Final Render Stage-1 Reviewed by John Dollus

Final Render Stage-1
By John Dollus

John Dollus has more than 10 years of experience in the architectural visualization industry with several national awards and professional lectures for groups including chapters of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA). dollus3d@verizon.net

Overview

During the course of producing this review, it became apparent that rendering engines seem to have developed somewhat of a cult-like following. Users of rendering engines are very defensive when it comes to comparisons. Frankly, this behavior amazes me. First of all, it seems people fail to realize that these are tools and the constant bickering translates to people having differences of which hammer to use and how to swing it. Secondly, the big three - Brazil, finalRender and Vray (listed alphabetically for those who take issue with the order), are all extremely similar in the methods they use as well as the algorithms behind the interfaces so whichever argument created in one camp can be easily turned by the other with only a few adjustments to the equations used.

For this review, I was provided with a download link emailed directly from Turbo Squid. The link included the full retail install including service pack version 2D and fifteen orientation movies in Quicktime format.

Installation

The installation process is one of the most painless procedures I have been through in recent times. An interesting note: When reading through the License Agreement (yeah, I actually do), Section 2-1 reads, “(1) Cebas Computer grants you a nonexclusive, nontransferable license to use finalRender Stage-1….” Later, however, in section 4-1 “…You may, however, transfer all your rights to use finalRender Stage-1 to another person or legal entity provided that you transfer this agreement, finalRender Stage-1, including all copies, updates or prior versions. You must inform Cebas Computer in writing about a license transfer and the new user has to sign and accept this license agreement….”

In an age where most companies provide no means to transfer if you find yourself not using the program as much as you had anticipated, this is a welcome divergence from the industry standard.

The next screen for the install is a ReadMe file addressing installation details, news, help file location, troubleshooting and build history. The only notable items here are in the help file section where great detail is provided about the online help system but no mention is made of a complete PDF manual also installed in the same location (more about this later). In the troubleshooting section, various means of communicating with the manufacturer are listed but no mention is made of the online support forum dedicated to finalRender on the Discreet webboard

http://support.discreet.com/webboard/wbpx.dll/~discreetcertifiedplugins/login

or the forum located on Cebas’ own site

http://www.Cebas.com/forums/Cebas/

Both are excellent resources for assistance from the rendering community.

After entering the serial number, you are presented with a screen asking for the Max/Viz software version. Max 4.2 through 7 or Viz 4 through 2005 are currently supported. One last screen asking for your install directory and you’re finished with the install.

Licensing

A fifteen second communication with Turbo Squid was all I needed before getting into production mode. I was not even required to restart Max before opening up one of the many sample scenes provided and verifying proper operation.

Training

After a quick install, my next task was to familiarize myself with the basic workflow of finalRender. I spent the next 3 hours sitting through the provided tutorial movies. A couple things are a bit of concern with the movies. They appear to have been created with Max 4 and, as such, are getting a bit dated. Also, as the program, help files and PDF docs have been updated (up to Service Pack 2B), the movies have not which might confuse new users. The interfaces shown in the movies have evolved in a couple specific areas such as the Global Illumination settings rollout. The movies can run a bit long as well. Anything over 10 minutes and I start scrubbing through the timeline.

The tutorials included in the online help file relate to object lights, shadows, volume lights, caustics and sub-surface scattering. The tutorials are brief and put together well including descriptions of why settings need to be set certain ways vs. a simple step-by-step approach. The downside is the fact that there are so few of them compared to all the sample scenes installed with the program.

While going through the tutorials, movies and sample files, I was a bit surprised that bucket size was never really addressed. The default value of 32 seems very low given the power and resources of systems used in production today. On my test system, increasing this value to 64 resulted in a 15-30 percent increase in speed depending on the scene.

Documentation is provided in two forms: an online help file and a 347 page printable PDF file. With a piece of software as powerful as finalRender, the importance of proper documentation cannot be stressed enough. Without it, new users would quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options available. One of my pet peeves of software companies today is the lack of printed documentation. While dual monitor configurations are becoming more common, I still value every square inch of screen real estate and it bothers me to have to fire up the workstation just to read a book. I enjoy having the option of going outside to read up on processes and techniques without having to worry about battery life or power cords. The included PDF file was a welcome feature. The online help file is very extensive going beyond the usual interface description process by providing tips and explanations on various concepts throughout.

