cebas Product Details Page

Firstly, as a standard version (finalRender R3) is targeted to the mainstream user base, while the other version, called the Studio Edition (finalRender R3 SE for short), is the perfect choice for bigger production houses and advanced users, seeking the maximum in quality and flexibility. Both products use the same rock solid Hollywood production-proven rendering core and produce the same rendering results (when not using any of the advanced features of R3 SE). Check out the SE Comparison feature page to learn more about the differences. With a purchase of either finalRender R3 or finalRender R3 SE, you will receive a complementary copy of finalToon R3.

finalShaders added

With the release of finalRender R3, finalShaders is no longer separately available for R3. Instead, all of the finalShaders materials are now available as part of finalRender R3 SE. In addition, we moved some of the finalShaders materials into the standard edition (R3) as well. The materials moved to the R3 product are:

fR-Wire - This has been a long time wish of many users - R3 now lets you render your objects as if you had applied a Lattice modifier to your object, but without the overhead of additional geometry.

fR-Volumetric - A true volumetric shader that creates shader data within your objects, not just on the surface. When used in conjunction with many of finalRender's other features, such as Sub-Surface Scattering, fR-Volumetric can help you produce effects that no other material can produce.

fR-Layer: One of the most flexible finalShaders materials ever! fR-Layer lets you layer materials one on top of another using Photoshop style blends (Overlay, Screen, Multiply, etc) to create some truely stunning end results. This material has not only been moved to the core product, but has also been modified internally, and now supports MAXScript and sub-object animation.

finalRender R3 SE also ships with the following former finalShaders materials and textures:

fR-Tension
fR-Curvature
fR-Fastskin
fR-DistantFur
fR-Ghost
fR-Electron
fR-Elevation
fR-ThinFilm
fR-Velvet
fR-Wet
fR-Xray
fR-3DGradient

Note that previous versions of finalShaders will continue to remain available for earlier versions of finalRender.

Interactive Rendering

Interactive Renderer - The Interactive Renderer (IR) is a new way for 3ds Max users to interactively adjust finalRender settings and scenes whilst obtaining near realtime feedback of the rendered result - directly in 3ds Max Viewports.

New Object Types

fR-Scatter is a new way to create and distribute millions of objects inside your 3ds Max scene without the usual memory overhead which is associated with large numbers of objects. fR-Scatter has options for varying the scale and orientation of your objects; options for material variation as well as full control over what you see in the Viewport.

finalRender R3.0 SE ONLY

fR-Ocean has been added as a new finalRender object type. It allows you to create realistically animated large scale water surfaces. When used in conjunction with the new fR-Ocean material, this is a powerful tool for creating almost any body of water, very quickly!

New Materials

As well as moving the finalShaders materials into the finalRender core, new materials have been developed and added to the core tool-set of finalRender R3.

fR-Override: Allows the user to control how your materials are 'seen' by finalRender, in addition to the main visual material you can now define different materials for use by secondary ray effects. This makes it possible to use different materials for reflections, refractions, caustics, shadow casting, shadow receiving and GI - all on the same object! This is a very powerful new material that enables many special effects that previously required either multiple render passes or special geometry tricks. Note: an earlier version of the fR-Override material was previously released on the Cebas forums as a hotfix for finalRender Stage-1 R2.

fR-ReWrapper: finalRender's development is all about supporting the needs of our customers - YOU! In an effort to enhance finalRender's Render Element System to outperform anything known so far in 3ds Max, the fR-ReWrapper material has been added to allow maximum flexibility when writing out Render Elements, within one rendering pass.

finalRender R3 SE ONLY

fR-VolumeSolid: This is a new material that allows you to volumetrically 'eat away' at your object. Enabling you to produce complex displacement-like effects entirely within the shader, avoiding the geometry overhead, commonly associated with displacement techniques.

finalRender R3 SE ONLY

fR-Ocean: For use in conjunction with the fR-Ocean object this materials offers features such as automatic foam generation and particulate matter.

Material Enhancements

As well as producing new material types for finalRender R3, we have also enhanced many of the existing materials with many new features and bug fixes.

fR-Architectural has been upgraded a lot, so that it matches the current state of the 3ds Max internal material. It also comes with new functionality as well.

Specular Highlights can now be individually adjusted and balanced against the reflectivity of the material.

Anisotropic rendering effects are now easier than ever and offer more control and flexibility. Most especially, real world effects and the behavior of reflections now match reality better than ever before.

Ambient Occlusion plays an important role in lighting and optimal scene setups; finalRender adds new functionality and features to get an even better and more flexible AO workflow with the fR-Architectural material.

Self Illumination has been added and it now supports real world scales, based on physical units.

Switching off time consuming rendering effects on a per material basis is now possible. This helps a lot in getting the most out of finalRender without sacrificing image quality or render time.

fR-Advanced:
- Adds the new Anisotropic rendering effects
- Adds a new Clamp Output rollout to control the color values of this shader
- Adds new options in the GI/Caustics rollout menu

fR-Metal: Introduces the new Anisotropy effects as well.

fR-Light: Several new parameters and functions have been added to this material.

fR-Matte/Shadow: Now offers many new options and functions.

fR-Dirt: Now offers two new modes - Corner and Contact.

