RE: 3dlight - FryRender - anyone using them?

["Marc-Andre Carbonneau" <marc-andre.carbonneau(at)ubisoft.com>]

Thank you all for your replies. I was curious since so many people were happy about the port and yet we rarely hear about it anymore. I wanted to know why that was.

I understand that it takes time and needs for people to add another renderer to their pipeline

Cheers!

 

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From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of denis-jose francois
Sent: May 29, 2008 10:56 AM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: 3dlight - FryRender - anyone using them?

 

>> This is something that I don't get though. You say it's way faster (and it is for certain things), but then you talk about programming and needing a lot of patience when it comes to shader creation. So imo, you have to factor in the amount of time you save by quickly setting up MR shaders... which might cancel out the faster render time.

There is an initial learning cost... but then, thats the same with anything surely? once you are past the shader writing experience creating new ones is very quick. it doesn't take months to develop a shader. it takes no longer than it does in mental ray. And whilst you can quickly set up a mental ray shader 'straight out of the box', to get a good looking mental ray shader that isn't going to slow your pipeline down to a crawl isn't so easy. Anyone who can do that quickly would have spent the equivalent amount of time learning about Mental Ray.

Turning on MB in renderman generally only adds about 10% to frame time. And frame time doesn't really change too much with size either. So the difference between rendering a small preview without motion blur and say a HD image with motion blur is very very small.

Displacement takes nearly the same amount of time as bump mapping and looks phenomenal. You can use displacement maps the way you would use bump in Mental Ray without having to increase the levels of your geometry and without handicapping your scene.
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And once you can write your own shaders you can approach your work in a whole different way. Its a bit like learning how to script in XSI... once you are past a certain point your whole approach to work changes.... and in the end that's a good thing.

Yeah, the licensing is pants. I'm fortunate enough to have worked in environment where that was taken care of - I daresay I wouldn't be able to afford to do it on a personal level.

So you can factor in the time of quick set up, but that doesn't cover the other aspects of quality... and creative freedom you get from not having to restrict your work due to memory limits (for instance).

please note, I'm not suggesting that Renderman is better than mental ray in all areas or is a solution for everyone - or is even a *cheap* solution, but its certainly worth the time and money. its just difficult making the first few steps...

Denis-jose

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