Speaking of Pepe and Pepeland . . .

In the previous post I referenced "Pepe". I have come to the conclusion that you may not know to what I refer. Pepe was a test render by Daniel Martinez Lara using a secret BETA version of a renderer called The Arnold Global Illumination Renderer which was to be used in Project Messiah. I was amazed by the rendering, concept, and use of alternate means to fool the viewer into believing that it was all a completely real scene. It's not always about lighting. The use of sound, the handheld look, and the seemingly random auto-focus truly added to the piece. It was done in 3dMax circa 1999 (even more amazing). Check out Daniel Lara's site HERE.

Also, do yourself a favor and download and view "Pepe" HERE. I really thought it was brilliant and inspiring.

RandomControl releases fryrender RT/RC5

fryrender RT

I wrote about fryrender in Maya Plugin Power. Their realtime renderer is ready for a look. The video itself is very reminiscent of the way "Pepe" was done. The whole hand-held, auto-focus look really lends to the realism of animation. You can check out the whole RandomControl site here. I thought that their renderer was very comparable to Maxwell Render. This RC5 is a realtime renderer. Wow. We shall see.

In the mean time check out what they have to say...

fryrender RT is the first unbiased render engine with real-time visualization capabilities.

fryrender RT is an extended version of fryrender which provides the tools necessary to export your scene into a format that our real-time engine RC5 can navigate at interactive framerates.

We are aware that the wait for fryrender RT / RC5 has been long. Now that we are facing the final stage of development, we have decided to make the wait feel a bit shorter by using this frontpage to post content created with RC5 every now and then. This way, you will be able to see for yourself what fryrender RT and RC5 will be capable of.

First RC5 preview - 2009.05.20

To create the following preview we took a camera-animated scene made in fryrender using 3DStudio Max. We loaded the scene in fryrender RT and precomputed a .RC5 dataset. This dataset is a single file which includes the scene description (camera animation, geometry and materials) plus the Global Illumination information precomputed by fryrender RT. Then we loaded the .RC5 file in rc5player.exe in playback mode. When started in playback mode, RC5player plays the camera animation frame by frame, writing each image to the hard drive.