Fryrender - Rhino Plug-in

[osuire]

Hi there !

 

I use Rhino for modeling, and I'm trying to convince myself that Fryrender is the best render engine for me.

Why ?

-Fry's single sheet sub-surface scattering (SSSSS !) is a great feature for me because I deal with Architectural membranes.

-Fry's virtual reality looks real good, I just hope they will release it in my lifetime

 

But then I tried the demo.

The Fryrender plug-in for Rhino uses McNeel's "Render Development Kit".

In fact, the RDK interface is a -confusing- extra layer between Rhino and Fryrender.

By chance, one of Fran's posts helped me figure out how to apply a Fry material to a Rhino layer which is far from obvious.

But just when I thought my troubles were over, I started working on the material mapping in the Rhino rendered viewport, and things went haywire : the materials got mixed up on the display, and I simply could not go any further.

Materials were propagated to other layers, and changed randomly when I re-opened the file.

 

Fran, if you hear me : HELP !

 

Cheers,

 

--

Olivier

[Magnus_Alexander]

poor fran..... the consequences of celebrity.... I'm a fellow rhino user, and I've had similar issues in the past. The only solution I got to work was to open another instance of rhino, and copy and paste the geometry in the new file. I don't know why it worked, but perhaps it has to do with your original file becoming corrupt? Note: the issues I had were while using V-ray, but it's still worth a shot.

[osuire]

Hi Magnus,

 

Thanks for your answer.

At some point, my stone walled house had stone doors...

So I closed and re-opened the file : my house was a log cabin !

Two layers were swapping their materials behind my back.

I'll try the copy-paste thing, but I just can't make this part of my workflow

 

I suspect the problem comes from the RDK which messes up the assignment of materials to Rhino layers.

 

I tried the Maxwell demo and Rhino plug-in, and I never had these kinds of problems...

 

Cheers,

 

--

Olivier

[Fran]

Hi Olivier,

 

I haven't had the issues you are describing. But I never use the RDK material browser because it sucks. I assign everything through the layers dialog. If I need to see a bitmap texture, I place it in the texture slot of the Basic material for the layer and then switch back to Plug-in. That way the texture is shown in the viewport and I can assign and check uv mapping. Again - don't use the RDK material browser. It constantly drops material definitions and then interferes with your being able to access the materials from the layers dialog. I've complained about this to no avail.

 

The Maxwell plug-in doesn't use the RDK, so it wouldn't have issues with it.

[Antisthenes]

Brazil is free for now have you tried that?

[osuire]

Thanks Fran !

 

I guess that If I do the mapping trick, I should not use map tiling within the Fryrender material editor, because the Rhino render preview would not take it into account.

 

But that's not a big price to pay to actually get rid of the crazy mapping bugs and get the job done.

 

I had a mail exchange with Andrew Le Bihan from McNeel on the subject of the RDK.

 

It looks like Feversoft would have been better off either not using it at all, just like Maxwell did, or use it the way it was intended to work.

But in that case, we would probably have lost some of the material options which are really specific to Fryrender.

 

I did try the Maxwell demo along with the Rhino plug-in.

Apart from a few bugs like the time settings and environment options playing musical chairs behind my back, I found it quite pleasant to use.

I also had some annoying mapping issues, but nothing that drove me to the asylum.

 

But it misses the single sheet SSS which I find very interesting for architectural membranes.

Fry's licensing scheme is also better for me because it allows to set up an el'cheapo render farm with a couple of low-life quad core slaves.

 

Well... off I go with my testing !

 

Cheers,

 

--

Olivier

[Fran]

It looks like Feversoft would have been better off either not using it at all, just like Maxwell did, or use it the way it was intended to work.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by that. It sounds like Andy is trying to pass the blame onto the fryrender plug-in developer? Maybe it is their fault, but as a beta tester who has reported the mat browser bug for every release since the very beginning of the Rhino plugin development, I hit a stalemate on this issue. All I know is that if I use the RDK material browser to manage my materials, I get unexpected results. Materials are lost between sessions and cannot be retrieved via the layer dialog. If I apply and manage my materials strictly through the layers dialog, things are rock solid. I highly recommend that you save your materials to external files when you create and modify them so that you can retrieve them if they are lost from the scene.

