Just came across this on CGTalk, the screengrabs of the interface suggests that this engine is something similar to Octane but for the CPU. http://www.fluidray.com/
I do wonder though, does anyone think that with a new engine seemingly appearing every few months, that the render engine market is overdue for a period of homogenization through events like buyouts and bankruptcies?
Because more likely than not, this will end up being another engine with a small to moderate size community of people who find the engine suitable for their needs, much like Indigo, Thea, Octane, Maxwell, Arion, Spectral Studio, Keyshot, ect…
A quick look at things suggests that is has all of the base set of features one would expect in a spectral-based unbiased renderer, but not something that could be a complete replacement for the engines that a lot of people here are using now. (Even if someone developed a Blender exporter for it).
its $299… i wonder how many PC’s you can put it on? pretty expensive…
for comparisons. Micro Render is 95 euro and you can use it on as many PC’s as you own.
Micro Render is fast and has real-time preview just like cycles,
the blender integration of Micro Render is the best that i have see so far from any external render engine. it still can use some work(on the roadmap), its not “perfect” but its not bad for multilicense for 95 euro.
I haven’t seen any updates in awhile… not sure, whats up with it…
it is a fine program , hope he keeps working on it.
Checked the trial.
Imagine it a mix of Cycles and Octane, CPU only, with only one render integrator but a facebook button in the UI for 300 USD in a betastate.
The UI is very much Octane-ish. Nodebased setup with property windows for all the stuff, a library for lights, materials, environments and stuff.
Rendering is fairly fast, the engine produces quite a lot fireflies (has problems with specular materials), supports IES lights, and adding/removing objects as well as manipulating is very nice, and also what crashed it for me. I made it crash 4 times during testing.
The performance on a quadcore ain’t that bad, but only if you keep the RT window rather small.
For 50 bucks I might consider supporting them in their betastate.
But no Blender exporter, no animations, no distributed rendering. Separate purchase of 32bit and 64bit version.
Nah. I see no bright future for it.
btw. OSX version coming up… prolly separate purchase as well
Looking at the gallery, it’s nothing you cant do with Cycles, Lux or Yafaray. For a Blender user, this software has no value, imo. May be good for users of Sketchup, or similar “lightweight” software, though.
The proliferation of render engines is something unique in the software industry. As an industry we are little by little evolving to create some sort of meta render engine.
the facebook render share is a bad idea IMHO,
read the terms of use of Facebook…
i wouldn’t want to basically give all my art away to them for free.
I cant believe people post their photos to that website.
is it actually real time, or is it progressive, like Vray RT(which is not real time either)…?..for clarification I would define RT as frames per second as opposed to seconds per frame…
on a side note, online social networking is retartded…lol, no, it really is.
This whole render engine just screams “I just want to make a quick buck” to me. It seems like the maker just developed a test render-engine using (what seems like) common knowledge by now and then decided he wanted to make some money off of it. There’s nothing exceptional or cutting-edge about the render engine, nothing that makes it stand out from it’s many siblings. The design choice is poor, the speed is not great, the facebook-button is a horrible idea and there is really nothing special about it at all.
Writing a render engine for fun or to increase your knowledge is fine but don’t market it as a commercial render engine for a steep price-tag and then encourage your customers to give away their work for free…
This whole light-bulb just screams “I just want to make a quick buck” to me. It seems like the maker just developed a light-bulb using (what seems like) common knowledge by now and then decided he wanted to make some money off of it. There’s nothing exceptional or cutting-edge about the light-bulb, nothing that makes it stand out from it’s many siblings. The design choice is poor, the light is not great, the <insert-vanity-item-here> is a horrible idea and there is really nothing special about it at all.
I’ve juxtaposed the word “render engine” with the word “light-bulb” here to underline the stupidity of this rant. Apparently, simply putting out a product that isn’t absolutely mindblowing in their eyes is a contemptible offense to some BA users.
Who are you to judge? If you don’t like the product, you don’t buy it! If you have valid critique (like arexma has shown), put it forth.
