finalRender 4 - First Take

[TheAllusionisst]

Long time no post here. With the end of life of mental ray I started looking around at options besides vray or Corona out of curiosity. Having invested a lot of resources creating MrMaterials, there really was some sorrow on my part seeing mental ray die off. I then happened upon finalRender when they released version 4 and was delighted to find that it could basically render 3DS Max scan line and mental ray scenes and the built in convertor did a good job of converting scenes/materials.

 

This got me to thinking that perhaps all our resources at MrMaterials could still have value so I entered discussions with Cebas/Edwin Braun and decided to offer support for finalRender 4 at MrMaterials.com. I converted our Mat Labs (Originally created by Jeff Patton when setting up MrM) to finalRender and a lot of materials to fR4 to help fill in materials in the different categories. We still have a lot of materials to upload as time allows.

 

Setting up the Mat Labs gave me some familiarity with finalRender and speeds compared to mental ray, some scenes and materials it was quite faster and some things required me to render longer/increased itterations to get the quality I wanted, but all in all for a new release/rewrite I was impressed.

 

At this time I am re-rendering old projects that were originally mental ray or vray to get a better feel for the render engine and hone my skills in it. The first project I am showing was originally modeled by 3DAS team member Branko Jovanovic and later worked on by myself. I will post a Raw out of the oven straight render with no post work and then a tweaked version with some entourage in it to show that it is the tweaked version with some post work. Hopefully each project will get better, I wanted to get a feel for it in real world conditions so to speak. On the interior rendering I applied the frame buffers de-noise option to clean it up a bit in the Raw version, so if you consider that post production so be it, but it was done inside the render engine interface so I am calling it a Raw image. The frame buffer has numerous tweaks available, but I only applied de-noise for the sake of the experiment.

 

I look forward to seeing the next drop/update and where the software goes, for a major release it has worked well and I have had fun playing with it. I will attach an image I did or my digital recreation of my car as well, all and all I am having fun playing around with fR3.

[James Vella]

if you are worried about the materials when it comes to other render engines you can be rest assured their built in material converters are excellent and would be the last thing holding me back from switching to another render engine. If you are using Connecter it can basically do this automatically upon import, so no need to worry these days what engine is being used - just what gives you best results IMO.

[TheAllusionisst]

James,

I am glad you have had great luck with material converters in your workflow and you have a great body of work! There are plenty of newer render engines out there that I haven’t tried so I can’t comment on the built-in converters. However, I have tried a lot over the years and use ‘Universal Material Converter’ https://www.3dstudio.nl/autodesk-material-converter and nothing I have tried is foolproof or provides great results going from one render engine to another. I have always had to go and tweak things, but a lot of the issue is the scene itself and how different lighting systems present the materials. There is the whole biased versus unbiased render engines………. So I would love to find a ‘Scene Converter’ that did GREAT conversions, but I don’t think that is a realistic expectation.

 

There is also the Proxy object dilemma if going from one render engine to another, basically, you dispose of the proxies and start over, or convert to editable mesh and then explode basically, but they are typically huge…… Just haven’t found an eloquent solution for that either.

 

That touches on one of the two most important items in archvis as far as I am concerned, and that is third party content and vegetation scattering/proxy systems, ForestPack Pro being what I use. Whatever I use it is kind of a given that I need to use something that works with that. fR4 does work with it and most of my content, there is some content sometimes that doesn’t seem to recognize the render engine. Lauberworks also works with fR4 so for the most part, fR4 is working for me. It also has it’s own proxy/scattering system built in, which some other render engines have as well. My goal here is just to experiment with fR4 and see if I will slip it into the workflow, it seems to have a lot of potential and decent price structure. It is also kind of fun to be in on the early release and have correspondence with Edwin when I run into something.

 

Currently the 3DAS team is using vray and Corona and I rarely get to render, but when I do it has typically been mental ray as I have used it for years and used it in XSI and of course sometimes vray has been the right tool, but right now I am enjoying playing with finalRender and haven’t hit any walls that there weren’t workarounds or features that substitute how I have worked in the past. There are a few features that I have requested and I know some of them are problematical due to the hybrid CPU and GPU rendering at the same time, but so far it seems pretty solid and it is a good match for me right now.

 

With all that said, if you can show me a program or converter that works on whole scenes as you seem to imply, I would love to see it as I don’t believe the boundary between render engines is as transparent as you seem to be indicating, but this old dog can always learn something and doesn’t think he is always right. I am not certain what "Connecter" you are referring to, could you elaborate, could be I have been missing the boat and should be using something.

 

Thanks for your feedback and insight/perspective and would love to hear what you using and what your workflow is.

 

Happy Halloween!

[James Vella]

James,

I am glad you have had great luck with material converters in your workflow and you have a great body of work! There are plenty of newer render engines out there that I haven’t tried so I can’t comment on the built-in converters. However, I have tried a lot over the years and use ‘Universal Material Converter’ https://www.3dstudio.nl/autodesk-material-converter and nothing I have tried is foolproof or provides great results going from one render engine to another.

 

I went from Mental Ray to Vray, then to Corona and use their built-in converter. I have never needed to use a 3rd party converter.

 

I have always had to go and tweak things, but a lot of the issue is the scene itself and how different lighting systems present the materials. There is the whole biased versus unbiased render engines………. So I would love to find a ‘Scene Converter’ that did GREAT conversions, but I don’t think that is a realistic expectation.

 

In regards to lighting sometimes I find it easier to stick with standard max lights these convert easily, when dealing with render specific lighting models or mesh lights this can cause unexpected results from engine to engine. Materials might need a slight tweak if you dont have these PBR Setup.

 

 

There is also the Proxy object dilemma if going from one render engine to another, basically, you dispose of the proxies and start over, or convert to editable mesh and then explode basically, but they are typically huge…… Just haven’t found an eloquent solution for that either.

 

The built-in converter for vray/corona/fstorm convert all proxies without issues, no need to do anything fancy other than click 'convert'.

 

That touches on one of the two most important items in archvis as far as I am concerned, and that is third party content and vegetation scattering/proxy systems, ForestPack Pro being what I use. Whatever I use it is kind of a given that I need to use something that works with that. fR4 does work with it and most of my content, there is some content sometimes that doesn’t seem to recognize the render engine. Lauberworks also works with fR4 so for the most part, fR4 is working for me. It also has it’s own proxy/scattering system built in, which some other render engines have as well. My goal here is just to experiment with fR4 and see if I will slip it into the workflow, it seems to have a lot of potential and decent price structure. It is also kind of fun to be in on the early release and have correspondence with Edwin when I run into something.

 

I also use Forestpro/Railclone for my workflow, never had an issue when changing render engines. I have no experience with Lauberworks or FR4, If you find it works for you I would not see a reason to change unless it makes your workflow better/faster etc.

 

With all that said, if you can show me a program or converter that works on whole scenes as you seem to imply, I would love to see it as I don’t believe the boundary between render engines is as transparent as you seem to be indicating, but this old dog can always learn something and doesn’t think he is always right. I am not certain what "Connecter" you are referring to, could you elaborate, could be I have been missing the boat and should be using something.

 

This is the link for Connecter. I have been using it a couple years and its pretty amazing tool for asset organisation and automatic conversion on import. It can also auto-proxy and a whole bunch of other things, its free and gets updated regularly.

 

https://www.designconnected.com/connecter/

 

All the best! Enjoy your Halloween

Edited November 1, 2018 by redvella

[TheAllusionisst]

Thanks for the info and the link, I will try it out!