www.kraytracing.com

Hi All

Thought I'd post this question here as oppose to the NewTek forum.

I keep seeing really cool images done by Kray and I get really tempted to splash out on it, but the price (if only it was 100 less!) and the fact that I don't _really_ need it stops me.

The bottom line is, I have LightWave obviously, and also FPrime, so another third party renderer would be a luxury. FPrime was a no brainer because you _knew_ you could use it as it mimicked LightWave output, and the previewer side of things was obviously going to be helpful.

Kray is different, it has far more controls, which means it might not be as easy to achieve even remotely similar results to those by say Johny Quick (who's work I'm in awe of!)

I could end up buying something I just can't get the results out of (due to it's complexity) controlling GI in 9.5 is difficult enough and that has far less controls!

So I guess I have two questions:

Is there any time frame on when a demo may be available? Without one it's impossible to tell how easy or difficult it is to achieve good results.

If not, how are new users finding it? Fairly foolproof? Annoyingly tweakable?

Thanks for any advice.
Matt

Hey Matt,

Good to see you kicking about.

I got a seat of Kray for Christmas. At the time LW was Imo lacking in the area of GI and F-Prime which had become our main rendering workhorse was significantly crippled due to the changes in architechture. At that time Kray was looking really good it was a cross platform solution that could produce beautiful Gi renderings at a reasonable rate of rendering. However, LW has made some unbeliveable strides in developing their GI solution it is fast fairly easy to set up , once you understand how to set it up and are familiar with the variables. Kray is different in this respect it has tons of variables to contend with and that is going to make the learning curve a bit more steep as I am finding out at this point in time. But the results do speak for themselves as well as the very favorable rendertimes as well as a broad ability for vast controll of many aspects of GI rendering.... I suppose the one thing that concerns me is lack support for some of LW features which smacks of the LW/F-Prime conflict changes in architechture always concerns me but these guys have seemed to have fared quite well. Once again this is coming from a novice's viewpoint, we'll see how it looks in a month from now...

So yes, IMO, despite all of the advances in LW it is STILL worth the effort to get profficient with. Although, I am just getting started and am realising just how complxe this tool is. But in a month I should be able to getve a more knowledgable answer. However, at this point in time I am afriad I am going to have to say, annoyingly tweekable" but under the circumstances and the level of control you have it seems to be a necessary component. Despite all of this I feel it is worth the effort .... and money.

I have seen question of a free demo copy surface at least twice since I have joined this forum. Personally, I feel it might not be a bad idea and well then there is beta team .... if you have a seat,... you are the beta team! These guys are a small team with limited rescources so they do what they have to or feel is right. Under the circumstances it appears that they have made some noteworthy progress"

Cheers

Hey Matt... Maybe we can get you a copy if you make a nice manual like you did for LW fiberFX

Seriously though I understand your fear about the huge amount of controls in KRay. However those controls are there primarely to squeeze every last breath out of Kray so you can realy get the fastest possbile output. For quickstart all you have to do is turn off cache and you get fprime like output (but faster). Now we also have wiki with some tutorials and manual there so this is a good thing to get you started too.

About demo - yes it's planned, but only after we finish the final release.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask...
cheers!

I've been using it 3 weeks now. Its very fast for rendering interiors. But this comes with years of input from beta testers so its no surprise. Now I am testing to see if it can do other renders FAST (cars, exteriors, animation). I haven't had much success. Maybe the old timers can get good results soon.
The controls are complicated but only a few really have great impact on quality and render time. I said great because some adjustment would only result in a few seconds saved and unnoticeable quality difference. You'll see which ones to tweak I'm sure. But atleast they're there.
Biggest workflow difference for me are the materials and lighting. My lw materials usually have spec, gloss, refl. values and somehow kray just renders them differently as well as lighting a scene in lw,fprime would result in a different output with kray. Luminosity and diffuse values for lumi polys render different in kray.

geo_n wrote:I've been using it 3 weeks now. Its very fast for rendering interiors. But this comes with years of input from beta testers so its no surprise. Now I am testing to see if it can do other renders FAST (cars, exteriors, animation). I haven't had much success. Maybe the old timers can get good results soon.

