F-Prime

[Jirapong]

Is there anyone using F-prime out there?

I would like to know how fast it is for heavy polygon and GI of architectural rendering realm.

I'm looking at it to help preview and final rendering for architectural related work. It's supposed to be faster than LW radiosity.

Thanks,

[nthused]

I use it daily. Wouldn't be without it. Rendered an animation of a 2+mil poly scene. No problems at all.

[barnabythebear]

Yes, i'm interested in this too.

I've been checking out other threads about Fprime and i keep seeing refference to grainy renders? Is this an Fprime problem or an issue about render time (ie not long enough)

thanks


nige.

[Captain Obvious]

I've been checking out other threads about Fprime and i keep seeing refference to grainy renders? Is this an Fprime problem or an issue about render time (ie not long enough)
Both, in a sense. Fprime will, as far as I've heard, get rid of most grain if you give it enough time. I'd recomend getting some noise-removal tool if you use Fprime (I don't have it, but an educated guess says it's the wise thing to do), like Neatimage or AbsoluteDeNoiser.

[wacom]

I love Fprime, but if you're tech savy and can live with the limitations you might want to look into Kray for walkthroughs.

Still Fprime is a good render option, but it really shines in setting things up. NewTek and Worley go a long way back too...so Fprime is most likely going to be around for a while.

The grain thing looks to be 90% taken care of with 1.5, but if you're doing print work etc. then using something like Neatimage, as stated earlier, shouldn't be a problem.

[Nigel Baker]

Hello there Jirapong,

FPrime is everything it claims it is and more.
There are very few products out there that can do exactly what they say it can and still a year later on WOW you.
With all respect to LW, I would never get to see any of my work rendered the way it can if it was not for the FPrime work around.

Get it, join the flock and be very grateful for powerful small plugins.

Thanks Mr. Worley..

[gaushell]

Use it daily for architectural viz. The real time saver is in lighting and material setup.

Haven't found it usefull enough for final renders yet - especially animations. Plus we like using various plugins and other procedurals that don't show up in it yet.

Saves hours upon hours on test renders.

[Hervé]

go in NT gallery... I've made cut away renders with 2 millions polys, area lights, radiosity and blah blah... no prob. :D

[ingo]

Is there anyone using F-prime out there?

I would like to know how fast it is for heavy polygon and GI of architectural rendering realm.

Thats FPrimes strength, the more complex a scene is the faster FPrime is compared to LW. And grain was never an issue with FPrime, although the new version produces a bit more than before (and is a bit slower). But antialiasing is a big problem, especially with edges that have a high contrast.

I'm looking at it to help preview and final rendering for architectural related work. It's supposed to be faster than LW radiosity.

Thanks,

Well for rough previewing FPrime is good, but for a better texture preview LW is still much faster.

[3dworks]

Is there anyone using F-prime out there?

I would like to know how fast it is for heavy polygon and GI of architectural rendering realm.

I'm looking at it to help preview and final rendering for architectural related work. It's supposed to be faster than LW radiosity.

Thanks,

hi jirapong,

fprime is very useful for the preview of lighting, texturing and if you have to position many props in the scene and want to do that exactly (considering how shadows fall, etc). i'm using the new version for a final render right now, a big interior scene with backdrop radiosity, and i'm very happy with the result.
sure antialiasing could be better, but rendering at a bigger size as the final one and the reducing in PS can help here. one big plus over the first release: definitly the new version does not crash anymore on my powermac and uses all its double processing power.

one other big advantage of fprime is hat you can start compositing in PS (non-destructive) with a first complete renderpass and show this preview to the client. in the meantime the render refines, and later you simply drag the final render into the compositing. go for it, you won't regret!

my 2 eurocents .-)

markus

[Lude]

And grain was never an issue with FPrime

Yes it was - i love FPrime but needed to go back to LW backdrop radiosity to get a nice noise/grain free render. I only have 1 night to render each image, and can't wait for the grain to clear.

although the new version produces a bit more than before (and is a bit slower)

U sure about this?

antialiasing is a big problem, especially with edges that have a high contrast.

