What is it about Germany and rendering plug-ins? Two of the top rendering add-ons come from there: mental ray from mental images, and finalRender from cebas. And while I'm in Andy Rooney mode, what do these companies have against upper case?

Feeble attempts at humor aside, this is a review of finalRender Stage-1, the second release of this advanced rendering software for 3ds max; the first was Stage-0. For the remainder of the review, I'll just call it finalRender. finalRender is much more powerful than the venerable default scanline renderer that ships with max. In some ways it's comparable to mental ray, which, coincidentally enough, will be included free with 3ds max 6, coming this fall to a VAR near you.

So, if you're planning to upgrade, why should you buy finalRender? One reason would be if you use a render farm: The mental ray renderer in max 6 is a single license, while finalRender lets you render on as many networked machines as you like. There are other reasons, which I'll touch upon occasionally, but this is not a comparative review. Certainly, if you're planning to stick with max 5.x for a while, finalRender is a no-brainer. Get it, and your renderings will look 1,000% better.

finalRender provides an abundant set of tools: global illumination, caustics, a special type of displacement, camera effects such as depth of field and motion blur, volume lights and some additional special lighting tools, several dedicated textures, and a texture-baking utility.

The plug-in achieves many of its effects by means of its own renderer, which you use simply by assigning it in 3ds max Render Scene dialog. It has nine (count 'em) rollouts, vs. one for max's default renderer. The first covers global options such as anti-aliasing. finalRender includes two anti-aliasing options: a simple, brute-force sampler with a single control (maximum depth) and a hybrid sampler that analyzes the image and samples only where necessary. The latter is considerably faster, naturally, and often, but not always, produces results of the same quality as the former.

Like mental ray, finalRender renders in buckets rather than in scanlines. The global options rollout lets you set the bucket size and order, as well as whether the messages appear in a separate window during rendering; all of these are also options with mental ray. According to the documentation, when not rendering on a network, you get faster results with larger buckets, and my limited testing bore this out. Additional options include how the render window (frame buffer) clears before rendering, multithreading settings, and the ability to override all scene materials with a global material. There's even an option to allow shadows to follow bump contours, as if the bumps were real geometry.

At heart, finalRender is a ray tracer, and the second rollout gives you control over various related parameters. You can turn on reflection and refraction, set the number of bounces for reflections and atmospheric index of refraction (to simulate, say, an underwater scene), enable blurry reflection/refraction, and more.

But what makes finalRender special is the addition of global illumination, which is a method of simulating real-world lighting, such as the bouncing of light from surface to surface while carrying along the coloring of surfaces it's bouncing from. The GI rollout lets you specify a sky light, along with its intensity, color, quality, and a map to use as the source of the sky illumination. Although it's possible to use the sky light without GI, it's not a good idea; when I tried it, I got a very spotty image. But then, when I tried it with GI, but couldn't see any difference, until I removed the top polygon of the box of which I was rendering the inside. The sky is outside … duh.

While the GI controls themselves are too plentiful to list completely, the most important are the number of bounces, and the final color after the last bounce; this defaults to black, although you can set it to a map if you want. You can also set the amount of color bleeding, the overall contrast and saturation, and even the lighting quality of a high-dynamic-range (HDR) image. But the great thing about GI in finalRender is that, despite the many parameters, it's basically very easy to use; turn it on, and the default setup will suffice for the majority of scenes.

And it's fun to watch it render; the first pass places green dots where sampling occurs (typically around surfaces in close proximity), and the second adds the GI illumination. Also, with the Reuse Solution option, once the bouncing is calculated, subsequent renders are much faster. For example, one scene I tried took 34 seconds to render the first time, but only 11 the second, even after moving the camera. I should mention that finalRender gives you two additional GI engines besides its default: Hyper-GI and Quasi Monte-Carlo. I didn't get a chance to investigate these, but according to the documentation, Hyper-GI produces faster results at a cost in quality, and QMC is designed for outdoor scenes.

Other renderer rollouts cover such areas as distributed rendering, in which you can render a single, large image on a render farm, and caustics, which you can enable separately for reflective surfaces and transparent objects (and, of course, both). I've yet to see truly realistic caustics from any renderer, including mental ray, but finalRender's are relatively fast, and look quite good.

finalRender's displacement method, "micro triangle displacement," is quite different from max's default displacement. Instead of giving you mysterious Edge, Distance, and Angle settings, it simply lets you specify the subdivision level, which is squared to determine the number of triangles into which each face in the original model will be divided. Even at low subdivision levels, it's more accurate than max's method at any subdivision level, but it's also slower. For example, a teapot displaced with a Checker map tiled 3 x 3 took 46 seconds to render with finalRender set to a subdivision level of 3, but only 5 seconds with max's displacement using the High subdivision preset. Also, it requires a much higher Displacement value to get comparable results. Also, I was unable to get smooth edges; for example, using a fairly blurry Checker map (procedural or bitmap) for displacement still produced sharp edges between the checks.

