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I’ve recently been working on converting a scene from mental ray to Arion.  Here’s a few tips that you might find helpful…

1.  Stay away from real world scale for your UVW mapping.  Fry materials don’t allow you to enter a real world size for your bitmap, so your bitmap for your Fry material would show up as a 1″ tile if real world scale is turned on in your UVW Map modifier.

2.  Don’t rely too heavily on the material converter for converting your materials over to Fry materials.  It doesn’t convert menal ray materials.

3.  Semi-transparent objects, such as curtains and lampshades, are a bit tricky.  The best approach is to take a transparent material and add a second layer that is opaque.  From there, you can control the balance between the two to get the right effect you are looking for.

4.  Save your materials!  If you have some reusable materials, save them to the Arion material library…no use reinventing the wheel each time.

5.  3D Max’s Multi-sub object materials do work with max, so feel free to use them where you need to.  Once in Arion, you can still edit each material individually.

Getting the hang of the FRY Materials used for Arion is quite simple, although it is a completely different way of thinking than the mental ray A&D materials.  Here is a quick overview to help those familiar with mental ray’s Arch&Design materials get used to the FRY Material’s interface.

Reflectance

The Ref 0 map slot is the equivalent to the diffuse map slot in the mr A&D material.

The Ref 90 parameter is where you  dial in your highlight color.  This is equivalent to the Color map slot of the Reflection parameters section of the mr A&D material.  For the most common materials, you can leave this as-is, or drop the value down to around 234 to avoid over bright reflections. 

Fresnel

The Fresnel parameter controls the balance of the two reflectance maps/colors based on your viewing angle.  This also controls the index of refraction for any transparent materials as well.  This is the equivalent to the BDRF curve in the mr A&D material.

Roughness
Roughness here is not a direct translation to the roughness setting in mental ray, rather it seems to best compare to a combination of the diffuse roughness setting and the glossiness setting.  Basically, a setting of 0 will give you smooth, glossy reflections and a setting of 100 will give you a soft, diffuse surface.  Below is a sample render of a default 50% gray material with only a black and white striped image applied as a roughness map.

The other settings on the main tab, Anisotropy, Rotation, and Bump,  are pretty self expainatory and perform the same functions as the like-named parameters in the mr A&D material.

Transmittance
For transparency settings, you’ll have to click on the transmittance tab of the layer on the material tree. Set the mode to Dielectric transmittance.  Note that your roughness settings have a large impact on transparency.  The lower your roughness setting, the clearer your material will be.

 I hope that this is helpful information to get you started.  To learn more about working with FRY Materials,  layers etc, be sure to read the manual and visit RandomControl’s Tutorials and Resources page, here: http://www.randomcontrol.com/tutorials.

As I’ve found is the case with most things in Arion, lighting is really pretty simple.  If you’ve ever used the self emitting properties of the Arch & Design materials in mental ray, then learning the lighting in Arion should be a snap.

Below is a comparison between mental ray’s Self Illumination material and Arion’s Emitter material.

The lighting in Arion is created by an emitter material that you can apply to any geometry in your scene.  The actual settings of the light material is pretty simple – there are only two things to dial in: Color and Power.  The one thing that threw me a bit was efficacy – I initially assumed this controlled the falloff of the light.  Changing this value simply acts as a multiplier of the light.

There is also a library of preset emitter materials available if you want to skip that part all together.  One of the simple and innovative highlights of the lighting material is the ability to select the color temperature from a visible color scale.  This not only tells you the temperature of your lights in °k, but gives you a visual representation as well.

The best part of all is that with Arion being a physically-accurate rendering engine, you no longer have to focus so heavily on thinking like the software in order to get a specific lighting setup.  You can now go back to looking for inspiration in the real world and apply it to your scene and it will just plain work.

For kicks, I did an experiment to see how this works with a flashlight.  Here is the result:

A real flashlight has a bulb and a reflective cone behind it to channel and reflect the light in one direction.  So, that is exactly what you need to do in Arion.  Create the geometry for the bulb, apply an emitter to it, create a reflective cone behind it to channel the light, and you’ve got yourself one nice flashlight.

Oh yea, add in the fact that you can tweak the light’s settings interactively during the render and it really seals the deal.

Fran has just posted a new video tutorial that gives a really good high-level overview of the Arion interface and basic operations. There’s a lot of good stuff in there! Go to www.randomcontrol.com/tutorials-arion to check it out.

Ok, so I’ve received my copy of Arion a few days ago and installed it on an old core2 2.13 GHz computer – I have access to other computers, but I was intrigued at the thought of making this 4 year old computer a decent rendering machine again. Since Arion uses the GPU in addition to the CPU, I figured all I needed was a decent mid-range gamer card. I ordered the GeForce gtx 260 OC for 200 bucks.  More on that later.

The actual Installation was a breeze – as long as you follow the instructions. There are two things you have to install along with Arion in order to get it running right. The instructions and links to the downloads are posted in the Arion wiki page at http://www.randomcontrol.com/wiki/index.php/Arion.

Once I was up and running, I was like a kid in a candy store. Moving the camera around, dialing in focus and depth of field, and updating materials during render time are all great fun to experience after so many years of the old-school rendering work flow. It’s kind of like DVR or a cell phone…you’re fine without it, but once you have it, it is hard to imagine going back.

Figuring out how to navigate the interface was fairly simple, and even on my old computer without the new graphics card, the feedback was pretty responsive. Applying new materials is not as straight forward – so it took me a minute to figure it out: Select the material you want to apply, then alt+click the object you want to apply it to. (er…I didn’t really figure it out. After trying to drag and drop a material into the scene about 15-20 times, I looked to the ever-so-helpful user forums for the answer)

Arion also has different buffer modes which come in handy (z-depth, uvw mapping, etc), and some compute much faster than others. I found it best to switch to one of the other modes to make camera adjustments and then back to Color mode to make material updates and the actual rendering.

All in all, I am extremely impressed with Arion so far.  Yea, it doesn’t have all of the features of fryrender yet, but it has all the basics and at blazing fast speeds for the quality you get out of it.  All of the renders have that true-to-life feel to them that take years of mastery to achieve the same thing in mentalray.  I can’t wait to see what I can do with this software once I actually learn it a bit better.

Once I get up and running with my new graphics card, I’ll start to get into the meat and potatoes of this thing.

I’ve been using mental ray for the past 7 years and I’ve been really pleased with the results I am able to get out of it. However, I have always been frustrated with the 3D workflow in general – make a change, render, go get coffee, come back, see your update, tweak, repeat.

About 2 years ago, fryrender caught my eye. I thought the results were absolutely amazing, and I was really intrigued by the idea of a physically accurate, unbiased rendering engine. No steep learning curve, no endless tweaking, just dial in the render dimensions and hit render.

Something was still holding me back from making the switch though. The render times just weren’t where I needed them to be in order to be effective with the limited resources that I have. Then, I saw the tech demo of Arion, and I knew I had to try it. All the great workflow benefits and high level of quality that fryrender has to offer at tremendously faster speeds.

With Arion being fairly new (as of this post), I figured I would do a favor to the 3D community and blog about my experiences of transitioning from mental ray to Arion. I plan to cover materials, lighting, rendering, and share general shortcuts, tips, and tricks that I pick up along the way.