You’re absolutely right on this one for sure.

[Lude]

hi 3dworks how are you using backdrop radiosity for an interior scene - have u excluded the ceiling?

[Jirapong]

Thanks all guys out there.

Most of my problem is preview and seting up. If I can reduce the time to do so, it will save a lot.

Looking at F-prime site, the rendering images seem to be fine for my use. However, they are all small and difficult to judge from.

Thanks again and I willget it as soon as I have timeto play with.

Jirapong

[ingo]

Yes it was - i love FPrime but needed to go back to LW backdrop radiosity to get a nice noise/grain free render. I only have 1 night to render each image, and can't wait for the grain to clear.

Especially compared to LWs raydiosity it was much earlier grainfree.

And yes, the old version is still faster for the same quality. It seems that the grain now stays much longer, especially in glass.

[richardo]

hi Jirapong

here is a quick test using fprime................
it took about 10mins. on a 3.4 dual xeon

it has been put through photoshop and a noise reduction programe
but left a little longer, fprime will remove the noise and improve the antilaliasing

for print work fprime is a great tool..................hopefully kray or the forthcoming vray can answer our animation needs..............

hope this helps :-)

richard.

[Nigel Baker]

Hello Richardo,

At first I thouth that this was an MaxwellRender scene ?
Must just be all the hype.


I find with the increase in power with FPrime to leave the image a little longer is still way shorter than the LW render.
Thanks for the test render.

[Jirapong]

It looks great Richardo!
Also, thank you so much for the test.

For the same rendering in LW would take two days. ;-)
The reason I say that because I just finished the weekend project, designing to water bottle for a friend of mine. Two bottles with water inside and plain white background with a bit relective floor. 600x800 at 7 passes PLD with Monte Carlo took more than 7 hours to finish.
I don't even think of how long it will take for architectural renderings work.

Thanks again for making my wallet empty :-)

By the way, the Wessily chairs look great. (the rendering looks great too, I said that because I just got couple Wessily chair for myself a few month ago.)

Jirapong

[wacom]

It's really hard to peg statements on Fprime 1.5 as to speed and noise. I've seen better noise reduction and faster renders on about 9 out of 10 renders...but there seems to be a few scenes that have some reall issues with noise "specals". Everyonce in a while I find a scene that, even though I follow all fo the "Fprime" rules, still has issues with "salt".

Has anyone found some general rules as to what gives you white spots that just don't want to leave? General noise can be reduced by something like NeatImage, but when it's pure white or beyond...urg...

[kopperdrake]

Totally agree Nigel, I tend to use FPrime for most things nowadays, unelss I really need to use a shader. The new support for dual cpus has meant a great speed increase :) I have also found it to be a bit more grainy than the first release, but then I haven't really played with the new light settings so can't talk knowledgably about it yet :)

Dunk

[Nigel Baker]

Hello All

I in full knowledge.
Accept and completely agree with what 'kopperdrake' wrote.

;—)

[Wade]

Fprime can not render as big a scene as can LW nativelyn. Not yet. But if it is below the thresh hold then it's faster.... but you can overload it as it needs a boat load of RAM.

We are talking 2-3millions ploys and 40-50 megs of images and clip maps, and Fprime just disappears, again scenes Lightwave can and does handle.

[pixym]

A simple test with FPrime 1.5

[pixym]

Another test

[Hervé]

Hey Eddy, nice renders... has a nice Tropical Island flavour... cool feeling...

OK, Now remove that cheap "porte -manteau", and put some very nice designed one !

Keep up the good work... ! :D

@++
Hervé

[nthused]

Nice job, eddy. Love the colors and atmosphere.

Comments:
The deck is washed out - it's distracting me from the wonderful interior you've done.

Also, I recommend mapping an image on the tv screen or make the screen refective so that it looks like glass. Right now it could be a chalk board.

