anyone tried this? wanted to know about the statement on their website saying FStorm material uses unique developed glossy brdf model. This model has less noise level and looks better than modern GGX brdf model. All materials have multiple importance qmc sampling. Just wanted to see your views on this since i see its also GPU based so maybe only a few people here who are setup for gpu rendering will really know about it.
I tried it out 1 month ago or so and it seemed pretty good for what it is right now. Still missing some critical features like displacement, normal mapping and motion blur, but it’s very fast, user-friendly and right now free. Actually some people are abandoning the Octane ship for Fstorm even though it’s in a very rough state (arch-viz guys, since it doesn’t require any special compositing like VFX work).
seeing some pretty nice work being done with fstorm, especially the stuff posted today
I must suck, i was getting uncleanable fireflies with purely diffuse shading…
Then again, i’m on nvidia (why would it matter?).
Is there a price? I don’t see anything. It doesn’t support MAX 2017, so I can’t try it. It looks they have been around for awhile, yet I never heard of them.
me either, just saw it on facebook 2 days ago now am following the group, will give it a test soon, looks promising and yes max 2017 is support, here is the link
http://www.fstormrender.com/forum/forum/releases/1081-fstormrender-for-3ds-max-v0-1-17
How long did they spend on those renders that actually look good? Because, I know for most of us, we don’t have 6 months to spend on one sitting room to get it to look right. You can look at their eye candy but you have to temper that with how long it actually took to get to that result. I bet for most production work, you’d want to tear your hair out working with this.
I’m sure you will have the guys who ditch Vray for the rendering engine flavor of the week because “Vray is too expensive” then build a 45 Titan-X card rig to get their render times back to where they were and be able to actually render their scenes.
Face it, V-Ray has a cult following and everyone else is a decade behind. Personally, I feel a sense of loyalty and unless I feel taken advantage of, I am not going anywhere. Would I pay for a software when there is a free alternative that is just as good..? Yes! I use and pay for Photoshop when there is Gimp. I’ll play with these late to the game players, but I’ll probably not waste much of my time.
i think it might be like all other renderers interms of setup and time to complete etc, talking to one user and he says its actually not bad, some nice complete interiors and exteriors are there too from different free users, for a start they seem pretty good looking but gpu is where i fall down, my pc isnt ready for but its supported, will see with some tests myself, never used a gpu renderer before
just ran a test on a vray scene, conversion was ok, one thing i always wondered is how to achieve this look when bloom and glare option is enabled in vray, its seems more targeted in fstorm and you get that star look, anyone can shed some ligth on this? i ran a quick 8 min render test in fstorm, unfortunately you need a good graphics card to run this which dont have
VRay will bloom like that. I don’t have a good handle on it, but once I got that effect. The nice thing is, you can play with it in the VFB until you get your desired results.
Shame it is GPU only…
Most of my scenes wouldn’t fit into GPU memory.
is this made by Karba from rendering.ru..? the username of the forum admin is different, but the user image of a speed skater is the one he always used…
from site
info…
Andrey Kozlov (Karba) is the main developer of FStormRender.
Education: Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhi) 1999-2005.
As you guys know, I’m like the GPU side of rendering and that’s why I’m following FStorm for few months now and I’m using it for such.
Don’t take me wrong, I’m working with Vray for 10 years and I love it, but I have to confess that FStorm is the first true alternative I found to Vray that is literally awesome and better than Vray for some crucial points that have been asked for a long time but never made it.
So I can’t stop playing with it, it’s just sooo cool, when ever I have 10 minutes, I just on with FStorm and play around.
I don’t know why, but with FStorm, everything looks better, and it’s not as if my skills changed overnight, I make the materials the same way, it just looks better.
Beside the materials looking better, the bloom and glare is certainly part of it but it’s mainly the interactiveness that is great, it’s superfast to work in RT with it, nothing comparable to Vray RT.
The nice shots you see are usually the work a few hours or days or two of work, and that’s all because it’s so fast to work with.
Here is a link of few shots I quickly saved out from the facebook page for those who have not access :
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6Tg0tCDvtd8WUZGdTA0QmFONkU
I’m loving it, and it’s so awesome to work with but I have to stick with Vray for most of my project for now as I need features that are not yet implemented in FStorm but if I can, for further small project, I’m definitely considering FStorm as Vray’s alternative.
The more competition the better!
Recent renderers are better because of the path that Vray’s cut for them. If they can try features in a different way than the vray guys do, it’s almost as if there’s a second company doing a different approach to solve similar problems and they might come up with better results which can be taken into account - the more smart people out there the better it gets for everyone 
It’d be real helpful if you could make some comparison test, pointing out what it is you think works better for fStorm.
Sure I’ll try to
One quick note for example : you can actually get away using any glossiness map with FStorm, if you change the bump, it actually acts as you had those little displacements in the texture that alter the glossiness of the texture and looks matte.
I’ll try to make a complete feedback of why FStorm is better than Vray and if I can get also visual examples
Nice looking renders Sbrusse!
One question, i’ve been trying Fstorm myself but since i’m a VFX guy and not archviz i need a lot more features than it currently has (render elements for example…) but one thing i noticed is that even with an HDRI that’s somewhat nicely calibrated and a reflective shader, i usually get lots of fireflies. You seem to have a few bright sources but no fireflies on your shaders? Any tricks? Or post cleanup?
@ Lele - one thing i noticed so far is that FStorm’s noise looks very “photographic”, it doesn’t look CG, it’s hard to explain, but let’s say that at 0.03 noise threshold i could get away with it because it looks like film grain, while Vray’s noise looks very CGish. I also saw some other archviz guys claiming the same, and that they would usually stop their renders sooner because of it. Also, real time glare it’s a big plus, something that vray lacks right now. The Lens Effects thingy could use a complete overhaul (messy controls, too many parameters imo)
the renders from fstorm on their forums are crazy realistic, grant warwick was one of the first guys i ever heard saying he chooses to octane renderer because of the level of realism it posseses over vray in a shorter period of time and now here comes Fstorm, i have been testing it and i have to say with small scenes just the way it renders ordinary things from the start is incredible, i have not much time to waite for renders to complete because of my crappy graffics card but based on what grant says i wonder what the gpu renderers seems to have over the cpu renderers and why the level of realism is so much easier to achieve in shorter period of time, GPU guys shed some light on this. indeed vray is the big boss of all renderers because it handles just about anything but in the chase for realism this new renderers are indeed lacking all the features vray has but they are producing amazing renders