Hello everyone!

I have just posted my first online kinda tutorial / hint / walk threw video. You can find there renders of RF made simulation rendered in iRay, Arion and Maxwell (actually 2 Maxwell renders – but the other one is just some fun that looked cool and I went for it). You will also find there few Nuke compositing tips and a general tip on how to achieve lets say almost physical correct chromatic aberration.

Excuse me for the voice I’m no radio speaker, and the hour was late ;) I had some thoughts regarding how hard is to record a tutorial… well my imagination wasn’t even half way of how hard it really is. TBH I have recorded over 40 mins of my “not very radio speaking” voice full of “god damns”, “ffs” and other foul language. Thankfully AVID came out handy (as always :).

Basically I tried to walk your through my 3 favorite renderers (since VRay and Mental are pretty covered I thought those 3 might be fun). 2 of them utilize GPU power one doesn’t. Since GPU rendereing is becoming more and more visible on the market those two may come to your attention as worth playing with. What i forgot to mention in the video was that iRay was in version 1.2 and Arion in 2.0.2 – it’s important since iRay seems to ‘slow down’ with higher versions… If it comes to Arion it’s worth to mention that version 2.4 is just around the corner and some cool new features (to mention one: g-buffer!!!) will be very soon available (with very fair price).

And the tutorial / analysis (walk threw?), ye the video:

If you have any questions about above video please do not hesitate to ask, post, e-mail.

8 Comments

  • Hi there! I have a quick question as I’ve been trying to render realflow animations using Arion in 3dsMAX which is not working – the imported meshes are not animated and arion only renders the fluid mesh as it is shown in the active frame/viewport. My question is – how did you render the realflow animation using Arion? Did you use 3dsmax or another program? Many thanks! Martin

    • Gecko says:

      Hi Martin,

      Yes I have used 3ds Max to render that one:

      .
      1st question: Is the fluid you have simulated in RealFlow animating in 3DS’s viewport? If not it’s something wrong with the importing phase of your scene. Arion Renderer doesn’t require anything special to work. Set HDRI (or some lights), apply material, hit render and there you should have the beauty. :)
      2nd question: are you using Arion 3DS Max plugin or standalone? I have never used standalone version, so maybe there’s a problem with bin files?

      Greg

  • Hi Greg,

    The fluid is in fact animated in 3DS’s viewport – as a test I tried rendering it with different rendering engines (scanline, mental ray, maxwell and vray) and in all cases it is animated just as it should – only not usign Arion :-(
    I used the Arion 3ds max plugin in combination with importing the realflow meshes with the realflow importer to get the bin files into 3dsmax.
    How did you get the meshes into 3ds Max?

    Thanks!

    Martin

    • Gecko says:

      Hey, I have put my hands on a system with Arion installed (I don’t own it, so it was a hustle to get the test fast ;). I imported the mesh via a bin mesh importer – one from RF. Mesh was ‘oldfasionly’ made in RF (legacy mesh). Applied material to the mesh hit the render and it went w/o any problem. I honestly don’t know where’s the problem with your system. Software up to date? No frame offsets (on the mesh importer proprieties tab)? No weird file naming?

      • Hi Greg,

        First of all many thanks for checking!
        It is quite curious – I’ve asked someone to help so we used 3dsMAX 2010 with Arion 2.0.3 and installed the latest realflow importer.
        Same as you I also imported the mesh via the RF bin mesh importer (legacy mesh).

        Curious thing is that in all other render engines (scanline, mental ray, VRAY, maxwell) the animation is rendered properly, just not using Arion.
        BTW – we also tested it on 3dsmax 2010 with Arion 2.7 beta – same problem.

        Randomcontrol told me to turn on ‘force animation’ in the ‘object properties’ setting of the imported mesh but this did not solve the problem.
        Which version Arion / 3dsmax did you use for testing?

        Thanks!

  • Danny says:

    Hey there! Dope breakdown, big props! I have a question, I am in need of some iRay tutorials. I purchased the iRay + for 3dsMax and am just curious on where to begin on doing tutorials. Form beginner of materials to the proper render setups.

    • Gecko says:

      Thanks for kind words.
      IMHO best approach for tutorial creation on rendering in unbiased engines would be trying to reproduce a real life picture. At least that’s what I’d do ;)

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