[pixym]

THX,

Hervé, the "porte-manteau" is the one wanted by the client...
Yes the deck is washed out and I will try to fix this asap.

[JML]

Fprime 1.5 is really good,
hopefully, future version will support network rendering..

very nice pixym , and I love the deformed reflection on the window.

how long did this render take?

[pixym]

JML,

For the room, I have let my computer to work a whole night + half a day, so I will say more than 15 hours at 1920x1080 pixels resolution.
For the Living, I would say 10 hours at 1280x720 px

[Panikos]

Pixym, cool renders, nice colours.
How many bounces ?

I am rendering now using 2 bounces on a 3GHz HT, almost 24 hours, 52 AA passes,
still noise visible at 1828 x 1556 pixels.

;)

[JML]

sounds like you guys need a dual xeons render farm ;)

[pixym]

Pixym, cool renders, nice colours.
How many bounces ?

I am rendering now using 2 bounces on a 3GHz HT, almost 24 hours, 52 AA passes,
still noise visible at 1828 x 1556 pixels.

;)

3 bounces only.
I think FPrime is somewhat Maxwell like! So that it takes very much time (about 8 hours) to really remove noise in the hight resolution image...

[nthused]

Panikos: Check your Lighting Quality settings for FPrime also.

[pixym]

sounds like you guys need a dual xeons render farm ;)

JML,

I have 8 dual Xeon 3ghz 2GB rendering rack 1U nodes... So I hope there will be a network version for FPrime.

[Panikos]

I have 20 rack boxes, 8 are full.
I am filling them step by step, I have 12 empty :D

Cant wait for FPrimeNet

[Panikos]

Panikos: Check your Lighting Quality settings for FPrime also.

I have it at default 0.5 but I will tweak to see the difference

;)

[pixym]

hi Jirapong

here is a quick test using fprime................
it took about 10mins. on a 3.4 dual xeon

it has been put through photoshop and a noise reduction programe
but left a little longer, fprime will remove the noise and improve the antilaliasing

hope this helps :-)

richard.

What Noise reduction program do you use?

[Panikos]

pixym, voici ma image WIP
:D

[pixym]

Euh, je dirais que cette image est bucolique :D

Yeah, I would say this is a homesick image...

[JML]

very nice, we only have 5 dual 3ghz here..
I keep asking them to get more, but we still have 5 for the moment..
what brand did you guys get ?
we have renderboxx, but we are trying to see if there was something less expensive for render nodes. (but we are pretty happy with the renderboxx)

[Panikos]

I have no idea about the brand.
I bought 20 boxes @ $300 each :)

[Nigel Baker]

:—)

So what happened to the FPrime issues.
I love the render farms with emense jealousey but lets go back to Priming
(said with a silent f).

;-)

[pixym]

Tests after 2 days of refinement!

[Captain Obvious]

I took the liberty of running your image through a noise remover, pixym.

Nice image, and even if Fprime will produce some noise, it might not be all that hard to remove it.

[pixym]

I took the liberty of running your image through a noise remover, pixym.

Nice image, and even if Fprime will produce some noise, it might not be all that hard to remove it.

Thanks very much ;)

Can you tell me what noise remover do you use?

[Exception]

NeatImage does a good job. Its ahndy as you make a profile for Fprime once, and it hardly needs any tweaking after that.

[Captain Obvious]

I used AbsoluteDeNoiser (http://absolutedenoiser.free.fr/), it's a free Java tool for it. Horrible user interface, and an absolute pain to work with, and not very fast either (making tweaking a huge pain)... But hey, it was free and it obviously worked! ;)

edit: fixed the name of the app

[pixym]

Thank you for these tips

[Panikos]

To be honest, I prefer that subtle noise.
It gives a natural feel to the image instead of some fat blurry pixels.
Thats personal taste :)

[Captain Obvious]

To be honest, I prefer that subtle noise.
It gives a natural feel to the image instead of some fat blurry pixels.
Thats personal taste
Same here. A totally noise-less image looks unnatural and is just plain ugly, in my opinion. A little grain can look quite nice. I never turn on noise reduction in Lightwave.

