Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP5 and Maya to Clarisse Tool V2 Released

The leading render farm in the CG industry, Fox Renderfarm, shares a tutorial about the variable management in Clarisse. Clarisse can create environment variables in the scene or directly call the system's environment to use. You can create environment variables in the Variable Editor of Clarisse, view Clarisse's own internal variables, and view the environment variables of the system. Open the Clarisse menu bar: Windows-> Variable Editor After opening the window: File File is used to save the currently created variables as text, and you can also load the previously saved environment variable text. Save Load Create variables Variable name naming convention: 1. Do not use special symbols other than _ (underscore), if there is a write, it will automatically switch to _ 2. Cannot start with numbers _ 3. Can not use non-English characters, if there is a write, it will automatically switch to _ (Clarisse has a chance to crash and exit when forced switching to _ is used if illegal characters are used) Delete: delete the selected variable Clear: clear all variables The types of variables that Clarisse can create are, Bool: Boolean type, 1 or 0. The number entered will be 1 if the number is equal to 0, and 0 if the number is equal to 0. Long: Clarisse's 'long' is a long integer, which can be understood as 'int', integer, and maximum. Double: can be understood as a 'float'. String: character, mostly a path, or a separate non-path character. Built-in is Clarisse's own internal variable: F: The number of frames in the current timeline. This variable is mostly used in sequence mapping. T: Time of the current timeline PDIR: The directory of the current scene. This variable mostly converts all asset paths in the scene into relative paths when packaging assets, which is the same as Houdini’s $ hip. PNAME: The name of the current scene FPS: The frame rate of the current scene The ones below are more about Clarisse's software installation. System environment variables. This is a system variable and a variable set in Clarisse.env. If there are variables in the system that do not meet the Clarisse variable naming convention, they will be skipped. This is not possible to edit in Clarisse. As an excellent render farm in the CG industry, Fox Renderfarm supports Clarisse cloud rendering services. Welcome join us and get a free trial.

This article is organized from the CG industry's leading render farm, Fox Renderfarm. The reason for writing this article is that once our customers encountered problems with Clarisse's asset path management, all the asset paths were originally in the A disk when they were made, and asked if there is any quick way to change the asset path to other. Drive letter. This asset path switch can be a very simple thing for Clarisse users. Fox Renderfarm hopes that this article will also help other Clarisse users. First, Clarisse provides a management path and is in Clarisse's menu bar: Windows-->Path Manager. The Path Manager is divided into 4 sections: the toolbar, the edit field, the path list, and the attribute list. (1) Check Paths (2) Show Missing Files (3) Search And Replace Tool (4) Replace with Variables Tool (5) Change folder path (6) Change File Path (7) Path Edition Field (8) Path List (9) ) Object Attribute List About the first column Check Paths: Basically, the path manager will check if the specified paths exist. Once completed, the last column of the path list (8) will switch from Unknown to either Found or Not Found. Show Missing Files: You can filter the path list to display only path flagged as invalid Search And Replace Tool: Provides a handy search and replace tool allows you to replace paths in batch. Type what you want to replace in the Search Text field and the replacement in Replace With text field. While you are typing your text, a preview of the resulting replacement is updated in real-time. Hit Apply when you are done or hit again Search And Replace to cancel. By default, the search is case sensitive. You can disable the case sensitivity by pressing Case Sensitive. You can also press Check Paths before applying your changes. This is very useful if you want to check the file existence prior applying your replacement. Replace with Variables Tool: It is a batch processing tool. It's a fast and easy way to replace a path by a Clarisse Variable. The path manager will look for the value of a given variable in the files paths and replace the value by the name of the variable. This is to be used with Clarisse's Variable Editor to work on multiple paths. First, define the variable in the Variable Editor and then replace the path with the variable. About the second column Change folder path: You can modify the folder of the asset. You can put the previous assets into a new directory and modify them directly into this directory. Change File Path: The path of the selected asset can be modified. Path Edition Field: Path of the currently selected asset Select the path in the Path List, displayed in the Path Edition Field, use the Change folder path to change the folder where the selected asset is located, and use Change File Path to change the path of the entire asset. The third column is the path list. Show all the paths in the current scene. Path List - Raw Path: The path shown on the object properties of Clarisse. - Resolved Path: The real path. - Type: path type. - Status: Found can be found. Not Found cannot find (lost) that does not exist. About the third column Object Attribute List: The Object Attribute List (9) is located at the bottom of the path manager. It displays all objects and attributes that reference selected paths. If you select any of the items located in the object attribute list, they will be selected in the application. Nothing prevents you from modifying their attributes in the Attribute Editor. At last, Clarisse also provides a scene packaging tool, which can package the whole scene into a zip compression package and change the asset path in the scene to $PDIR (the current project directory, like Houdini's $hip) The relative path at the beginning. This compressed package is copied to any directory and uncompressed to open the scene project. You can see that the path of all assets is normal. It should be noted that if the amount of assets in the scene is relatively large, it is not recommended to use this packaged work, it will take a long time, and there is a certain probability that the package fails. Some of the content is referenced from the official website of isotropix: `_the_path_manager.html`

