hdrs, alpha, netrender questions

[PEgaz]

at first HI to everybody - I'm here quite new, and I'm very happy to find that forum, since Fryrender has the policy not to have any even small forum part opened to non/future customers. Despite of their kindness and great customer care - it seems to me a little ... odd.

 

Playing from time to time with fryrender builds and considering buying it for my purposes I came out few problems which I will ask if you don't mind:

 

1. IBL with HDRs - when the feature was "released" I did some tests and had no problem with achiving nice sharp shadows (if I needed) (for example with Paul Debevec timelapse HDRs) when I tried it with last build it seemed impossible - I had very splotchy image full of strange artifacts that could not be cleared .... anything changed with "understanding" HDRs by fryrender in never builds? or I do semthing wrong? I cannot reproduce sharper shadows with any of my HDRs now

 

2. alphas - I can't achive alphas from transparent objects - they render fully opaque, is that normal?

 

3. NET Render - I had no possibility to use it - is it production ready now? I have a small render farm here and I hope I can use it without any problem ... is it one_click reliable solution now? can it be queued normally like in bacburner?

 

I can't remember other questions now - when I am I will post some further ones.

 

I'm looking forward to hearing from you, and thank you in advance

sorry for any english mistakes

 

Peter

[Fran]

Hi Peter and welcome.

 

1 - IBL should be back to normal for the next release. When you use an hdri that has a high contrast between dark and light (and extreme example would be a dark image with a single very bright spot), it will take longer for the noise to resolve. If you have problems with relatively homogenous (even) tones, you can try blurring your hdri.

 

2 - If you need an alpha channel render, select the objects that you don't want obstructing (like window glass), and set the fryrender Exclude Completely flag.

 

3 - To use network rendering successfully, you need to make sure that your scene and all resources are in shared folders and have full network paths to them. When you create your materials, any bitmaps should have network paths - (\\computer_name\folder_name\image_name). In the Network tab, you would click Detect to have fryrender detect all computers on the network (you can delete the nodes you don't want from the list and save all the settings to a file for easy use). You then set up your render specs and designate which nodes you wish to have working on the job. This information is saved to the same .ini file as the one I mentioned before. Of course, you can have as many configuration files as you want. There is also a very easy way to send your scene to a commercial render farm, called FeverFarm.

 

I hope this helps.

[PEgaz]

thank you Frances for your reply - btw I've seen your works on FryrenderForum and I was pritty impressed!!

 

ad.1 - I've read about blurring HDRs ... but it seems a little pointless when you have to achieve effects other than "blurry" The point is that (as you wrote) there were some changes causing problems, and they work on resolving the problems... good to know

 

ad.2 - is there any way to achive an "real alpha" I mean that it corespond real transparency in specific angle for transparent objects.

 

ad.3 - ok - we work with Vray DR for few years now - and we have dedicated file server with all paths the same for every computer - - that's not a problem ... just one more question if you can queue few jobs? I mean that I can set that 1 render should last n amount of minutes, another n amount of passes and some manager switch from one to another when the first is finished during the night?

 

regards

Peter

[Fran]

Are you referring to an alpha channel render for compositing purposes?

[PEgaz]

yes .... and I know there's a background slot in Fryrender .... but we do a lot of things in post .... and photoshop_ready_solution is essential for us. very often we need to put background after we'll render something, or change it afterwards - so putting it onto background slot is not a solution

[Fran]

yes .... and I know there's a background slot in Fryrender .... but we do a lot of things in post .... and photoshop_ready_solution is essential for us. very often we need to put background after we'll render something, or change it afterwards - so putting it onto background slot is not a solution

 

Use your method of choice - compositing definately offers a lot of flexibility. But any objects will act as obstructions, regardless of their material, so you need to either hide the objects in your host app or apply the Exclude Completely tag (which can also be done in the host app).

 

An alternative to using the Alpha channel is to use the Material ID channel for your mask. Objects in the scene are assigned a unique color depending on the object's material. So, all objects that share the same glass material will have the same color. You can use that for a selection mask or exploit it however you like.

[PEgaz]

thank you for being so helpful ... it's time to buy one licence to check ... so we may meet on fryrender official forum ... wish you more great renders!

[Fran]

You might want to check with Feversoft to see if the "Friend Offer" is still open.