On the other hand, too much grain is not a good thing...

[Hervé]

woaw... you guys have strong equipment... I have amateur stuff only here... he he.. :D

[Panikos]

Bonjour mon ami Herve !!!
:D ;)

[Pavlov]

hi Jirapong

here is a quick test using fprime................
it took about 10mins. on a 3.4 dual xeon
richard.

Gerardo,
your interiors always look great. They have a "vray look" i like: good diffusion and very balanced contrasts.
Given a SUN + backdrop lighting only, LW/Frpime tends to have dark and washed out areas due to weakness of bounced lights. This can be improved with ambient (but it looks odd in the corners), with surface fine tuning and in other ways.
I cannot get the look of this picture with distant light + backdrop only; i wonder if you have used other lights or gradients on surfaces. Floor does not look burned, light bounces correctly. What setting have you used for lighting, rendering and exposing this ?


Thanks,
Paolo

[wacom]

Check out NeatImage too (www.neatimage.com). It's free for stills, but you can only save out to a few formats on the free one. It works fairly well, but I'm not a noise reduction expert. It's not priced that badly either for the "fuller" versions. Also, for the "salty" type noise you can bring it into a photo editor and use scratch and dust removal filters sometimes...

[pixym]

I HATE NOISE :mad:

[nthused]

Pixym, What's your light quality setting in FPrime? Try a higher number, see what you get.

Kray is starting to look very good for interior shots - because of noise issues like this. Still you cannot beat the speed FPrime gives for set-up.

[pixym]

It is the default light quality, so I will test with higher value.

Thanks for the tip nthused ;)

[Exception]

It is the default light quality, so I will test with higher value.

Thanks for the tip nthused ;)

Pixym, can you tell us something about your light setup?
Is it one area light and a background gradient, and that's it?
If so, what are the values, and do you use GI boosting?

[pixym]

Pixym, can you tell us something about your light setup?
Is it one area light and a background gradient, and that's it?
If so, what are the values, and do you use GI boosting?

For the lighting setup, I use one area light only at 120%
A bakground gradient (From light blue to white) is used
Fprime is setting as follow:
Monte Carlo: ON
Intensity: 500%
MC Bounces: 3
Render Mode 2.5 DOF: 100%
Render Mode 2.5 MB: 100%
Lighting Quality: 0.500

I do not use GI boosting

[Exception]

Intensity: 500%


Thats what I meant with GI boosting....
500% eh.... wow... thats a lot.
But it must be working well, i'll give it a try immediately! Thank you.

[pixym]

Thats what I meant with GI boosting....
500% eh.... wow... thats a lot.


Sorry but I confused GI boosting vs background boosting ;)

[ravantra]

If you have Photoshop CS it has noise reduction tools built in. There are also a few free action plugins that reduce or eliminate noise.

[JML]

If you have Photoshop CS it has noise reduction tools built in. There are also a few free action plugins that reduce or eliminate noise.

where?
do you mean smart blur? or is it a new filter ?

[ravantra]

Sorry, if you have CS2 it now has these tools. If you have CS you can use the filters under noise.....despeckle help reduce noise and light use of "dust and scratches" can help. I use a free action set for photoshop found here

http://rondayview.com/000002.php

[JML]

good to know,
I also heard that CS2 automatically supports hdri format, very nice,
I hope my company is going to upgrade to cs2..

