V-Ray v.s. Fryrender?
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@steelers05 said:
Im by no means a pro with vray but I am getting comfortable with it. I love the program and it really has helped me sell my ideas but there were some scenes that I did, that took an entire day of just experimenting to get somewhat close to what I was looking for.
I've seen some of your images, and I'd say you're definetely on the right track.
As for spending a lot of time experimenting, well, that's just the way it is. Kwisten is right: even if you're using an unbiased app, you'd still have to put a a fair amount of time in getting everything just right. No way around it. BTW: use Asgvis' standalone mats editor - fast, and pretty easy to use. Handy app.@steelers05 said:
And stinkie, would you say that it shouldnt be too complicated to learn a program like fry or maxwell if you are fairly comfortable with v-ray? And I want to try indigo, just have not had the time. It looks fairly intuitive and can produce some very impressive images.
Toxicvoxel pointed out: "What you see on the render galleries is 10% technology and 90% skill." He's absolutely right. Look, the best way to know what app suits you best, is to try a couple. Download some demos and spend a few days with them. And don't think one app will be 'a cure for all' - they all have their advantages and drawbacks.
This is important too: don't be too ashamed to choose the easy route. I use Maxwell daily. Do I know anything about shutter time, iso values etc? No. If I want dof, I just render a depth map. Much easier, and a much more flexible approach. In other words: be practical. Figure out what you can't do without, and learn that. All the other stuff will follow gradually.
@kwistenbiebel said:
'As easy as taking a photo' is really a myth.
Yup, that truly is BS.
@kwistenbiebel said:
I am looking forward to Podium v2.0 as I think it will be of an equivalent quality at a more reasonable price.
As am I. Podium V2 might very well become a very popular app. Fingers crossed!
@kwistenbiebel said:
I think best practice is to combine Vray with one of the unbiased engines (Fry,Maxwell).
This I totally agree with. I find that Vray (in my case) comes in very handy for checking out compositions, checking for light leaks etc.
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Ok where to begin here:
First thanks for all the input guys. You gave me a lot of good insight. With taking all that in, I guess my next concern is the time it will take me to learn. I know plenty of you commented saying that fry and maxwell can be easier but just looking through the manual, it looks like a lot more options than even v-ray. I could be wrong but it is going to be a lot to take in. I guess the only way for me to find out is by downloading the demo. Im just concerned with only having a month to play with the demo, when it just might take me a month to read the manual?\
and I go back to school in a week 
. I dont know if I will be able to get comfortable enough with it in a months time to get a good idea of its capapbilities and if it is worth purchasing. I wish they had an unlimited trial with a stamp on it to prevent it from being used commercially. And my final concern is my computer...it is a single core laptop with a 2ghz processor and 1gb of ram. Ive been able to get by running v-ray and podium on it without too many problems, but is it even worth it to try and run fry on there? I mean thats part of the reason it takes me so long to learn these programs, because I need to wait an hour just to see what happens to an image when I make on little tweak...it really slows down my learning. -
Hmmm, your computer sounds as if it might be a bit lacking for unbiased render engines, although id still recommend trying fry, if only for a bit.
If your worried about running out of time in the demo id recommend giving indigo a try. Its free so youve got a lot of time to learn it, if you so choose. A lot of the settings are also pretty similar to fry and maxwell, so it eases the transition quite a bit if you ever want to try either of them.
The most important thing is to have fun while learning your render of choice, if your finding it boring do something else for a while and go back to it in a week or 2.
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I'd suggest remus makes the best point relative to your choices! Computing power - I think this will cause you to rip hairs with any unbiased option. You need grunt!!!!!
That said I have a feeling as computing power grows as even quad core machines are cheaper and cheaper by the day and 8 core machines likely to be more common place, 64 bit is proving faster with maxwell for example. I think you need to consider this and future proof yourself!!! Are you going to buy a new machine in the future???
One other thing to consider is that if you are exporting from SU think about the poly count limits that currently dog SU as an exporter for rendering and look at apps that enable instancing and if possible external referencing of components!!!
I know maxwell aims to shortly enable the option to replace low poly components upon export with high poly MXS files (maxwell geometry) meaning trees and plants as an example created in apps such as Onyx or xfrog can be bought into maxwell studio and material edited and saved. This file can then be later referenced to a low poly proxy in SU!!! This will mean a great increase in realism in any output and a much smoother workflow in SU.
