Fr2 Users?

[DAN212222]

hey guys hope everyone is well....

 

im currently looking at buying the final render 2 plug in for cinema 4d, but was wondering if there was any users around, and what your thoughts on it were?

 

thanks dan

[Ernest Burden III]

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/20183-comments-final-render-cinema-sp2.html

 

and from another similar thread I wrote this:

 

fr2/C4D-SP2 is much better than SP1 was, actually something to consider using, relying upon.

 

First off, the distributed render (bucket system) is working much better, seems to be pretty stable. I have not yet put it to any hard use, so it remains to be seen how it holds up with something like heavy-detail animation.

 

The GI is as good as betfore, but they've added a new 'details' feature which is really a little ambient occlusion stirred in to help the GI look good with lower settings.

 

SP2 supports more of C4D's built-in shaders, and seems to do much better with bump.

 

The problem I'm having is with lights. fr2 doesn't read most of the 'details' tab stuff, so you cannot color the falloff of lights. I've experimented with reviving my old technique of using a small plane positioned near the light with a color gradient mapped on it to cast colored falloffs. That works, but not with mapped shadows, so its either knife-sharp hard/raytraced shadows or beautiful but slow area shadows. Pick your poison. But why should we be drinking poison?

 

Ah, but now there's IES lighting! And it even works! But not really. There is a bug in SP2 where IES lights ignore transparency when casting shadows from IES lights. That means a glass on a table will cast a shadow as if its made of rock. Not good, no known work-around. OK, so much for IES lights. They're there, but not usable.

 

Supposedly the physical sky has been fixed, but I haven't tested that yet.

 

fr2/C4D works well, but is not perfect. Its very much like vray, but speaking of which, the vray/C4D bridge is supposed to be completed soon, so you might want to wait and buy that instead.