Like mental ray, finalRender offers a high-quality depth-of-field option, which lets you set the distance and lens aperture; the latter option is misnamed "shutter size." But unlike mental ray, you can also set the shape of the aperture--and thus the shape of out-of-focus specular highlights--to any of eight options such as circle and triangle. And if you've ever bemoaned the limitations of the standard motion-blur functionality in max, you'll like the relative wealth of functionality and quality of results with finalRender. The Trails option isn't realistic, but it's great for special effects. Let's hope cebas adds support for motion blur in Particle Flow when it revs finalRender for max 6.

finalRender adds its own Object Properties command to the right-click menu. I won't get into the mostly utilitarian details here, except to mention a nice option that lets you transfer properties between objects.

Included are four special materials and two maps. Among the materials are one called Stage-0, probably for backwards compatibility, plus new ones dedicated for glass and metal, and a general-purpose "advanced" material. The metal and glass materials look quite realistic right off the bat, except that the latter, for some reason, has no specularity. These are both a subset of the advanced material, which includes settings for reflection and refraction--standard and advanced--plus shading, GI and caustics, and sub-surface scattering for volumetric light effects inside objects. So, for example, you can set a material not to bleed color onto its surroundings, or not to receive color from nearby objects. You can also use anisotropic reflection controls to simulate surfaces such as brushed metal, and emulate a prism's ability to separate light into its constituent colors. One of the included maps let you use high-dynamic-range bitmaps, useful for image-based lighting effects, and the other lets you incorporate finalRender's raytracing capabilities into standard 3ds max materials.

Then we have finalRender's lights, formerly part of cebas's LumaObject technology. The object light is very nifty; it lets you turn any object into a light source. Actually, it attaches a virtual spotlight to each face in the object. You have global control over these lights, and can set the color (via the object's material), a multiplier value, the angle of light coverage (narrow/wide beam), and exclude objects from its effects. A special S Distance setting lets you illuminate nearby objects evenly, and a Room Reflection option gives an ambient lighting effect based on the actual illumination. FinalRender's particle light lets each particle in a particle system act as a light source, and there's also a rectangular light that can simulate a fluorescent fixture or a skylight. These all work quite well, but I found a small problem with the object and particle light: Because each is represented as a small X in the viewport, it can be difficult to find and select, unless you use the Select Object dialog. Once you select one, however, its Modify panel rollout gives you easy access to the rest.

Closely associated with lights are shadows, of which finalRender includes the standard complement: shadow maps, raytraced shadows, and area shadows. finalRender's shadow maps improve on the standard ones in that they support transparency. This feature is not automatic, however; you must use a separate function to pre-render the shadows in order for it to work. On the plus side, you can pre-render all the shadows for an entire animation and reuse them for subsequent renderings, say, from other camera angles. The ray-traced shadows are basically the same as max's, with the addition of a few extra parameters such as one that lets you specify shadow-casting by fully transparent objects such as window panes. And the area light lets you choose the shape and make settings that optimize the ray-tracing process.

The finalRender volume lights come in two flavors; a 2D rendering effect and a true 3D atmospheric. Contrary to the manual's description of the former as "real-time," I didn't see a huge speed difference between the two, and the 3D effect does look more realistic, so I recommend sticking with that. Both use the same set of parameters, which exhibit a few differences from those of max's volume light. One of the principal differences is that finalRender's volume lights use a map for noise, rather than restricting you to the standard noise in max's volume light. This is mostly a big plus, although you do give up the "Wind From" option. Also, while the manual says you can use only 3D maps, I was able to get noise with 2D maps, albeit not very controllably. Other differences include the ability to specify graphs for color attenuation and light falloff.

Conclusion

The reference manual is comprehensive and well written; I especially like the feature that lets you jump to a certain section by clicking the corresponding part of a UI screen capture. But I discovered an omission: a number of controls on the rollout for the default anti-aliasing engine aren't shown or mentioned. Admittedly, they're basically the same as those in the standard max renderer's Anti-Aliasing rollout, including the same 12 filters, but the documentation could simply point that out instead of pretending they don't exist. The index is very complete, which is appropriate for such a complex piece of software. The tutorials, however, barely scratch the surface of what the software can do; I would've appreciated a bit more effort here.

As usual with such complex software, the best way to learn is by experience, and also by seeing and examining what others have done with it. In the latter area, finalRender comes with a generous helping of example files that do a good job of showing off its various capabilities. Unfortunately, however, the creators of the files neglected to take advantage max's Summary Info feature for describing what each scene does, so you need to do some sleuthing to find out. Hey, the journey is the reward, right?

Bottom line: This is a well-designed, powerful piece of software that has something to offer just about any user of 3ds max who renders. And if everything I've described isn't enough, finalRender also comes with cebas's excellent finalToon plug-in, which I reviewed in Spectrum last April. You get your money's worth and then some with this software.

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