Think also about the available materials libraries and what is available! Vray has been around for a long time and there is tons of materials available, maxwell's material gallery now has thousands of materials available, Fry has really just kicked off so not so much available there.
I don't think these choices are easy as the workflows and resources are so varied! but mate if you find you can get any output fromm vray you are far more up the ladder than me as I couldn't understand one quarter of the options available to get good output.
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@richard said:
.... but mate if you find you can get any output fromm vray you are far more up the ladder than me as I couldn't understand one quarter of the options available to get good output.
Well, Vray is actually more about knowing which buttons to leave UNtouched
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The options in the render settings panels are very elaborate and touching the wrong one can seriously influence the output.
Best way is to start with presets, both for render settings as for materials.
You'll notice that your input can improve by just changing some of the parameters and leaving all others untouched.And I agree with Richard about having enough computer power.
For unbiased rendering this really is a must.
I purchased a 8 core render beast some months ago, and I must admit that for the first time 'unbiased' became more or less feasible. For exteriors, I hardly notice a render speed difference to Vray.
Interiors however are another ballgame. even with hugh CPU power, you still want to leave it running a whole night to get it crisp. -
@kwistenbiebel said:
@richard said:
.... but mate if you find you can get any output fromm vray you are far more up the ladder than me as I couldn't understand one quarter of the options available to get good output.
Well, Vray is actually more about knowing which buttons to leave UNtouched
. ( ...) Best way is to start with presets, both for render settings as for materials. You'll notice that your input can improve by just changing some of the parameters and leaving all others untouched.True! In order to get decent images out of Vray, you needn't know all the ins and outs of the inner workings of the app. Took me a while to figure that out. I would recommend reading the manual, though - just to get a basic understanding of what everything does.
@ steelers: Richard and Kwisten are right, for unbiased rendering, you'll need serious computing power.
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@unknownuser said:
@ steelers: Richard and Kwisten are right, for unbiased rendering, you'll need serious computing power.
I woulnt say thats necessarily true, but if you havent got a lot of computing power you do need a lot of time and patience.
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Yeah I was affraid everyone would tell me that about computer power. Im debating getting one built but im still a poor college student. Thats what makes fry even harder to buy, cause I dont think they offer a student discount...I wonder if there is anyone to ask on their forum about that? But I have been running vray on my computer and that alone takes patience...even podium does with my wimpy computer. And as far as vray is concerned, you all are right. It took me reading through the manual a few times and just playing around to get a little bit of a grasp on it, but to me, once you get a hold of what to touch and what not to, workflow really moves fast. I would even argue that it can be quicker than podium at times (but I think v2 will change that). I found that messing aruond with the material editor first and then the rendering settings was a very sensible approach to learning the program. The encouraging part about fry and having a slow computer is that I believe you can pause renderings and start them back up again. That will really help so that it wont imobilize my computer for days. And I did just download the demo and it actually is for an unlimited amount of time and did exactly what I thought with the output limitations and stamp. But please anyone keep commenting on this topic if you want to because all the information that I can get, the better.
But I do want to kinda go a little off topic and I think this may be an appropriate place to talk about it since a bunch of you are already involved with the post and I dont think I should start a new one. Anyway, If I wanted to do animation...how would you rank programs in order what I should try to learn first. Obviously I have to deal with the rendering engine first but what next? The adobe products seem to be the way to go, but which ones are relevant. It seems that flash, illustrator, and after effects are all good ones to help enhance images and animations...am I wrong? I just look at the capabilities of each and they all seem like they do different things but also work together and when I see plugins like Knolls lighting effects, I just cant even begina to think about the endless amount of options for illustration. But thank you in advance to anyone insight guys...you have already helped out a lot. Now to play with fry and hopefully my computer doesnt die.
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When you say animation, what sort of animation are we talking about here? 3d or 2d? they are vry different beasts requiring different solutions.
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Honestly both. I may be wrong but I see some of biebels stuff and it looks like a mix of 2d and 3d. It seems as though a lot of people will take a single rendered image and manipulate it a little bit for part of an animation and then another part will be the 3d simulation. It looks like a nice way to create longer and sometimes more interesting animations without having to do a million scenes for a model to produce a 30 second animation. I guess im looking to know how to do animations that are professional and suitable for architectural illustration primarily...and maybe toss in product illustration (but that seems to be a similar process just different modeling and rendering techniques).
