| Q&A |
 Furry
Ball,
Vaclav Kyba
March 2010, |
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“
The working process with FurryBall rendering
is more like a WYSIWYG, every change you make shows
up in the viewport right away. With more and more effects
and techniques added most of the reasons why not to
use it as a final renderer become obsolete. Important
thing about FurryBall is that it has been aimed to be
a perfect rendering tool for animations in the first
place since the beginning.”
<Furry
Ball vs Mental Ray (image Carlos Ortega) |
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| Q1 |
GPU rendering is more and more popular for DCC tools. What is
the role of FurryBall : previz, final rendering ? |
| A1 |
FurryBall
is a GPU renderer for Maya that aims to be a final renderer
although there are still some cases where it cannot compete
with
physically based renderers. FurryBall is actually a viewport
renderer but everything you see can be output to file(s), in
fact the final
render output can be done using script commands without using
the viewport at all. The working process with FurryBall rendering
is more like a WYSIWYG, there is no 'RENDER' button for the
viewport renderer, every change you make shows up in the viewport
right away.
It is up to a user what role it will be given in the workflow.
With more and more effects and techniques added most of the
reasons why not to use it as a final renderer become obsolete.
Important thing about FurryBall is that it has been aimed to
be a perfect rendering tool for animations in the first place
since the beginning. |
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| Q2 |
Can
FurryBall be used with compositing software to blend render
layers (AO, depth...)? |
| A2 |
The
first idea was there would be no need for render layers, "it
is realtime, you can fine tune everything in FurryBall".
Although this is
true in many cases, there were many users asking for render
layers so we added full support for commonly used layers (depth,
AO, shadows, reflections, color bleeding, ambient, specular,
...). These can be rendered to a file(s) using our output settings
node system or displayed in viewport.
The demands from our users are very important for us and we
try to add features they want as soon as possible. |
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| Q3 |
Antialiasing
is a major feature, what are the capabilities of FurryBall in
this area? |
| A3 |
Proper
texture filtering is a must have for any renderer, then there
is jitter multisampling and supersampling. Jitter multisampling
is a great feature for edge alias removal which is very important
especially for high frequency geometry like hair. Why is it
so great? Because there is only a very small performance hit
and the result is comparable to a 4x4 supersample. Jitter multisampling
can be also combined with standard supersampling so there is
mostly no need to use some high supersample values which is
always a memory and performance killer. But still supersampling
in FurryBall does not slow down the rendering in a linear way
like it does in most of the software renderers, ie. 2x2 supersampling
for instance will not be 4 times slower but only something like
1.5x - 2.5x. |
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| Q4 |
FurryBall
can display realtime shadow. What kind of shadow is it? |
| A4 |
Currently
there are depth map shadows with many ways of soft shadow filtering
and there are also variable penumbra shadows that are hard on
contact with occluder and softer farther from it, these can
be also known as area light shadows. We are currently working
on translucent shadow maps and plan to add deep map shadows. |
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| Q5 |
FurryBall is an addon for Maya, do you plan to support more
software such as 3ds max or Softimage? |
| A5 |
We
do but not in the near future, we think about creating plugins
for other software (especially 3DS Max) in a year or so. More
probable is standalone version. |
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| Q6 |
Can
FurryBall compete with raytracer or physically based renderer? |
| A6 |
Surely
it can but as mentioned there are still cases where nothing
what is not physically based can compete with physically based
renderers. But the question is - does your render/animation
really need to be physically correct? Physically based renderers
are great as a reference but there are many issues when using
them, especially in animation and then there are those render
times. |
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| Q7 |
GPU
are getting more and more powerfull, can feature such as DirectX11
dynamic tessellation be usesull for FurryBall for displaying
displacement map? |
| A7 |
Definitely,
it is great to see how DirectX API is evolving. Subdivisions
and displacements are one of the greatest features in new DX
but there are many more - multithread rendering support (still
important even though FurryBall is usually GPU limited), shader
linking (possibility to add much better support for Maya Hypergraph
and custom materials), there is also DirectCompute - something
like CUDA/OpenCL but integrated into DirectX and thus great
for existing DX engines. With DirectCompute there are many possibilities
to add for example true raytracing or some advanced effects.
There are also much higher resource limits (16K for textures
and output), high quality texture compression and many more. |
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| Q8 |
Is
FurryBall able to render advanced effects : fur, caustic, volumic
lighting, post effects... And control those effects in realtime? |
| A8 |
It
would be weird if 'FurryBall' renderer was not able to render
fur :) Hair/fur system and rendering is one of the greatest
features in FurryBall, it is closely connected to Maya Hair
so you can use Maya tools for animation and dynamics. There
will be also the possibility to use custom set of curves in
the next update.
There are fullscreen glow (bloom), final image filtering, post
AO and color bleeding adjustments, DOF controls and many more
coming. Every setting or attribute you change is displayed using
FurryBall in realtime. |
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| Q9 |
Do
you think that 3d artists can gain a lot of time by using FurryBall? |
| A9 |
If
we weren't sure of this we wouldn't be working on FurryBall
so hard. Every artist knows the 'OMG, I want this to be finally
rendered' feeling when he hits the big RENDER button. The saved
time is extremely important here, it can be used to fine tune
the result exactly as the artist wants it to be. What for is
a physically based renderer when you don't have the time to
tune things because it takes forever to render anything and
sometimes it is not even possible to adjust these extra details
because it is physically correct you cannot change it even if
it looks weird. |
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