[Nigel Baker]

Hello All,

Really enjoying this thread.
But no one has posted an image in a while. So I thought I would put my foot forward.
Rendered this image, took about 2.5 hours. ( 256 passes? )
Monte Carloe Radiosity
Intensity 120%
Bounces 3
DOF 100%
Render Mode 100%
Light Quality 0.8

[richardo]

hi nigel

nice image.............

looks like you have alot of ambient light in your scene though.

try turning down your ambient intensity down to 0% and adding some area lights.
one in the window, this will give you some nice diffuse shadows from the window.

you could also add one or two more in the kitchen to give you bounced light off the back wall in the kitchen..................

you should be able to turn down the intensity from 120% to around 70%, just experiment with your light settings .......................

richard

[Pavlov]

A test interior, from Seshima architect.
12 hrs and neatimage. I someone is interested, here are params:

- Distant 200% light targeted to a spinning null system (a null_1 spins 360° for frame, and another null_2 is parented to this. Null_2 has an offset on X axis, and this is the control over shadow softness... bigger ofset, more blurry the shadows. Null_1 is targeted to the sun so the system always face the sun and gives a correct cirlce, and Sun is targeted to Null_2. Check it, i find this one the fastest way to get soft shadows in Fprime).
- Bluish Backdrop with 3x Picky multiplier.
- 3 bounces, 300% intensity.
- 10% white ambient (should have used a bluish one).

Paolo Zambrini

[pixym]

Very very nice Pavlov ;)

I have also make a try with Maxwell!
So this is my first test with this renderer.
I have turn all the surface to white and turn ON the Heliodon.
12 hours of computing on a Dual xéon 3ghz/2GB rendering node:
640x360 pixel
Sample level 23
3 bounces


2 versions, "natural" and Neat Image filtered
The Fprime with surface version is also posted

[richardo]

pixym

how long did the fprime version take??

very nice images by the way :-)

richard

[pixym]

The Fprime render took about 18 hours without noise (I do not remember exactly :( ) to render at 1280x1024

[Exception]

Well I whacked this up yesterday to test the GI boosting effect... It looks kinds nice, but Im not happy with the rendertime of 18 hours for this resolution. I tried to neat image it but it destroys the rough surface texture. Too much noise :(
Never mind the errors, like the light blotches on the floor and the weird reflection, its just a test scene : )

Pavlov, thats looking pretty darn good. Just the reflective ceiling bugs me a bit.
I need to get one of those pretty scenes off my backup disks to test with one of these days...


settings:
1 Area light, 170%
3 bounce MC
600% intensity
0.5 quality
Pentium 4 3.4 Ghz, 2GB

[nthused]

Try increasing your bounce, decreasing your GI intensity, and increasing your light quality: Start with this and tweak as needed.

light quality of 2.0
reduce GI boost to 200%
Increase bounce to 8

Try it at a smaller size first to see what quality of light you're getting - then commit to the larger render when you're happy with the lighting result.

[Captain Obvious]

Try it at a smaller size first to see what quality of light you're getting - then commit to the larger render when you're happy with the lighting result.
Ohh, a question about Fprime! Can you change the output resolution while it's rendering? Say you have a small window rendering, and you think, "hmm, that looks good," can you then just increase the window size or something such in order to get a higher-resolution (but lower AA, obviously) image?

And one more! I will probably get Fprime myself sooner or later, but I'm curious now! About GI in Fprime, how big a render time hit does it take when you turn up the bounces? In all the LW native render tests I've done with Monte Carlo, two bounces will take about twice as long as one bounce, and three bounces about twice as long as two, and four... well... I usually cancel it after a long while. Does Fprime have this problem?

[Exception]

Try increasing your bounce, decreasing your GI intensity, and increasing your light quality: Start with this and tweak as needed.

light quality of 2.0
reduce GI boost to 200%
Increase bounce to 8


thats strange... i would think the bounces make the heavy impact, the boost almost nothing... im trying now with those settings, and it doesnt have the fill it needs to have but does go somewhat faster. Could you explain this?

[Exception]

Can soemoen give me an indication on howmuch the Fprime window is slower than the actual Fprime render? Say on a 640x480? Abouts? 10%? 50%?

[wacom]

Ohh, a question about Fprime! Can you change the output resolution while it's rendering? Say you have a small window rendering, and you think, "hmm, that looks good," can you then just increase the window size or something such in order to get a higher-resolution (but lower AA, obviously) image?