New Features related to Service Pack 2D:

Distributed rendering has been enhanced to include color codes for each node to make tracking more user friendly. Opacity maps have been included in the FR-Advanced material options to add flexibility in creating materials. Global Illumination now includes an option for rendering pre-pass samples only. I found this helpful in diagnosing scenes by network rendering with this option. In the past, the only way to view this information was by rendering locally and watching the progress. The rectilinear light now includes both bias and density settings for more control over shadows. HairFX is now supported though I was unable to verify this at review time.

General Impressions

Rendering

Within the first 20 minutes, I was able to consistently crash Max by opening the sample scene, GI-Room, switching to Hyper-GI and changing the Blur setting to 20. This general ability to crash Max quickly when using a plugin is one I learned from a coworker several years ago (thanks, Darin). In finalRender’s defense, I also attribute this to not reading the manual at all and just jumping into one of the more complicated aspects of the GI process which, of course, is animation. After reading the manual, I found a blur setting of 15 more than adequate and the program performed flawlessly. Popular GI systems today that rely upon raytracing techniques all suffer the same problem – stability of the solution over time. There are a few workarounds to this problem. One popular approach is to render out every nth frame of an animation pass and save that lighting solution to a file. That file is then loaded back into the animation and the pre-calculated solution is averaged over time creating the stability that does not exist when rendering out unique frames. finalRender supports this method like some of it’s competitors but it goes one step further in adding a unique render ‘style’ called Hyper-GI which is described as a blend between radiosity and raytraced GI techniques. If you have the time to deal with multiple passes and generate a pre-calculated pass using the finalRender:Image method, I would suggest going that route because it generally results in more precise effects. The Hyper-GI method is great for a one-pass solution otherwise and appears to give good results for architectural walkthrough work. The Quasi Monte Carlo method is a brute force implementation that gives few options and is, in my experience, quite slow compared to the finalRender:Image method that is also based on Quasi Monte Carlo algorithms.

Materials

As with the other QMC rendering engines on the market, finalRender works best when using it’s own material type: fR-Advanced. Other material types install with the program including fR-Glass, fR-Metal and fR-Matte/Shadow but the core material is the fR-Advanced. I found myself getting much better results just sticking with the fR-Advanced material instead of the Glass and Metal templates. In the fR-Advanced material type, a new shading method, Zauner, has been added. With Zauner, you get a whole new section for mapping textures specifically for the specular highlights of the material. To be honest, in architectural rendering, I cannot imagine a time when I would need Zauner shading and while QuadHiLayer (4-layer) specular controls offer the opportunity to create some very interesting layered looks such as brushed stainless and burnished metals, the same effects can be achieved using simpler methods such as texture blending. Overall, the fR-Advanced material is extremely powerful but also very complex which makes material creation for new users a bit daunting. My advice to new users would be to stick with the basics of material creation in finalRender for a period of time before activating every option available in the material. Once you have a good understanding of how finalRender interprets materials, read the excellent documentation before delving into some of the more advanced material characteristics.
 

 

Summary

finalRender is a Discreet Certified 3ds Max plugin and is one of the first commercial global illumination rendering systems created for Max based off of stochastic raytracing algorithms. These systems are all very similar at the core but vary in their user interfaces and ‘efficiencies’ built into the methods they implement to deliver a final image. finalRender offers a wealth of opportunity to fine tune a scene to arrive at a desired result. Unfortunately, by offering so many opportunities in the form of settings, a typical user can quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer number. Perhaps spending a year with a competing product has made things more clear, but I found that I was able to achieve equal results relatively quickly. I, for one, am excited to know that I was only able to scratch the surface of the program and am eager to continue to delve into more of the intricacies later. For those of you who are comfortable with terms such as undersampling and know the difference between deterministic and stochastic raytracing, finalRender holds much for you to increase your rendering prowess. If you are a beginner, you may want to keep finalRender in mind for when you are ready to explore rendering more closely.

finalRender is available for $795 from www.turbosquid.com

For a complete list of features and options, visit www.cebas.com

Images are courtesy of Memorial Hermann Medical Plaza & Kirksey www.kirksey.com

 

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