Frywell Render

Just thought I'd start a thread to list all those little things that are better in Maxwell than in Fry, and vice-versa.
Each line starts with a number for easy reference, then the name of the render engine, and then comes the particular point where it has an edge over the other one.
As a rule, I alternate between Fry and Maxwell.
Feel free to add more !

1- FRYRENDER : Single Sheet Sub-Surface Scattering, great for opaque fabric, leaves, etc. Objects can't be seen through them, but you can see the shadows that are cast on the side opposite to the camera.

2- MAXWELL : Great Rhino Plug-in / integration. Don't know about the other plug-ins though...

3- FRYRENDER : Base geometry for objects with displacement can be ultra simple. For instance, if your geometry is a rectangle, all you need is a quad mesh or two triangles, whereas in Maxwell you need to have some kind of tesselation, or the displacement will be very odd.
This means you have to sometimes create a "per object" render mesh, which is a waste of time.

4- MAXWELL : Possibility to customise the default paths and the program installs in the ../Program Files folder by default.

5- FRYRENDER : As pointed out by Jorari, Fryrender output files seem to be much smaller than those of Maxwell.
Did anyone else notice that ? Is there always a tenfold difference ?

6- MAXWELL : To change a color in the material settings, you click on a button which represents the color, whereas in Fry, there's a button to access the color picker, and a button representing the color, but it's not clickable = silly and confusing.

7- FRYRENDER : Possibly faster noise cleanup. But we really need some kind of benchmarking here...

8- MAXWELL : Has a studio environment. But to be completely honnest, I rather stay in my modeler. Unfortunately, the Fryrender Rhino plug-in still seems quite buggy, and the icons looks terrible too

To be continued....

Cheers,

--
Olivier

As someone who used maxwell I can tell this:
Fryrender- better integration with other app, you'll get the same dialog for rendering in every other soft(max, cinema,..etc)
Maxwell- I find maxwell studio unusable
Fryrender-faster
that is all I can remember for now, but hope to come up with something more

Hi Pjetrus,

And thanks for your input, although I don't consider the Rhino integration to be a success in it's actual state of development.
But I see we agree on the studio and speed (although benchmarking is needed).
I'd like to add :

9- FRYRENDER : Clip-mapping is much more straight-forward, given the ability to weight-map at material level, and not only at layer level like in Maxwell

10- MAXWELL : The official forum is fully accessible, and in particular, the part related to plug-ins. This is not the case with Fry.

11- FRYRENDER : The material editor has a well-organized structure, and the map editor in a separate box avoids confusion, whereas in Maxwell, the "texture editor" may display maps that don't belong to the layer being edited. Moreover, image controls in Fryrender are all directly available, but in Maxwell, they are in a small and "slippery" separate box.

12- MAXWELL : The "Real Scale" feature for textures allows to over-ride texture mapping, so that -for instance- a tile will always have the same dimension , regardless if it is applied to a small or a big object. Makes sense, huh ?

13- FRYRENDER : The material preview has a "magnified" version, and it is possible to choose the "test room" directly from the material editor.

Well, that's it for now.
Feel free comment using the item number.

Thanks !

--
Olivier

To say that fryrender is faster than maxwell is wrong, cause that heavily depends on the scene.

Fryrender i think it has easier material setup.
Before i liked the fryrender cinema 4D plugin best, but now the maxwell one has a new coder, that have made it realy good.
Maxwell has studio, i think it can be usefull. Many export the models from the package and do the setup in studio.
Fryrender you can change the light color in layer blending, you can not do that with multilight.
Fryrender have Importance sampling for image based lighting so that it can get sharp shadows(still broken i think)
Maxwell has .ior files, so that you can take the rendering to the next level of realism.
The fryrender forum, is realy bad. Not because we demo users can not post. But because the betatesters and rest of the crew, act like a gang or something. Say something wrong and you account is banned. Just think of the case with max. For thoose who know that.

Well thats all for today

Stromberg90 wrote:To say that fryrender is faster than maxwell is wrong, cause that heavily depends on the scene.

Perhaps a simple outdoor scene with no SSS, no displacement, and well... nothing that typically slows down an unbiased render engine...

Stromberg90 wrote:Maxwell has studio, i think it can be usefull. Many export the models from the package and do the setup in studio.

I haven't found how to do instancing of objects in the Maxwell plug-in. It looks like the only place you can do that is in the Studio...
whereas it is possible to do it with the Fry plug-in. (Correct me if I am wrong).

Stromberg90 wrote:Fryrender you can change the light color in layer blending, you can not do that with multilight.

Great feature. I wonder how long the Next Limit guys are going to stand that without doing something similar, not to speak of the SWAP thing.

Stromberg90 wrote:Maxwell has .ior files, so that you can take the rendering to the next level of realism.

I hadn't noticed ! I hope it's high on Chema's "to do" list...

Stromberg90 wrote:The fryrender forum, is realy bad. Not because we demo users can not post. But because the betatesters and rest of the crew, act like a gang or something. Say something wrong and you account is banned. Just think of the case with max. For thoose who know that.

I'd be thrown out in one minute then...

Cheers,

--
Olivier

Stromberg...You can talk about the comparison for the same scene of the .mxi files in Maxwell and .dsi files in Fryrender....mxi files size are 10 times bigger than .dsi files...Or at least in my scene of the Building University Interior where every time Maxwell was writing on my Hard Disk I get annoyed with Maxwell. And how I couldn't control the savings frequency...What a pity.

And in this case time render was bigger in Maxwell...But sometimes I think that not so much.

The advantage of using the studio module in Maxwell I'm sorry...I can't see it. For me was a bit disappointing trying to get a real advantage...For example I couldn't pick the objects correctly...Maybe for make some kind of trnaformation in the type file...And quickly launch a render.

Maxwell has the capability of the render region and this is something that I miss so much in Fryrender...!!

And Maxwell it's easier to use than Fryrender...I don't know what is but...It's the easiest render engine to use I've found. And the results obtained are like Fryrender.

And the treatment received in some forums related with Fryrender where some "expertized" members are near GOD...EJEM...Makes me sad. This was the reason why we created this forum...And I would like to take this opportunity to tell all of you that you can make all your questions and the rest of us will try to answer the best way we can. In this forum we shouldn't demostrate that one is better than other we should help each other the best as possible.

Regards.

Yepp, thats what this forum is for
I hope that maybe chema would look here, or at the maxwell forum and understand what a real forum should be like

The color of the global lighting can be modified from:

Did you refer to these parameters?
Regards.

Yepp.

Ok, so let me summarize the new input :

14- MAXWELL : complex IOR, not available in Fry.

15- FRYRENDER : ability to control the temperature of each light in the Layer Blending, which is not available in Maxwell's Multilight.

16- MAXWELL : ability to render a region of the scene, which is no longer available in Fry.

17- FRYRENDER : realistic night sky with moon, although this feature has been stripped out for now.

Edit of 10- MAXWELL : The official forum is fully read-accessible to non customers, and in particular, the part related to plug-ins. This is not the case with Fry, which leaves Demo tester alone with plug-in related issues.
The amosphere in the Maxwell forum is percieved by some as less elitist than the Fryrender forum.

Does that summarize what you guys think ?
Any other points you would like to mention before I start engraving all this on a huge marble stone ?