 

You should also know that if you use the RDK EdgeSoftening feature, and try to change or apply uv mapping, it will not update in the viewport. You have to disable it until after you get the uv's the way you want them. This has nothing to do with fryrender, but is a Rhino RDK bug. Also, objects that are grouped will sometimes render incorrect uv mapping.

[Nic H]

vray has 2 sided material which is very similiar and gets great results for translucent membranes, pretty quick rendering as well.

[Fran]

vray has 2 sided material which is very similiar and gets great results for translucent membranes, pretty quick rendering as well.

 

I guess if Olivier is interested in unbiased renderers, he's not interested in Vray.

[osuire]

Hi Fran,

 

Here's what I meant :

The original idea (if I got ot right) with the RDK material editor is to create any third party renderer material from a single interface : the RDK material editor.

But the Fryrender plug-in doesn't make use of that, and teleports you to it's own material editor.

That's why I said they're not using the RDK the way it's meant to be used, and that's why Andy can't be blamed if it doesn't work.

 

Feversoft was probably right when they considered the RDK material editor was not suitable for creating Fryrender materials, but in that case, they should have developed a full-blown plug-in like Maxwell has.

 

Regarding the worflow you suggested,I trust it works because you can still pull out those amazing renders, but I ran into several problems :

 

To assign an existing Fry material to a layer, I need to "Edit" or "Create" because the "Browse" button is greyed out.

Then the default material is converted to a Fry material, and the Fry material editor pops up.

It would be nice to browse directly without the useless "conversion" thing.

 

Then I wasn't able to give the material a name in the layer manager.

In the Fry Material properties, the "Name" slot is not editable (bug ?), and neither the file name or the "Alias" is transfered to the layer properties box.

The manual edition of the name in the Rhino material editor does not work.

 

I also had an issue with mapping showing up properly in the Rhino render preview, but not in the render.

I might have not followed the steps properly though.

 

It's a shame Rhino and Fry don't play nice because they are great programs.

 

Thanks for your help,

 

Cheers,

 

--

Olivier

[Fran]

If Rhino and fryrender didn't play nice, I wouldn't be using it for most of my production work. If I didn't prefer fryrender, I'd be making use of the 16 useless Maxwell licenses I own.

[osuire]

Fran,

 

Am I doing something wrong that prevents me from naming the materials in the layer manager, and getting the right mapping in my render ?

 

Thanks,

 

--

Olivier

[osuire]

Hi Fran, I've got real frustrated in fighting to assign materials in Rhino with the Fryrender plug-in, and have been testing the Maxwell trial for a while now.

The Rhino plug-in works quite smoothly.

The developper, JD HILL seems to be doing a great job there.

 

How about those "useless" Maxwell licenses you've got ?

Are they for sale ?

[Fran]

Hi Fran, I've got real frustrated in fighting to assign materials in Rhino with the Fryrender plug-in, and have been testing the Maxwell trial for a while now.

The Rhino plug-in works quite smoothly.

The developper, JD HILL seems to be doing a great job there.

 

How about those "useless" Maxwell licenses you've got ?

Are they for sale ?

 

I don't understand what the issue is with assigning materials via the layer dialog. There is no place in the dialog that would show the material name. Where do you expect to see it? I do know that when you export your scene, when you look at the MAT tab of the fryrender console, the layer name overrides the Alias name from the fryrender material's global parameters. Is that the issue you are having?

 

The licenses are non-transferable, else I'd have sold my original 2 licenses long ago.

