Fstorm render

[Donfarese]

I don't get it, in these Redshift looks much better at a third of the time?

That's what I thought Also, Redshift is much better if you ask me.

[Nicinus]

Some quick comparisons between Fstorm and Redshift.

I don't get it, in these Redshift looks much better at a third of the time?

[jstrob]

I've heard the same argument about any number of render engines - Maxwell, Octane, Corona, Arnold, iray etc. However under similar lighting conditions and similar materials all these engines produce results that are more or less identical to V-Ray (and I know this because I've checked, many times). Don't get me wrong, if you find that FStorm works better for you, by all means use it, I just don't accept the "more photoreal" argument as valid.

Best regards,
Vlado

I was not not impressed enough by Maxwell (except maybe those single flash photos once), Corona, Octane or Arnold (maybe except the movie "Gravity") to think I really need to learn how to use them, but I think there is a small plus with fstrom. But I will test it just for fun cause it is really far from being usable in my work. For that V-Ray is way more advanced and versatile. My render farm is all CPU based and it's still the best way to have predictable results for animation. I need render element, cpu based rendering and all the shaders vray has as well as all the pipeline tool that comes with vray (open vdb support, vray instancing etc). I also need the absolutely perfect support we get here from Vlado and chaosgroup! (BTW, Good luck to Arnold's users now that Autodesk owns it!). A renderer needs more than a photoreal single frame button. I haven't seen any animation from Fstorm yet.

And yes for sure I will try to see if I can reproduce some of the Fstrom Render in V-Ray and some compositing. For stuff like glare etc, it's always better in comp anyway.

[savage309]

It might be the case that there is a better shader, but the approved way of arguing about such claims is by publishing a paper (like ours for SIGGRAPH this year and the ones in the docs.chaosgroup.com), which can be checked by multiple independent authors. It happens occasionally somebody to have a different shader/light/whatever, because the original one was too hard to implement.

Best,
Blago.

[Moriah]

Glad to know an improved lens effects system is coming! Also i might do a simple scene comparison with vray and fstorm and try to see where these differences come from hopefully.

What about what he claims to be a modified GGX BRDF? "FStorm material uses unique developed glossy brdf model. This model has less noise level and looks better than modern GGX brdf model." Do you think this might influence the overall look of the scenes?

[savage309]

I agree on the real time lens effects. We are working on having that, but it will take a while
Unbiased usually can be translated to "unsmart". We have the BF/BF option. I don't see how having no cached GI implementation can be a feature.
V-Ray, especially RT GPU has no complex options or whatsoever and it is very easy to use. From the feedback we have got so far from various artists, RT GPU is not slower by any means compared to whatever GPU raytracer.

Best,
Blago.

[vlado]

I even asked to one of the gurus there what was his opinion on Vray and he said "there's too much settings and setup needed, i'm not a technical guy, i'm an artist, with Fstorm i just have to click render and it's already photoreal even with the lack of features it has". - I don't agree with this, nowadays Vray is pretty simple, but you see what i'm trying to say...

That once an idea gets into an artist's head, it's very difficult to take it out? Yes, V-Ray used to be more complicated to set up, but that's not the case anymore. It will take a bit of time for that thought to sink in.

I can't really agree that lighting behavior is different - all render engines compute pretty much the same thing. There are details in mostly in clamping, limited light bounces and other "optimizations" (f.e. Corona renders are by default more contrast-y because it clamps GI heavily, RedShift is even more aggressive sometimes to the extent that the final render has little to do with the real world), but overall they produce similar results.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Moriah]

What i noticed from archviz guys trying out FStorm (and some personal experience), is that:

1. No need to setup, since it's "unbiased", you dont have to worry about settings/technical side of things (maybe GI clamp if you need).
2. Glare/Bloom is very simple to setup (realtime too) and gives that touch of "realism" that you sometimes lack with Vray because of it not being so simple to setup and not realtime.
3. Lighting behavior seems different for some reason, both with single light sources and single HDRI, maybe it's the GI, but artistically it looks "better"/"different".
4. Very fast for a GPU renderer but lacks a lot of features. Vray on the other hand is not as fast but is way more complete in GPU.