They put in a facebook sharing button because social-network integration is everywhere these days, and people actually do share renders on there! Putting their works “out for free” is what people do who actually want their works to be seen. Nobody pays for looking at renders online. And of course a site like facebook (and every other site like flickr etc.) will reserve some rights for using the images - otherwise they couldn’t legally run the service.
haha why does everyone have problems with all these new renderers? i like playing with new renderers.
i’m actually a little impressed with its speed so far. admittedly, it does have a harder time cleaning up glossy materials than Cycles. and the node system is pretty cryptic and a little unforgiving at the moment - i haven’t yet found a way to simply disconnect a node from another, i’ve had to keep deleting nodes and adding/connecting new ones even if i just want to see the difference between two nodes. that’s kind of annoying, but i wonder if it’ll be changed at some point.
i was really weirded out by the “Share this on Facebook!” button at first, until i realized i usually upload renders to facebook anyway lol. i just wish it was a customizable button like “Upload this to my Blogger blog!” instead. it’s pretty crashy so far, but that’s what beta testing is for.
my only “complaint” so far: i’m really curious about the .frt file format. FluidRay reads a binary file instead of the pretty common format of reading .xml to define the scene and .obj’s. i wonder if this closes doors for writing exporters. and unless they develop one, it’d make setting up scenes a real pain. there’s one for Sketchup, but that doesn’t really help me
@Zalamander if you are at the store where they sell cheap light bulbs that are really good, are you going to shell out half a fortune for a new light bulb that looks and works exactly the same as the others?
What I am saying is that there are many cheap or free render engines circulating around on the internet these days that all look almost identical and works much the same way, if you want to sell your product these days you gotta stand out from the crowd (and this is true for almost everything) and offer functionality that others don’t provide, in this case that was the Facebook-button which was a bad marketing choice IMO (potentially compromising NDA), if you just want to post your renders to Facebook you can use Cycles or something, no need to fork out 300 bucks for a commercial license if that’s all you are gonna use it for. Other than that I don’t see anything that is different from other existing render engines so trying to sell this one is going to be really difficult unless the price drops dramatically or some functionality is offered that makes it worth the price, because right now Cycles kicks it’s ass in speed, flexibility, workflow and functionality while remaining free and open-source.
I am me and I reserve the same rights as you and everyone else that have posted in this thread to judge the product, Ace Dragon created this thread asking for inputs about the render engine and I gave mine, however despite saying pretty much the same thing as everyone else here - my opinion is the only one in this thread that is not valid in your opinion. So I can say the same thing back Mr. Zalamander, who are you to judge if my opinions are valid or not?
Probably not, but that’s not really the point. Also, as a matter of fact, this renderer is not the same as any existing renderer and it also isn’t particularly more expensive than certain other renderers.
What I am saying is …
That’s what you are saying now. That’s not really the same as what you said before.
I am me and I reserve the same rights as you and everyone else that have posted in this thread to judge the product, Ace Dragon created this thread asking for inputs about the render engine and I gave mine, however despite saying pretty much the same thing as everyone else here - my opinion is the only one in this thread that is not valid in your opinion.
If you believe you are saying the same thing as everyone else in this thread, you should read what everyone else is saying.
The difference is, you are accusing them of being in for a quick buck and you’re saying that “it’s ok to write such a renderer to learn, but it’s not ok to just market it”. Well I disagree on that notion on what is OK to do and what not. Who are you to judge what people are doing with their work? Every software developer has a right to market his work and you have the right to not care about it.
So I can say the same thing back Mr. Zalamander, who are you to judge if my opinions are valid or not?
I didn’t do that, I said if you have validcritique about the product (not its marketing), put it forth. You’re of course free to issue your opinion, no matter how unsophisticated it is.
I was saying the same thing before but elaborated since you clearly did not understand that. And I am not accusing anyone of anything, I was merely stating my opinion and if you have a problem with that feel free to put me on your ignore list, I know for sure that I’d be relieved if you wouldn’t reply to me ever again.
You weren’t saying the same thing and you where saying it in a less derogatory language the second time around. I wouldn’t have taken issue with it, had you phrased it that way.
And I am not accusing anyone of anything, I was merely stating my opinion and if you have a problem with that feel free to put me on your ignore list
Alright, I take back the “accusing” part, you weren’t technically accusing anyone. But I still think what you wrote originally sounded stupid, that’s why I juxtaposed the words to point it out. I don’t have any problem with you stating your opinion, so I hope you have no problem with me stating my opinion on your opinion
I know for sure that I’d be relieved if you wouldn’t reply to me ever again.
Such luxury I will not grant you. Nobody shall be safe from me replying to what they wrote.
