Interview with Isotropix About the Cooperation with Fox Renderfarm

Just finished the interview with MAXON, Fox Renderfarm is so glad to announce our cooperation with Isotropix in 2018, we also started an interview with them regarding Isotropix's future development along with how the cooperation between Fox Renderfarm and Isotropix could benefit both users. Please check the detailed interview below:

Fox Renderfarm: Since the first version of Clarisse was 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 series like The Young Pope, American Gods, Black Sails, Black Mirror and Altered Carbon.

Fox Renderfarm: Share with us about Clarisse's 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 and 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: What 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 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 that owns a large number of render nodes. It gives our customers a lot a flexibility as Fox RenderFarm provides them with 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 time while allowing artists to make creative decisions faster than ever!