And one more! I will probably get Fprime myself sooner or later, but I'm curious now! About GI in Fprime, how big a render time hit does it take when you turn up the bounces? In all the LW native render tests I've done with Monte Carlo, two bounces will take about twice as long as one bounce, and three bounces about twice as long as two, and four... well... I usually cancel it after a long while. Does Fprime have this problem?

I'm no FPrime expert, but I'd say that the more "open" your scene is the better. The more closed down (like a room with sunlight as the light source) and the fewer light sources etc. often seem to make it take longer. So if you did Industrial design work, where you just needed a little MC for one very complex object on a simple surface, but not in an inclosed enviroment, then FPrime would be great...


As far as bounces- that too is related to the scene, but it isn't as taxing over all as uping the bounces in native LW. Ditto for raytrace recursion limits- they make a diffrence, but they don't speed things up as fast in LW if you cut them.

Let's put it this way: I had to make a simple scene for an illustration with some oil barrels recently that was "out in the open" not in a room. In LW it took as long to do one small limited region area as it took FPrime to render the whole scene almost noise free in the same amount of time at 1600X1200. I was using only two bounces as well. But you see- your millage will vary. FPrime will almost always be your friend when it comes to lighting, texturing and pre-pre-viz, but only tests will tell if its going to be way faster in a scene than native LW. It's a brute renderer like Maxwell, not like Vray or Kray (which can be a good and bad thing).

Quite frankly if I did arch viz I'd be keeping an eye on Kray...but it sure isn't as easy to use as Fprime!

[wacom]

Has anyone experimented with making there scene have a few more bounces, but rendering it with less intensity in the lights etc., then upping the gamma etc. in post?

[richardo]

hi wacom

the image at the bottom of the first page of this thread, had only 2 bounces and an intensisty of 70% (fprime radiosity intensity).....................3 bounces would have removed the darkness from the window frames..............but it was only a test to see how quick i could render an acceptable looking image......................

and i incresed the gamme level to 2 i think it was or maybe 1.8..............

works pritty well :-)

richard

[pixym]

Check this out:

http://www.worley.com/fprime_art_of_noise.html

[silverlw]

Hi pixym! ( and wacom and everybody else;) )
Thanx for letting me try your room with Kray. I have found a whole bunch of bugs thanx to your room, so Gregorz is now a very bizzy man for the moment ;)
I did a testrender yesterday (15 hrs render 5120x2880) (http://hem.bredband.net/b223277/pixymLroom15hrs14min.jpg) and despite the bugs i like the outcome very much. I have been quiet for some days since development of Kray is now in an very intensive phase of testing, bughunting and coding of new functionality. The new "look" of demo is now done so the watermark with lot's of K's all over is gone. Instead there is "Kray V2.0 Rendertime 12minutes, 20.000 photons etc.." only in bottomline. I think and hope you will all be exited to try out the demo wich will be out in a couple of days now but it's hard to tell an exact date.

Ups forgot this thread was about Fprime, sorry.

[pixym]

Silver,

Glad to read you, and thank you very much for these informations about Kray coding :)

[silverlw]

Worley forgot to mention Fprime 1.5 actually does caustics now without faking it.
Try for yourselfs,add an hdri via Imageworl.p and activate a couple of bounces.
The hdri i used is Kitchenprobe.hdri and it's the light from it's windows you see.
oh i might add i changed lightquality to 100 otherwise you get so much noise you puke;)

[Nigel Baker]

Cool Silverlw,

Nice little piece, very simple and clean.
Will you post your timefor FPrime if you remember.

[silverlw]

for the previous image about 3 bounces,3 refinements 15-20 minutes i guess. This is another attempt and show the increasing noise and timeaspects of more bounces. Now i had to use minimum 5 to get through the vase but i used 6 bounces and only got to refinement lvl 1 in30-40 minutes. Cool it work's though ;)
note: have done a similar image in Kray thread with 24 bounces/recursions 5 minutes.

