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.

[nicnic]

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

[Fran]

Originally Posted by nicnic

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