Fry?

[Stinkie]

I've noticed the plugin-specific forums over at the Fry site are only accessible to customers. So I'll ask my questions here.

• How's the plugin? Does it work without too much hassle?
• How does the plugin compare to Maxwell's and Indigo's?
• Is making mats hard? I.e. does one need a degree in physics?

Well, I guess what I want to know is: what do you think of Fry in general and it's SU plugin specifically?
Just curious - I don't intend to buy Fry ATM.

[ilay7k]

is demo at download page?
i think you can download it and try...
for me, i like fr's aeronoise feature for cleaning a few regions from noise...

[kwistenbiebel]

Fryrender is a good app.
The SU plugin can benefit from more streamlining towards workflow though, but all in all it works well.
Chema and Joesfer (dev team) are really motivated to make it better and they always answer to your requests so that is a good thing.

Material setup is 90% similar to Maxwells, but it has more control to change brightness,saturation etc.of the used texture images, which is really a handy thing.(It prevents you from going to Pshop every 2 minutes to alter textures).

Indigo still has the best (read: easiest) GUI.Fryrender on the other hand has the most features regarding light setup (multilight) and image control.
Fry is comparable to Maxwell, though someone needs to put some more effort on the Maxwell plugin for SU as it really is far behind the exporters for other host apps.

[remus]

Not that ive tried it, but i was browsing the fry site and the engine seems to have some pretty wicked features, specifically there's a tool that lets you select parts of the render to concentrate on, would be very useful for clearing up noise i imagine.

Edit: re-read your post and realised this was totally off topic, its still pretty cool though

[Stinkie]

@remus said:

there's a tool that lets you select parts of the render to concentrate on, would be very useful for clearing up noise i imagine.Edit: re-read your post and realised this was totally off topic, its still pretty cool though

That is indeed a cool feature. Though it would be better if unbiased rendering just got faster.

@kwistenbiebel said:

Fry is comparable to Maxwell, though someone needs to put some more effort on the Maxwell plugin for SU as it really is far behind the exporters for other host apps.

No sh*t. While I'm truly fond of Maxwell (it does yield fantastic results, doesn't it?), I'm not fond of NL's "philosophy". With Maxwell, a streamlined workflow seems to be out of the question. Almost everything is a hassle. The plugin has it charms, but it certainly falls short compared to SkIndigo. It baffles me that an independent developer like Whaat can come up with such a great plugin for free, while a whole company cannot deliver an equally good one with it's € 1000 app. And I'm not even mentioning the bugs.

I'm under the impression NL hasn't got much of a clue of what SU users want - or that they couldn't care less.

EDIT:

These are my preliminary thoughts on Maxwell and (Sk)Indigo:

• both produce excellent results, but Maxwell seems to do a slightly better job on really fine details
• if you want to try out different lighting setups, Maxwell is the way to go, as it's got Multilight
• if not, choose Indigo. Certainly for daylight renders, as Indigo's got skyportals (these speed up rendering)
• the same goes for skydome renders: Indigo
• Maxwell generally seems to go easier on yer RAM (can anyone confirm this?)

EDIT 2:

I should add to the above that, despite it's clunkyness, I'm steadily growing fond of the Studio. All in all that one's quite a powerful and versatile tool.