[Panikos]

What are your surface settings ?

[Panikos]

I got this caustic before, using the FPrime 1.02 and now with FPrime 1.5.
The Caustics are generated only from Backdrop or Environment Plugins and LightSources. LumPolygons do not generate Caustics for the time being.

Increasing the bounces to more than 2 enhances the effect however its unuseable cause a lot of bounces generate a lot of noise and it slows down rendering in busier scenes.

Of course Worley can improve this without the penalty of many bounces, but I guess there are other priorities currently.
;)

[silverlw]

What's the matter with you people!!! ;)
I present a great discovery for realism and noone seem to care or even try it. It work's with HDRI's and Lume objects but not with normal lights. I have used 3 bounces in Fprime and that produces great results within short time.
In Fprime 1.02 you could get a similar effect but noway such as god as this. It was fake all the way and worked by upping specularity to ridiculous heights and controlling the focus of it with glossiness. I have found a bug though with this technique and that is that even if i set the lumeobject to not cast any shadows it still does with the light from the Hdri. Remember to set Fprimes quality ratio to 100 when you try it since lower values will produce a lot of noise.

[Panikos]

Well, its good that you have found the way.
It requires some more effort :p

[Exception]

Ok here's this thing in Frpime,
this time with 250% intensity and bounces set to 5. It takes less time but still rather long to render. It does look quite ok though in terms of realism I suppose.

[wacom]

So the car is what the student has to show for all his studies! This one looks far better...way less noise.



SilverLW- those caustics seem very nice...it's hard for me to judge their acuracy though, but if it "looks real" then it is!

Also...maybe this is a problem with Fprime's noise? Maybe Fprime does caustic like functions ALL the time and they can't be turned off- hence the noise? Just a random synaptic fire here....

One last thing: has anyone noticed that classic non-refinable is faster than the other options, and not just because it doesn't pauses to save the information? Is this because of memeory usage?

[Panikos]

Yeap, these are caustics however the have weak intensity and require extra treatment or a valid documentation from WorleyLabs.

Future is promising

[robk]

Not to throw a wrench into the works, but When I was perusing an email I got from the Rhino 3d guys it said that the Maxwell renderer will have a plugin for Rhino 3d so I visited their site (maxwell's) and found they also produce a plugin for lightwave. On their user forum I saw some renderings from otacon and others and they appear to be quite good. In fact I was very impressed with some of the rendereings. I know they are still in beta but they seem to be producing impressive results none the less. Has anyone other than otacon tried the plugin and if so what are your impressions other than it is slow? Otacon's comments would be greatly appreciated also.

[nthused]

robk:

Go to the Maxwell render site and join the forums...a lot of comment there for Lightwave users.

[Nigel Baker]

Hello there Robk,

Yes and yes again. I am using a Mac and the plugin is not final yet.
Textures are not usable yet.
The majority of the cool work you are seeing is done on 3D max right now & LW (PC) as far as I can make out. But it won't be long before the LW Mac plugin is up to date.
Final release for the full product is around JUNE.

[robk]

I joined the forums on the weekend. Just don't know if it worth spending my hard earned cash on another renderer for Lightwave. I have Fprime which I like very much (still needs hooks into shaders though) but Maxwell results look pretty damm good also.

[wacom]

The problem has never been getting the client to like the native LW render, but getting it to the client on time. That's why so far I'm not very into Maxwell...very very nice...but those render times...hmm Maybe for stills?

I'm thinking that Fprime...and Kray will be the way to go...speeeeeed....speeeed...speeeed.

Besides I think it's cool that one guy makes Kray and that he really listens to what people want and loves to "fix" things...

[Captain Obvious]

This image is a plain glass sphere, a plain floor surface and a simple light polygon (1000% luminosity). It is rendered with 1 bounce Monte Carlo in F9. I turned up the gamma in order to make it less black. Sorry about the noise! ;)

[Captain Obvious]

This one is fairly standard raytracing. An area light and caustics turned on. No radiosity. F9.

