Fstorm render

[glorybound]

I am not seeing a way to convert a scene and there seems to be no download scripts.

[mitviz]

Ok I just these on the fstorm facebook page and I really think we have to find why those renders look so real. The glow, the DOF, the way the light reflect on any kind of surfaces, it looks more real in my humble opinion.

Is that really just the user's experience?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/FSto...1363819826697/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/FSto...5399546089791/

we have to find why it looks more real in order to implement all these little deatails in V-Ray.

i think we all watch bertrand's work, he does some really great stuff but some of his most realistic works were done with octane and corona so far that in my opinion, these set of renders done with fstorm are just really impressive, i have been also testing it with my crappy graphics card on small scenes, its really not normal at all, it doesnt need complex shaders to get what you need right away. once Bertrand gets his hands on this for sure we will see some nice stuff. Its early days for Fstorm but seems they learnt from octane and made something impressive, especially with the tonemapping side of things and the soft realistic look. The gpu guys must be eating it up

[Donfarese]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/30988...r-monster.html

why?

Because 60% increase in speed for $1,200, that kinda sucks, now that you can get The Last Titan X for good prices on ebay. But what really is disappointing is the 12GB of ram, same as last generation. Speed is good, but everyone was really hoping for more ram for larger scenes. I mean 12GB what happened to 16GB? GTX 1080 has 8GB, last year had 12GB double what the 980TI had, then before that the Titan had 6GB double what the 780TI had.... We got ripped so they can sell Quadros and Teslas.

[bardo]

I am sure some regular good old people will come in the defense, using the "Just learn to use your renderer" argument, but the thing is, that these days most people don't want to, and frankly, don't even need to. If you can achieve 8/10 quality out of the box with minimal effort spent learning and digging into deep technical stuff, why would you take a lot more time consuming and sometimes headache-inducing path to arrive to the same 8/10 quality mark?

You're quite right...but at the end...I think it's just an illusion...because when you'll output the same image quality of everyone...someone will ask you to do more to lift up the quality bar...and you have to study...and sometimes could be something "techy", sometimes "arty".

And I think that this is true for every kind of job you did... in particular when you work in an intangible job sector like CGI, programming, visual arts and so on...

In any case your arguments are quite good and I think it's fine that every year there is a new pretender for the throne of the best (personal) renderer...

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Well since we are talking about GPU renderers, the new Pascal Titan X was just revealed.... what a disapointment

http://www.pcworld.com/article/30988...r-monster.html

why?

[Donfarese]

Well since we are talking about GPU renderers, the new Pascal Titan X was just revealed.... what a disapointment

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

thats some very reasonable arguments there Recon

[LudvikKoutny]

The big part of success of Fstorm is that it defaults to a digital camera rather than neutral linear computer renderer. I've tested it briefly, and tone mapping settings default to average camera response curve, DoF settings default to camera objective, and bloom/glare settings default to secondary optical effects of average DSLR camera.

Everytime I tried to do same with V-Ray, I have unfortunately failed. The weakest point seems to be V-Ray's lens effects, that just do not look real no matter what i try. Real glare and bloom has not only intensity, but also size based on intensity of source image highlight. V-Ray lens effects has constant glare size regardless of intensity, and instead of adding glare on top of the image, it simply blends blurry image with base image, giving you very hazy and dreamy look even when using very slight glare or bloom effect. (I do realize that is by design, to prevent increasing HDR image intensity beyond what it really is, but I would much rather take realistic glare that I can use on my final image, instead of fake looking one, that I can't, even at the cost of messing up HDR spots on my image.)

Another issue is absence of photographic tone mapping. Physical camera exposure controls that have this partial functionality (something similar to filmic tone mapping) are not supported by V-Ray. V-Ray luckily supports LUTs, that can load arbitrary camera response LUT, but those are not saved out with image. Sure you can do all of this in post, but it really changes your workflow, if you build a scene looking at it through camera objective rather than neutral linear renderer.

Next one is that V-Ray still defaults to Blinn BRDF and no internal reflections for refractive materials. That alone means that if you are user, that is not aware of advanced BRDF choices in V-Ray (you are for example just artsy guy, not tech oriented type), your Fstorm shading will come out a lot nicer. GGX reflections and highlights will look a bit deeper and crisper, and bunch of wine glasses on table will look a lot more detailed and interesting with internal reflections enabled.