Just finished the interview with MAXON, Fox Renderfarm is so glad to announce our cooperation with Isotropix in 2018, we also start an interview with them regarding the Isotropix's future development along with the how the cooperation between Fox Renderfarm and Isotropix could benefit both users. Please check the detail interview as below: Fox Renderfarm: Since the first version Clarisse released in 2012, more and more CG artists and studios are familiar with Isotropix, tell us a little about your company. Isotropix: Isotropix is a global, fast growing company specialized in developing high-end professional graphics software for the VFX and animation industry. Founded in 2011, the company grew fairly quickly, and our team is now composed of about 40 passionate and talented people! Back in 2012, when we announced our flagship product Clarisse, there was a lot of excitement but we had to face huge challenges. It’s always difficult to introduce a new paradigm shift, especially in a market that hasn’t changed much in 20 years, and it took us a few years to be recognized as the player we are today in the Industry. Today we’re very proud that Clarisse is being used in production by world leading studios such as DNEG, Industrial Light & Magic, WETA Digital or DreamWorks Animation as well as mid-sized to small CG studios of all around the world! Lately, Clarisse has been rendering the amazing VFX of feature films such as Star Wars The Force Awakens/The Last Jedi, Star Trek Beyond and more recently Wonder Woman, Dunkirk, Valerian, Blade Runner 2049 as well as many TV-series like The Young Pope, American Gods, Black Sails, Black Mirror and Altered Carbon. Fox Renderfarm: Share with us about Clarisse current brand awareness and situation in China. Isotropix: Today, our customers are mostly located in the Western market. We have only a few customers in China. However, Clarisse has already been adopted by studios such as Oriental Dreamworks and Base FX which used Clarisse on several feature films including Star Trek Beyond, The Great Wall or Captain America: Civil War. We’re really excited and looking forward to the next few years to expand our position in this market. Fox Renderfarm: Share with us regarding the product development strategy and promotion in the near future? Isotropix: Many artists still don’t know how Clarisse can revolutionize their workflow: it’s a new software that introduces a paradigm shift allowing users to work interactively on their final images. To make sure that users understand Clarisse’s true power, we need to help them think a bit out of the box. This is why we are releasing more and more customer stories and tons of free tutorial materials so that everyone can truly understand the revolution Clarisse offers. You can find all these learning resources on our website and I strongly invite you to discover our latest Behind the scenes video: Blade Runner at DNEG as they recently won this year’s Best VFX Oscar! Fox Renderfarm: How about your thoughts about cloud rendering service and how it can benefit CG artists? Isotropix: Using a cloud rendering service has a real transformative effect on the CG industry, it gives access to a huge amount of rendering power while being very flexible. It’s a time and money saver for artists and studios that can scale up their immediate needs super quickly without requiring physical machines. Fox Renderfarm: How can Isotropix work with Fox Renderfarm and what benefits that Isotropix can offer to Fox Renderfarm's customers? Isotropix: We’re thrilled to partner with the Fox Renderfarm team! It’s great to see that Clarisse is now part of their offer. Fox RenderFarm is a very serious company owning a large number of render nodes. It gives our customers a lot a flexibility as Fox RenderFarm provides them with a quick and easy access to a huge rendering power! Fox Renderfarm: Share with us about the new features and highlights of the latest released Clarisse 3.6. Isotropix: Clarisse 3.6 is a great release: it comes with a new shadow catcher, an outline shader, a powerful feature called shading variables and a real-time denoiser! With the new Shadow Catcher background plates can easily receive shadows and color bleeding of CG elements in scenes, simplifying greatly live action integration. 3.6 also introduces a new Light Path Expression (LPE) unoccluded event to extract diffuse, reflection and transmission occlusions in custom LPEs. In addition, this release brings a new outline subpixel filter which allows to render high quality edges and silhouettes from 3D scenes to easily create great non-photorealistic images such as blueprints or cel-shading style renderings. The all-new Shading Variables is a must have feature to streamline any look-development pipeline! Users can now create and share true material templates across multiple objects in projects to simplify the management of their scenes. Instead of duplicating whole material networks, users can directly specialize and drive them by defining Shading Variable values at shading group, geometry or shading layer levels. It’s really powerful! Finally, Clarisse 3.6 integrates the new NVIDIA Optix AI-driven denoiser technology to denoise interactive renders in real-time as well as final renders. It’s a real game-changing feature as it saves render times while allowing artists to make creative decisions faster than ever! You can check out our website to learn more about our latest release: 3dot6.isotropix.com and try it for free by downloading our Clarisse Personal Learning Edition at: try.isotropix.com