[Nigel Baker]

Yes Wacom,

Ain't that the truth.
This week I prepared a very small 30 second animation for a client, for video.
But with averaging frame times between 2.5 minutes ( deliberately kept small ) and about 500 frames. This was rendered on 2, Dual G5 Macs.
Time and money and time is always an issue. I agree with you here.
Sometimes I get carried away showing clients what they can have but when the time is an issue the money tends to disappear.

[noiseboy]

I joined the forums on the weekend. Just don't know if it worth spending my hard earned cash on another renderer for Lightwave. I have Fprime which I like very much (still needs hooks into shaders though) but Maxwell results look pretty damm good also.

This may not be of interest to you but if its procedural shaders you want in Fprime then you could try VisualTexture.
http://www.nodalideas.com/visualtexture/index.html
Makes getting procedurals correct alot easy and works well with Fprime


Cheers

Colin

[WizCraker]

The Caustics have always been there since Version 1.0. I asked Steve about this when I noticed them showing up with HDRI as the lighting solution when FPrime came out and this is the reply I got on 2004-04-02.

The "caustic-like" effect is correct, it IS caustics, and it IS "caustic-like". LightWave has an interesting design where caustics are computed ONLY from lights. Fprime doesn't support this.
But the interesting LW design does NOT compute caustics from OBJECTS (like a luminous one) or background HDRI maps.
There's a reason for this, doing those caustics is expensive and slow, but FPrime's radiosity is so fast I left it enabled. LightWave takes pains to deliberately turn it off, again I expect for speed reasons.

This is kind of one of our design decisions, so we try to MATCH LightWave, or should we do the Right Thing even though LW is not?

We don't document this because usally it's subtle, and who knows, we may change the way it works. And since we DON'T support forward light caustics (yet?) it would confuse people. So better to leave it as an undocumented feature. :-) We could make a toggle switch to turn it on and off but that locks us into the design forever.. and we're being very careful with the FPrime GUI, trying to keep it easy and streamlined.

[Captain Obvious]

Can someone try caustics from light polys or HDRIs with some other Monte Carlo-radiosity renderer?

[toma]

see this ? Fprime's caustics are great ! (these renders use no light or environnement, just luminous polygons…)

tomas.

[Captain Obvious]

That is impressive indeed. How long did it take to render those, and on what hardware? I didn't notice any noise at all.

[toma]

I don't know… I let these renders run since friday night ! so it's 96 h for the four images, each one up to quality 28… I wasn't here this week end, but I guess quality 10-15 was just as good… but it's still 12 hours/image (on a dual xeon 3.06)…

BTW Frpime will not shoot caustics from a reflective surface, so I had to use transparency only with a refraction indice of 0,01 to simulate reflections…

cheers!

thomas.

[Captain Obvious]

BTW Frpime will not shoot caustics from a reflective surface, so I had to use transparency only with a refraction indice of 0,01 to simulate reflections…
Then how would one create shadows from normal lights? It works well with only light polygons, but faking reflections with refractions means they won't cast normal shadows unless you turn on regular caustics, which you can't in Fprime...

[toma]

that's true … another issue with this trick is that I can't create a material that will cast transparency and reflection caustics…

toma…

[Captain Obvious]

And you can't create glass, either... With the 0.001 refraction trick, you can't even get proper transparency, unless you render several passes. I suppose you could bake the transparency first and apply it... or something. Hmm.

[toma]

yes, this will work only in some situation like the scene I've post…

[trang]

can u render in fprime 1.5 and use the rendered images to bake and animate?

[pixym]

I do not think it is possible to do that.

[kopperdrake]

Nope - you can't, unfortunately :( It's on my wish list as it'd be a lot quicker :D Best way for animation is to bake a low res texture as a luminosity layer :)

Dunk