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Mate if your thinking 3d animation i think forget about unbiased options altogether. You have to remember each frame needs to be rendered. Kwist's recent {nude} animation remember was done over 7 more cores than you have available. You could be looking at 10-20 hours or more per frame so nearly two weeks for one second of video.
Hopefully Podium 2 offers up some better animation tools!
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@remus said:
@unknownuser said:
@ steelers: Richard and Kwisten are right, for unbiased rendering, you'll need serious computing power.
I woulnt say thats necessarily true, but if you havent got a lot of computing power you do need a lot of time and patience.
Seriously he'll need more than patience - he'll go crazy!!
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Patience and a good mgazine then
If your thinking about 3d animation (complex stuff with more than just a moving camera) youll want to get a proper animation package like blender, 3ds max or maya. SU just isnt designed for animating objects.
And as richard said, you can pretty much forget about unbiased rendering for animation, unless you fancy leasing out some time on a render farm, but then that can get pretty costly.
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Yeah first priority would definately be getting a beast of a computer and I my first engine for animation would be vray and I would probably just forget about an unbiased engine. But this link is what im looking to do and it is very common if you can get a client that wants to spend the money on a walkthrough...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZTUIr6aM8
I dont see why sketchup couldnt handle something like this, but I could be wrong? Im not looking for animating figures and all that. My primary goal is a camera walkthrough/simulation of a space and building where you take the frames and stitch them together and there you go. But I guess what wanted to know is what programs would you use to stitch them together...I would want to add introductions to the animation, music, scene transitions and stuff like that. Thats where the adobe products seem to come into play. I just dont know which ones are worth the time and which are not and thats where I guess I need the guidance. Because like I was saying before, when you look at some people's animations, they have stitched seems but then they will take one frame and zoom in and out of that single frame and manipulate it with what I assumed is one of the adobe products? That helps turn a 30 second animation into a 45 second animation and it can look very nice. You do that a couple times and you have a longer animation that is actually worth presenting and not this 10 second one that took days to render. And I can try to learn a little bit of these programs like flash, after effects, and illustrator without necessarily even having the computer to do the animation yet. I can learn how to add music and scene transitions and when I graduate and get the money, I can get a big boy computer and be a little ahead or idealy Id like to have a job and let them pay for it all. Either way is fine but im just trying to learn as much as possible before I graduate. Then on top of that there are all the lighting effects in some of these programs that can help with enhancing the animation. I just always am asking people that are experienced about how they see the market and this forum along with the rendering forums really help me get a grasp on what is worth knowing and what isnt....its a great help and I always get great advice and i apologize if im being "that guy" thats asking a million questions. But, with that said, thanks again for all the input, its really valued.
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i think it(animation) was made by using network rendering feature of vray as distrib.rendering, so not only multi-core machines used in animation pipeline...servers and it's slaves.
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@richard said:
Mate if your thinking 3d animation i think forget about unbiased options altogether.!
That I disagree (partially).
For exterior animation, unbiased works quite well.(Indigo, Fry).
For interiors, rendering animation using unbiased indeed is an impossible quest. -
The latest version of ArtLantis is easy to create animation with. It is also very fast if fantastic quality isn't what you are after.
I used it for years before Podium. -
I really appreciate all the info about the rendering engines and with all the input ive received, I have a good grasp on what to possibly use, but im a little more interested in the programs that take those scenes and puts them together?
For instance, Biebel and anyone else that feels they can answer: what did you use to put your paperclip animation together? Were they adobe products to stitch and add the music and other imagery effects? The programs after the rendering engine are what im wondering about. Which ones are worth the time and money?
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try to look at http://www.icube.ru (one of russian viz leaders, one of developers of vrascatter for vray-proxies - http://www.icubeviz.com/services/VRayScatter/). they have own renderfarm to make really nice viz(after main page, left corner to switch language).
there is no such program with button "to make it beautiful"...need time to make masterpiece or final composition of subj.
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Jeepers, guys. There is a ton of stuff that renderers often ignore that makes it different from 'physical processes'. Renderers have improved hugely in the last 10 years but they are a loong way from 'reality'...
A really common one is that they represent light by choosing just 3 frequencies at the low, middle and high frequency range to represent what is a continues function. ie Red,Green,Blue values rather than the response curve of the light.
Adam
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