So it all comes down to people doing just a few quick test, and getting very pretty results. It's love on first sight effect. It's not just about if it is possible to do with your tool, it's about how easy it is to do, what people often value more. Most of them do not even know you could do most of it (not all though, due to the limitations in V-ray lens effects) in V-Ray. They just run a renderer that has good defaults, and they see something that looks better, more pleasing to the eye. It takes their usual work, their current skill level, and pushes the output quality little bit higher without any effort from their side. And anyone who is ambitious when it comes to output quality is willing to do anything to push quality even 5-10% further, even if it means completely switching to a different renderer.

I am sure some regular good old people will come in the defense, using the "Just learn to use your renderer" argument, but the thing is, that these days most people don't want to, and frankly, don't even need to. If you can achieve 8/10 quality out of the box with minimal effort spent learning and digging into deep technical stuff, why would you take a lot more time consuming and sometimes headache-inducing path to arrive to the same 8/10 quality mark?

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

i tried the fstorm briefly today but the TONEMAPPING settings dont seem to be realtime OR i am missing some very important button somewhere.
Its not likely it bakes in the tonemapping settgins in to the render right? that woudl be a show stopper...

we use ARION for tonemapping and 32 bit full float VRIMGs but still achieving that quality is not possible using this combo although very close.

[bardo]

is there a demo?

Unfortunately our company firewall detect the fstorm site as an adult website .... Too sexy images?

I'll check at home...

But about tonemapping, how could you control it? Is there some presets?

[jstrob]

I just asked that artist why his renders are so realistic. He started saying maybe his material and models but then when the point was brought by someone else about tone mapping he said that:

"The tonemapping is a dealbreaker in Octane and FStorm. When using V-Ray and early days of corona, I never managed to achieve this soft and natural result, everything looked very weird. With the tone mapping it's so easy to balance things out."

So tonemapping might be an answer.

The other guy who brought the point said this: " I think the answer lies in the tonemapping.
If you were to save the render as 32bit linear, and composite it post(without using LUT files), I don't think you would be able to balance it so naturally.
... And that's what Octane, and now Fstorn(even more) excel at - something that vray is missing. Not 100% sure l, but this is the conclusion I've got to following my tests."

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

here are some more fstorm renders.

http://www.evermotion.org/vbulletin/...6873-work-area

If you visit the creators FB, you ll see he has done some pretty neat vizes even in Corona.

So it is very likely, that stuff were seeing around is really done by pros and not coming like that out of the box.

On the contrary, they all really look more real than aynthing else i ve seen i have to admit that.

i guess i ll have to do some tests myself to see how a raw render from fstorm
looks.

[jstrob]

In this case blame goes to engineers also, maybe they should have listen to the people this time and give them faster horses instead of this car



People can use Red Dragon camera and make awful stuff but also they can make great things with phone camera.

Did you actually asked this question seriously, or is it some elaborate way of telling us how we should drop this whole conversation?

For my part I absolutely love that car design! As weel as that one:



Buick estate 1974 with real FAKE WOOD PANELS: I have to model this and render it with V-Ray and Fstorm!

[jstrob]

If we're speaking about the overall quality of the images...my answer is: absolutely yes...

80% of the image is made by models & textures.

There is a very good attention to the details and professional modelling, texturing, shading and lighting... please..check Peter Guthrie or Bertrand Benoit websites....
If we're speaking about GI algorithm, DOF or others rendering features I can't see anything that Vray can't handle (speaking about Vray CPU).

If we're speaking about rendering speed or only GPU rendering feature we need more informations to judge and we should have the scene for right comparison as Vlado is making with the other fStorm scene provided.

You're maybe right. But that's a whole bunch of people who are suddenly as good if not better than Bertrand Benoit. I absolutely love Bertrand Benoit's work but he didn't do any render as real as those I just posted. It is very subtle but Im pretty sure about it... And i follow Bertrand's work pretty closely.

We'll see when Bertrand start playing with Fstorm, we will all fall on our back!

[Ivan1982]

Go Edsel!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]31515[/ATTACH]

I always think of the Edsel when I think of what happens when you try to create something from a large focus group. What did Ford say? “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

In this case blame goes to engineers also, maybe they should have listen to the people this time and give them faster horses instead of this car

Is that really just the user's experience?

we have to find why it looks more real in order to implement all these little deatails in V-Ray.

People can use Red Dragon camera and make awful stuff but also they can make great things with phone camera.

Did you actually asked this question seriously, or is it some elaborate way of telling us how we should drop this whole conversation?