Worleys new plug-in
 

Just in case anyone has missed it and the accompanying video, check out www.worley.com. Think its time to start saving my hard earned wonga again.... :)

Yep. Been waiting for the video to see what this really was. Looks really cool.

That is 1 fast render engine


The credit card is out and ready


:))))

yepp.. looks amazing :) this is one plugin everyone must have

I dont think I'd use it :( I barely use viper.

New sample video up on the Worley site today. This is now making the damn thing look totally amazing. I know crispo says that he doesn't use viper to pre-vis his scenes, but the output from this plug looks as though we can forego the output of pressing F9 altogether :) ...

It looks amazing


Credit card still out waiting

:)

And with the dollar hitting nearly 1.90 sterling it's getting more and more tempting all the time... I could get every single Worley plugin airmailed to me for a little over 700 quid :)

To true... the good old pound rules

I heard (don't know where) that the price will be $499.

... 5 min. later
ahem, just looked at worley's info...
Despite online rumors, we have not announced pricing or availability of FPrime to anyone yet, but we'll post more details early next week.

Looks like they've released the price! Normal cost USD 399. Introductory price USD 279.
For those of you in Blighty, thats just shy of GBP 150!

Not bad, I'm still more interested in getting my wife to let me get G2. Im using ekkis plug overcaster for my lighting at the minute. Im not really happy anymore :(

Well, it's out next week.... :D

There's even more sample vids over at www.worley.com showing off real time radiosity. 3D World Magazine are supposed to be doing a full review in next month's mag (available at around this time next month) too.

Amazing, radiosity and image sequences. !!!

Looks like they're now taking orders. The discount only lasts til March 16th though!

i want to know how it works! They had to have really thought of somthing new, or cut coreners on quality, because if newtek could make it faster they would.

Heh - I'll let you know. I've just purchased the Worley catalogue of plugins (owing to the $ being so weak against the £)...

Worley doesn't cut corners. Their aren't many programmers out there with Worley's abilities so it is unlikely Newtek could have done this on their own. I ordered it as well so hopefully I'll be able to download it tomorrow. Once they get the SDK worked out so FPrime works 100%, the combonation of FPrime and G2 will really give Lightwave some teeth.

I don't believe they cut corners either...

from what I've seen and read so far it's an iterative renderer; improving quality and precision with each iteration.I'm going to get a copy too!

Wow...... that is just crazy!!!!!

and i like the iteration rendering, it's kind of fun to watch :)

anyone know what kinda system they use for the demos?

Here are a few test renders I did with FPrime tonight. The machine is a P4 2.53 MHz with 1 Gb ram.

This is a 2 minute render. Fprime constantly refines the quality. The image is pretty good after a few seconds and for the first minute improves a lot, after a minute the changes become more gradual.

There is 1 spot light and 1 area light. An HDR image is used for some of the reflections. The floor is a couple of procedurals. Shadows and reflection raytracing are turned on.

and here is my Strat model WIP with no lights, 1 sky dome with luminosity set to 140%. FPrime radiosity set to Monte Carlo, 60% intensity, and 10 bounces. YES 10. This first one is a 10 minute render time or about 11 iterations.

and the same render after 30 minutes...

another cool thing about FPrime is you can zoom in on any point without moving the camera using the mouse wheel. Here is a 2 minute render of a zoomed in section. I reduced this image by 50% in Photoshop.

That's amazing, Cory! Its great to see what can be done with this first hand like this. What do you make of the plugin though, are you thrilled by the results?

My advice would be to beg, borrow, or steal to get FPrime. It is unbelievable how fast setting up scenes are now. Especially with 2 monitors. You put FP in the 2nd monitor as big as you want and as you change your scene, the render adjusts. There are some things that don't adjust immediately (Worley noted they are due to LW limitations) but you just move the time line or hit refresh and it will adjust.

Well that's me well and truly sold then! Cheers for the info, Cory and thanks for sharing your experiences and renders. Oh for two monitors!
*runs off to get credit card*

That last one I reduced because it was 800 pixels tall so here is a cropped section of it at 100%. This was only 2 minutes. I knew there was a reason I microbeveled the hell out of that model.

WAHHHHHH -- No fair. I'm still waiting for my license key from Steve :(

wow that looks great.... but it's not all wine and roses for some people...check this out......http://www.imotionstudio.com/fprime/
This has actually made me decide to stay off of the fprime revolution at least until after my lw8 is shipped..then I'll see what bugs still need to be ironed out. My system specs are. Dell XPS2 p4ht set to dual 3gig. 2gigs ddr2 ram dual monitor setup... Cory is there anything in your documentation about compatibility with LW8?

True enough. I have noticed that there is some grain, and that for a lot of the scenes I've been working with this weekend, LW native renders do come out to better quality and faster.

However, there is the advantage that FPrime can come back to a render in progress if it's been aborted for some reason, and the fact that I can now get acceptable near realtime feedback on scene placement, lighting, surfacing, etc. in the manner that Viper really can't match.

There are a few people that are having some issues but they seem to be the minority. If you got the cash, I would buy it while it is cheap since Worley has stated it is going to be updated quite a bit yet. Even if the rendering was complete crap you still have the benefit of real time setup. I did a scene with 74 lights that took minutes vs hours to light and texture. Personally I haven't had a problem yet. Dual processors might be a source of some problems. Worley has FPrime running exactly the same on LW 7.5 and 8. Also, both Newtek and Worley have publicly announced they plan to work together after LW8 ships to allow FPrime to move to the next level.

*edit* (I rephrased this so it is not taken incorrectly.) I just got an email from Steve and he he says they have a lot of control over the noise from area lights and is not worried about being able to improve the quality.

how about another test image. I did this last night. Not sure of the time. I loaded in Meni's A5 scene to see if I could use FPrime on multiple scenes at once so this one ran in the background while I had another instance running up front. It wasn't more than an hour and I do remember it looked pretty good fairly quick with just some graininess in the shadows. Nothing was changed in the scene.

I did a new test with 147 lights and have added it to here: http://www.idcnet.com/~scc/fprime/fprimetests.htm

I had a few emails today from the very tired Steve Worley and here are a few notes from them along with a few other items I have read - The issue with the grain in radiosity renders containing area lights is something they have a lot of control over and have no worries about improving the quality. The number of passes on the interactive window have no relationship to the number of passes when using FPrime render to save a sequence. The number on the interactive render was added late in development because people wanted something to show progress there. An update addressing the problems, including the image map issue, will probably show up pretty soon. They have plans for a lot more stuff when the SDK opens up.

You made me sad... :(



Ill still have to look into it! :squareeye

Don't be too sad. The happy people far outnumber the sad ones. Worley is also working, and has fixed, some of the issues people are having.

FYI if you have FPrime, version 1.01 is now available in your personal download folder.