New Texture Maps

fR-Layer Map: Similar to the fR-Layer material, this allows you to layer standard 3ds Max texture maps on top of each other with Photoshop like layer blends (overlay, screen, multiply, etc).

fR-Multi/Sub Map: This is a special texture map that allows random switching between a list of texture maps, making it much easier to provide variation in materials in your scene.

fR-Mesh Distance: This is a new texture map that creates a mask map based on the distance between meshes.

New Light Type

fR-DomeLight: With finalRender R3 we've introduced a new light type - a dome light. This makes it easy and quick to setup your scene's lighting and reflections without having to resort to computationally expensive solutions such as GI.

New Render Effects

fR-Glare has been added to finalRender R3. This new Render Effect simulates photo-real brightness overshoot of nearby pixels on film material or CCD cameras. Control and adjustment of this effect can be done at interactive rates and gives instant feedback most of the time.

Render Element Enhancements

One of the major focuses of finalRender R3 has been the improvement of our Render Elements support - in conjunction with our new fOpenEXR exporter, R3 now offers unprecedented control over Render Elements in 3ds Max. Many existing Render Elements have new options to enhance compositing or rendering workflow in general and new Render Elements have been added to offer increased flexibility or advanced functions for complex compositing tasks.

New Render Elements are:

fR Alpha
fR Ambient
fR Ambient Occlusion
fR Self Illumination

Updated and Enhanced Render Elements:

fR Caustics
fR Global Illumination
fR Lighting
fR Reflection
fR Refraction
fR Shadows
fR Speculars
fR SubSurfaceScattering
fR Velocity
fR Z-Depth

Render Elements exclusive to finalRender R3 SE:

fR Complete
fR Material
fR Object-Material ID

Render Element Passes

Render Element Passes: In addition to the many new and improved Render Elements, finalRender R3 SE users can enjoy the advanced Render Element Passes functionality to build up their own professional rendering pipeline to handle advanced compositing tasks. Our unique Render Elements Passes functionality allows the output hundreds of layered Render Elements in one go - bypassing the built-in 3ds Max limit of only 32 render elements.

Linear Workflow Enhancements

Linear Workflow (LWF) has became something of a hot topic lately throughout the whole industry. However, there is a lot of hype about LWF, much of it causing more confusion for the user.

finalRender R3 always works internally in a fully linear mode (and always has). No shaders or other fancy tricks exist (nor are required) within finalRender to get a correct linear workflow. All calculations are linear and lighting and color handling are all fully linear. If wished, the final output can be adjusted to any non-linear display type including printing to film or other output devices.

To have a proper linear work-flow we do suggest to follow these simple steps:

Make sure your displays are properly calibrated and re-calibrated on a regular basis.
Make sure that all textures used for a project are linearized by either a proper de-gamma or by a proper lossless color space conversion, before use.
Make sure that 3ds Max is using a proper and correct Gamma value throughout the whole application including Material Editor and color swatches, including or excluding any possible Display corrections.
Never ever apply Gamma correction to linear file formats when saving them!

With finalRender R3 we have introduced several new tools and features to make this process easier for you:

fR Photographic Tone Mapper: This render effect helps a lot in tone mapping HDR rendering output, so that they are properly shown on non-linear displays (such as your monitor!).

fR Physical Camera: This is a new series of controls added to all standard 3ds Max cameras. These offer real world camera settings for easier and faster camera setup. Effects like Exposure, Motion Blur, Glare and Depth of Field are all based on real world camera values that can now be easily adjusted and controlled.

The Bitmap HDR map has been improved and enhanced and now offers a new Color Space Conversion tool with multiple options and methods to handle linear and non-linear images. Many available bitmap textures come with a 'pre-baked' gamma correction, making those textures behave strangely when used "as is" within a linear workflow. The Bitmap HDR map now offers a "De-Gamma" option which is a function to strip out all non-linear information in an image. It turns a non-linear image file into a linear image! Besides "De-Gamma", LUT files are supported as well, to define the target color space of an image. (Note that Bitmap HDR's functionality can be used on non-HDR images as well!)

Discussion about Linear Workflow became even more popular when ILM created their OpenEXR file format to introduce an open standard to efficiently store linear bitmap files. finalRender R3 offers now, one of the best OpenEXR implementations available for 3ds Max - so good in fact, that Autodesk has adopted it as part of the Connection Extension available to 3ds Max 2010-2011 subscribers.

The fOpenEXR bitmap handler offers many new unique features to help in maintaining a clean and efficient linear workflow. Features like unlimited OpenEXR layers, stored in one single file, help greatly in keeping the amount of bitmap files to a minimum when doing compositing work.