I even asked to one of the gurus there what was his opinion on Vray and he said "there's too much settings and setup needed, i'm not a technical guy, i'm an artist, with Fstorm i just have to click render and it's already photoreal even with the lack of features it has". - I don't agree with this, nowadays Vray is pretty simple, but you see what i'm trying to say...

So from the technical point of view actually there might not be that many differences, i don't know and i can't comment much on that, but from an artist's perspective, it's easier to achieve a photoreal look indeed with less fiddling around.

Of course this is for "simple" archviz scenes, because other than that you can't do much with it right now, specially if you're into VFX work or something that needs some degree of compositing. But then again, there's no real renderer that is a master of everything, but when the job needs to be done, people always go back to Vray.

[vlado]

a new user in vray will have to pull a bertrand benoit or grant warwick to achieve the renders i see over there on Fstorm facebook page

I don't agree with that at all; you made the same argument for Corona as well, but keep in mind that even though these are new FStorm/Corona/Octane/Arnold etc users, they are not 3D newbies at all - the majority of them are people who have already been doing archviz for years. When people say "this is my first render in XYZ", it doesn't mean "this is my first render ever". Setting up a photoreal 3D scene requires skills and general knowledge about how lights and materials work, regardless of renderer - otherwise you'd all be out of jobs

Best regards,
Vlado

[mitviz]

man a new user in vray will have to pull a bertrand benoit or grant warwick to achieve the renders i see over there on Fstorm facebook page, here are some new ones below i saw, i agree with vlado under the same conditions it seems they all seem to perform similar but not the same, but out of the box they aren't under the same conditions, maybe it the way the initial things are setup initially what makes things look more photoreal from like octance or fstorm, even corona, well more the gpu renderers. am not qualified to compare them but dam, their renders look dam good even from new artists. Vray is stil the big boss in the house as everyone knows and everyone stil will for now need a copy to handle big jobs. Would love to hear from some of the gpu guys more since it seems like gpu rendering is getting more popular and they have tried these renderers and not just from people trying to be one sided. Have to repeat though dam the Fstorm renders look real
http://www.evermotion.org/vbulletin/...ers-collection

[vlado]

But now Fstrom really has something I can't explain yet that is unbelievably photoreal.

I've heard the same argument about any number of render engines - Maxwell, Octane, Corona, Arnold, iray etc. However under similar lighting conditions and similar materials all these engines produce results that are more or less identical to V-Ray (and I know this because I've checked, many times). Don't get me wrong, if you find that FStorm works better for you, by all means use it, I just don't accept the "more photoreal" argument as valid.

Best regards,
Vlado

[jstrob]

It pretty rare that I see an render engine that I really want to test cause it seems to have something V-Ray does not have. For example when I saw the movie "Gravity" rendered with Arnold I thought maybe I should look into Arnold but when I saw the price of the licenses I just forgot the idea and I didn't loose any time testing Arnold. But now Fstrom really has something I can't explain yet that is unbelievably photoreal. for now it's free to test but I need to order a Nvidia card cause it doesn't work with my Firepro. So I'm waiting for some geforce 1080 to test fstorm.

[^Lele^]

indeed.

[Mokiki]

@Lele
To achieve a similar effect in vray I just use a spiral gradient ramp inside the anisotropy rotation map slot and reduce the refl. glossiness amount.

@Vlado
I can't believe in all my attempts I never thought about reducing the bitmap blur to 0.01 and keep filtering on "Pyramadial". The only difference is the bump strength needed for vray to give the same reflection pattern but yes it works.

(Sorry about the difference in brightness in both images)

[^Lele^]

You should be able to do this with a bump map and no anisotropy without issues; you don't need vraycolor2bump, just make sure the bitmap blur is 0.01

Best regards,
Vlado

ah!
I tried changing bump amount and filtering type.
Another reason why you're boss. ^^