[osuire]

Hi Fran,

 

The issues in assigning materials via the layer dialog are :

-it's tedious

-the material name does not appear in the layer manager after assigning the material to the layer.

There is a "Name" item in the Rhino layer material editor, and it is not filled correctly either.

 

I also have been systematicaly plagued by mapping inconsistencies in the rendered viewport which do not occur when using the Maxwell trial.

For example, the mapping size for a box mapping goes bezerk when I re-open a file.

Stangely, the values in the mapping panel are not changed, but the aspect in the rendered viewport has gone haywire.

 

I haven't run into the specific problem that you described though...

 

Is there any dramatic improvement / plug-in overhaul / hiring JD HILL scheduled in the near future ?

 

Cheers,

 

--

Olivier

[Fran]

Can you please post a screen shot of the layer manager where the material name is supposed to appear? And also a shot of the messed up uv mapping?

 

Thanks.

[osuire]

Fran, here's where the name of the material is supposed to appear.

But of course you know that. We were probably not speaking of the same thing ?

 

As per the mapping bug, it's simply that the scale of the texture does not stay consistent from one session to the other.

I had this problem both on my laptop, and on my box, so I guess it's not hardware related.

 

I'll have to give it a try with RC5.

...but I also need to re-install the Fry demo.

 

Cheers

[Fran]

The material library name must be a parameter that is not in use by the fry plugin. It is perhaps an issue of nomenclature, since it implies the name of a collection of materials and not a single material.

 

I have never had the scale of my textures change between sessions. Do you have a small scene you could post that exhibits the behavior?

[osuire]

Wow ! I wonder how you can keep track of the material assignments in that case

 

I'll get back here with examples of the mapping bug when I get the time to download and re-try the Fry demo.

 

Thanks Fran !

[Fran]

Since I rarely import geometry from other people, I organize my models with the layers being named for the object and the object being named for the material. I can see where it would get complicated with an imported ADT file with hundreds of layers and archane layer names.

 

The plugin is being reviewed for the next release, so I will ask if it is possible to make use of the Material Library parameter.

[Fran]

From the layer dialog, if you set the material type from Plug-in to Basic, you can type in a material name that will stick with the material when you switch back to Plug-in. Fry will still override that name with the layer name though.

 

If you were to use the RDK material browser and rename the fry material there, it would also show up. The browser poses so many problems that I don't recommend that anyone use it. I believe it was developed with the idea that the user would create and edit only basic materials, because that is the only way it is stable.

Edited February 1, 2009 by Fran
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[ralopez]

Hi Fran, I appreciate your posts, it has giving me a little more insight to other renderer. I have been working with MentalRay, and Vray. Well just started with Vray. I work for a Architectural firm out in Utah.

 

To say, Vray is incredible with its renders, much faster than Mentalray, but it might be that I still do not understand all the settings in MentalRay.

 

So the questions is, how is Fryrender better, from your perspective, and why you have choosen Fryrender?

 

 

Rafael

[Fran]

Hi Rafael,

 

I used Vray for a couple of years in production and it was good because it had some things that Max radiosity didn't have, like glossy reflections. I briefly dabbled in mental ray, but couldn't get the results I wanted. When Maxwell came out, there were a lot of things I liked about it, and I did some nice pet projects with it. But I was never able to use Maxwell for production. And when V1 came out, there turned out to be many changes from the beta that I did not like about Maxwell. So when I got the opportunity to beta test fryrender, I found that I liked it very much. It seemed easier with a much better workflow. It's more a matter of personal preference and satisfaction with the results I'm able to achieve than anything else. I think my skills all around have improved in the time I've used fryrender, and that is a natural growth process, but fryrender inspires me to push and then push some more. That's a good thing.

[ralopez]

Thanks Fran, I got to see your other post with rendering. Awesome work. I will look into FryRender. If I have any questions I will get back with you, if you have time.

 

I will download the demo, and convert them from MentalRay to Fryrender.

 

 

Thanks