Anti-Aliasing Gamma: finalRender R3 introduces a separate Anti-Aliasing Gamma value to the advanced control section of the Anti-Aliasing rendering menu. This allows the user to assign an individual Gamma value to the Anti-Aliasing engine of finalRender, which helps a lot in solving many rendering problems and issues, that would have been impossible to solve in R2 of finalRender. This feature is good for night or dark scenes were AA in darker areas is critical, especially when the final result is displayed on a Gamma corrected screen.

General Enhancements

Visual Debug: A special "visual" debug mode has been added to the raytracing acceleration settings. By enabling this new debug mode, the rendering will show a false color image that encodes through a cold/warm color gradient with the quality of the raytracing acceleration tree (MSP-Tree). This makes it much easier to balance your scene for speed/RAM issues.

Physical Sky: The physical sky model has received several enhancements. There are now different sky color models that may be selected - this solves the 'pink sky' that was a common complaint of earlier versions of finalRender. A ground plane color option is also now available. Along with many internal corrections and enhancements the physical sky model is now better than ever.

Hybrid Rendering: finalRender R 3 introduces a new true hybrid rendering technology. Besides the standard Raytracing algorithm, another special "Scanline-Rendering" algorithm has been added to the core rendering engine of finalRender. The main advantage of such a hybrid approach of using two rendering technologies, at the same time, is improved rendering speed and better image quality. Both rendering technologies have their advantages and disadvantages; combining the best of both technologies into a hybrid rendering core leads to a much better and more robust rendering solution than before!

Iterative viewport: Implemented as an ActiveShade renderer, finalRender R3 is now able to produce results "on the fly;" this represents another step towards a faster rendering and quicker scene setup.

Micro Triangle Displacement: MTD has been enhanced a lot in this release of finalRender. New options along with many core changes make this rendering effect much better than before. New triangles created by the MTD algorithm may now re-use the original Smoothing Group for smoothing the final surface, or they may use material ID information or a specific smoothing angle.

Global Blurry Multiplier: The Global Blurry Multiplier in the Adaptive Multiple Ray Sampler (AMRS) offers improved functionality by allowing global adjustment of all blurry rendering effects in a scene at the same time.

Cylinder Camera: Now offers more options and better control than before. It is now possible to adjust each view-axis in detail. Note: The new Cylinder Camera was previously released on the Cebas forums as a hotfix for finalRender Stage-1 R2.0

Particle lights: Particle Lights have always been a specialty of finalRender, no other professional rendering system offers the same power to render a series of lights in a scene, all individually controlled by a particle system. fR Particle Light has been enhanced and updated, it now supports the latest 3ds Max API calls and methods and in addition to this freshen up of function calls new features have been added as well! Particle lights now support real raytraced and area shadows.

Raytracing: Updates to the raytracing core bring new tools and functionality to this release of finalRender. With the introduction of a global Ray Bias value for all secondary rays in a scene, a great help has been introduced for debugging or fixing a scene. Refraction and Reflection rays now have individual environment map and color slots, so that they can see different things in one and the same scene.

fR-PhysicalSky: finalRender's Physical Sky texture map is now visible in the modeling viewport as a background image map. Interactive updates in the 3ds Max viewport of this texture map are possible when using the map in texture mode.

Motion Blur: A new global TM Sampling option has been added to the motion blur parameters.

In addtion finalRender R3 SE now offers now Motion Blur mesh samples.
Object Properties: finalRender Object Properties have been enhanced and new features and functions have been added. Every object may be turned into a Matte/Shadow object without applying any kind of material.

MAXScript: finalRender R3 offers better 3ds Max integration than any other version before; many enhancements done to MAXScript, for example, allow a much easier and better integration in existing or new rendering pipelines.

fR Color Mapping has new options and controls for even better Exposure Control.

Render to Texture: finalRender R3 now supports proper Render to Texture (RTT) Edge Padding even with transparent materials in contrast to other rendering solutions offered by 3ds Max. Projection Mapping Options, like "Ray Miss Check" and custom "Ray Miss Colors," or custom Element Background colors for outputting Rendered Textures, is fully working.

Details Detection: finalRender R3 is all about reality and simulating the light flow within a 3D scene. Proper flow of light and energy transfer, based on physically accurate light transportation models, is the base upon which finalRender is built. However, for the user, the freedom to leave the boundaries of physics has always been there and will always be there. "Details Detection" is a great tool that was introduced to finalRender some time ago to add more depth to an image, in other words, a more pleasing visual result in less render time. By adding new controls and features to this tool, a whole new level of realism is now possible.

Several optimizations and adjustments have been made to the finalRender Render Dialog. Some functions have been removed and some have been replaced by other more advanced features.

General rendering core enhancements and changes have been made to increase overall rendering speed and rendering quality. The filtering methods, for example, used in Anti-Aliasing for secondary rays has been optimized to create a much cleaner result with less noise. These modifications represent a "massive" change to the rendering core, it is very likely and to be expected that renderings of pre-R3 scenes may look different compared to R3.0 renderings.