Fox Renderfarm Blog

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!

The leading render farm in the CG industry, Fox Render****farm, 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 EditorAfter 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.SaveLoadCreate variablesVariable name naming convention:Do not use special symbols other than _ (underscore), if there is a write, it will automatically switch to _Cannot start with numbers _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 variableClear: clear all variablesThe 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 timelinePDIR: 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 sceneFPS: The frame rate of the current sceneThe 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 Render****farm supports Clarisse cloud rendering services. Welcome join us and get a free trial.

The fast cloud rendering services provider and GPU & CPU render farm, Fox Render****farm, will share with you a new version of Clarisse.Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP5 releasedClarisse has been updated to 4.0 SP5! This time, the processing of "Light Path Expressions" has been expanded, and a new firefly filtering system has been added to facilitate more realistic and flexible rendered output.Although Clarisse iFX 4.0 has been releasing service pack updates this year, this time SP5 is the biggest update ever. The update extends the software's handling of Light Path Expressions, including the option to output the variance of the LPE for rendering denoisers that support difference as input.It is also possible to export lobe constant values - used in the Disney Principled, Physical Hair, and clear-coat materials to simplify the process of baking textures during look development.Isotropix has also introduced a new clamping method that ensures a more accurate reconstruction of channels from LPEs during compositing.New firefly filters and improvements to the Standard materialsOther changes in SP5 include the addition of firefly filtering attributes to Clarisse iFX's path tracker to reduce artefacts and noise in "difficult" lighting configurations. By using Fresnel normals to calculate the Fresnel effect, the energy conservation model on the software's standard materials is improved, and the rendering effect will be more realistic.Maya/Clarisse Bridge Tool V2.0 releasedSeeing a lot of friends here who use Maya and Clarisse must have a converter. Tell you, it really does! And recently updated to version 2.0. This tool called Maya / Clarisse Bridge Tool was developed by FX TD Muhammad Etman of Egyptian VFX company Aroma Studios. This tool can export Maya scenes to Clarisse iFX. Allows users to export Maya scenes directly to Clarisse iFX without having to use intermediate file formats such as Alembic. Although it does not create a live link between the two applications, after setting up the export, you can update the Clarisse scene with a single click.The process supports geometry, shaders, textures, lights and animated cameras, and supports shaders and UDIM UV layout formats for each component.During the export process, the scene is automatically converted between standard scale units, co-ordinate settings, and color spaces used in the two host applications.Assets using Arnold's Standard Surface shader will be converted to the Clarisse iFX’s Disney principled shader: a process that Etman calls pretty much one-to-one conversion."Recently updated to version 2.0, which improves performance by updating lights and shaders in real-time. It is said that the shader conversion process is now "4-5x faster" than the original release. In addition, Alembic data is now supported, which means that animations can be transmitted, including "multiple shape objects (like) Skin Cluster". Export should also now preserves the hierarchies of all object types.Fox Render****farm hopes it will be of some help to you. It is well known that Fox Render****farm is an excellent cloud rendering services provider in the CG world, so if you need to find a render farm, why not try Fox Render****farm, which offers a free $25 trial for new users? Thanks for reading!Read more: https://gumroad.com/l/hgTKwRead more: https://forum.isotropix.com/viewtopic.php?f=167&t=6077

The fast cloud rendering services provider and GPU &x26; CPU render farm, Fox Render****farm, will share with you a new version of Clarisse.Recently, Isotropix released Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP2. An important update is the addition of GPU-accelerated ray tracing to the 3D viewport. The Isotropix official said it is based on Nvidia's RTX technology, which can process VFX scenes containing hundreds of billions of polygons in real time. The iconic feature in Service Pack 2 is GPU ray tracing: this is also the result of a three-year collaboration between Isotropix and Nvidia. Let's take a look at the video.It is currently limited to 3D viewports, not final quality rendering, but only wireframes and simple shadow views do not support Clarisse's Previz or Progressive rendering mode.Nvidia-based RTX technology, but works with older Nvidia GPUs. The system is based on RTX, a hardware implementation of Nvidia's DirectX 12 DirectX Ray Trace (DXR) API, available in the company's GeForce RTX, Titan RTX and Quadro RTX GPUs.However, Isotropix says it can be accelerated on any Maxwell GPU or newer version.The window can be set to GPU or CPU rendering, or it can be set to mixed mode. If the scene exceeds the available graphics memory on the GPU, the rendering will fall back to the CPU. Rollback is also used if the scene uses features that are not supported on the GPU (currently including rendering time shift and volume).Other new features include improved sampling of importance in CPU rendering and "massive" improvements in the importance of lighting and material sampling on the mirror and transmission paths.According to Isotropix, the current scene is "four times faster" than the previous Clarisse iFX version.Fox Render****farm hopes it will be of some help to you. It is well known that Fox Render****farm is an excellent cloud rendering services provider in the CG world, so if you need to find a render farm for Clarisse, why not try Fox Render****farm, which is offering a free $25 trial for new users? Thanks for reading!

This article is organized by the CG industry's leading render farm and cloud rendering services provider, Fox Render****farm. 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 very simple for Clarisse users. Fox Render****farm hopes that this article will also help other Clarisse users.First, Clarisse provides a management path which 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 ListAbout the first columnCheck 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 invalidSearch 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 columnChange 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 assetSelect 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 ListRaw 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 columnObject 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.Fox Render****farm hopes it will be of some help to you. It is well known that Fox Render****farm is an excellent cloud rendering services provider in the CG world, so if you need to find a render farm, why not try Fox Render****farm, which is offering a free $25 trial for new users? Thanks for reading!Some of the content is referenced from the official website of Isotropix: https://clarissewiki.com/3.6/using_the_path_manager.html