to tweak stuff in layers in comp goes a long way.

As far as a render (not a re-render of a single pass) goes, It is definitely a shortcoming of the resp. implementations, Maxwell & Fryrender, but not something that is an inevitable effect of a renderer being unbiased.
The fact that these renderers don't allow putting stuff out separately doesn't mean it's not possible -- unbiased or not.

For example, you can output your beauty (unbiased) plus a set of passes. Some of which can be added together to exactly replicate the beauty and some of which can be used to give you something close to the beauty (because they require multiplications).

Cheers,

Moritz

[FreakWizz]

FryRender turned me off by having a closed forum...

I downloaded the demo and had a few questions about using it, of course after much fuss and registering on their forums so i could post to users who had already tried the plugin in my host application. It's obvious that i could not post questions because of the closed forum of FryRender...

So obviously the plugin looked okay, but for the price and support offered, i would not pay $20 for it as is.....Maxwell caused so many problems after initially closing off their forums to new customers, but they changed that rule and i have been using Maxwell ever since Also Maxwell did develop a long way since the complaints led to it's closed forum becoming open again.

Add to that the constant promises of the RC4 technology and FryRender development and bad customer service are enough to just say "No Thanks"

[ubiq]

ahem
mmm
"Add to that the constant promises of the RC4 technology and FryRender development and bad customer service are enough to just say "No Thanks""

o my god. i could write pages to prove you're utterly wrong, and that it's a quasi unanimous feeling amongst Fry customers, so you will end up roasted, and it wouldn't be kind for you.

Keep goin with Mwl ;)

[CHRiTTeR]

It's the main problem if you want those passes, yes. What is ambient occlusion? It is a fast way to fake the look of shadowing you get when lit by the environment. Fast and fake are not in Maxwell's list of objectives at all. And besides, you can get an AO/specular/reflective/etc pass out of Maxwell if you really want to, you just have to set it up manually.

Well ao is verry handy to simulate dirt and dust in corners (which most static objects have in the real world)

Last time i checked maxwell, it couldnt do ao
maybe you mean the skylight? But thats not the same thing as ao.

[Oddgit]

When i have used the occlusion pass to make grime it was always a baked occlusion channel so i could edit it with photoshop, it was never just a straight AO channel comped on top. Those are cake to do too, AO shader on MentalRay and a few seconds later you have your grime map ;)
Plus, for what Fry and Maxwell do, arch vis and product shots, why would you want them all grimed up and dirty anyway ;)

[lwan]

The point of fryrender is simple : the highest quality and the most complete render possible (all components) without user intervention on the core stuff. Doing so, you hit very high levels in terms of raytracing speed, noise convergence and material quality for example. A biased raytracer based on fry's core would probably smokes many existing high-end renderers out there, but that's not the goal here.
This technology is aimed to a more global success pretty soon with the impressive hardware improvements.

As for passes, they're in but considered optional. An unbiased render shouldn't use compositing in our opinion because it would obviously break its unbiased nature, but we agree that it's an important feature for users so it's here and will stay in.

Cheers,
Erwan

[johnstrieder]

Well ao is verry handy to simulate dirt and dust in corners (which most static objects have in the real world) Last time i checked maxwell, it couldnt do ao

Fry in fact can render AO-Passes and Dirt is avaiable in the Material-Editor ;)

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