Hmmmm the comment about the difficulty in doing exterior scenes is a bit disturbing as I was hoping to attempt this but I reckon I should just settle for trying to get a handle on mastering setting up an interior shot. However, I have committed to this and I am willing to invest the time necessary to hopefully master these tools. We are at this point going to have to glean as much info from the "old timers" as we can to hopefully start producing ourselves and then be in a position to start helping other newcommers. Hopefully the software will also mature as well. Lot's of potential here but there is still lots of work to do. On the other hand LW does have a viable venue for doing exterior GI. It is easy to set up reasonable render times which can be tweaked to extract more efficient processes. So in this regard LW has become quite viable. The massive settings in Kray I understand of course is to allow you the user to extract the optimim performance. Which in my opinion is disireable but can be a double edged sword. To folks who love to tweek it is a spot in heaven to those who just want to get the work out or don't understand the terminology of the controls it is a quagmire of confusion which could lead to frustration... justifyably so just differences in perspectives I reckon.

geo_n wrote:The controls are complicated but only a few really have great impact on quality and render time. I said great because some adjustment would only result in a few seconds saved and unnoticeable quality difference. You'll see which ones to tweak I'm sure. But atleast they're there.
Biggest workflow difference for me are the materials and lighting. My lw materials usually have spec, gloss, refl. values and somehow kray just renders them differently as well as lighting a scene in lw,fprime would result in a different output with kray. Luminosity and diffuse values for lumi polys render different in kray.

That was also a bit disturbing to me as well. I remeber F-Prime sometimes would render out differently in some cases prompting me to maintain sepatrate versions of my scenes and Models which were the same but had different surface attributes. Or maintain a set of surfaces which could be switched out. However, if i had an object which had tons of surfaces then that could be a daunting task....

It appears that this going to be a given as each rendering engine is going to interpret surface attribute settings differently. I just don't see how there is a way around this, hopefully, I am wrong.

Thanks for bringing these points to the forefront, I don't feel so inept but I still feel at this point that there is great potentail here and I am willing to make the investment in time as well as money, which we all know is one in the same...

Cheers

Macdoggie wrote:

geo_n wrote:I've been using it 3 weeks now. Its very fast for rendering interiors. But this comes with years of input from beta testers so its no surprise. Now I am testing to see if it can do other renders FAST (cars, exteriors, animation). I haven't had much success. Maybe the old timers can get good results soon.

Hmmmm the comment about the difficulty in doing exterior scenes is a bit disturbing as I was hoping to attempt this but I reckon I should just settle for trying to get a handle on mastering setting up an interior shot. However, I have committed to this and I am willing to invest the time necessary to hopefully master these tools. We are at this point going to have to glean as much info from the "old timers" as we can to hopefully start producing ourselves and then be in a position to start helping other newcommers. Hopefully the software will also mature as well. Lot's of potential here but there is still lots of work to do. On the other hand LW does have a viable venue for doing exterior GI. It is easy to set up reasonable render times which can be tweaked to extract more efficient processes. So in this regard LW has become quite viable. The massive settings in Kray I understand of course is to allow you the user to extract the optimim performance. Which in my opinion is disireable but can be a double edged sword. To folks who love to tweek it is a spot in heaven to those who just want to get the work out or don't understand the terminology of the controls it is a quagmire of confusion which could lead to frustration... justifyably so just differences in perspectives I reckon.

geo_n wrote:The controls are complicated but only a few really have great impact on quality and render time. I said great because some adjustment would only result in a few seconds saved and unnoticeable quality difference. You'll see which ones to tweak I'm sure. But atleast they're there.
Biggest workflow difference for me are the materials and lighting. My lw materials usually have spec, gloss, refl. values and somehow kray just renders them differently as well as lighting a scene in lw,fprime would result in a different output with kray. Luminosity and diffuse values for lumi polys render different in kray.

That was also a bit disturbing to me as well. I remeber F-Prime sometimes would render out differently in some cases prompting me to maintain sepatrate versions of my scenes and Models which were the same but had different surface attributes. Or maintain a set of surfaces which could be switched out. However, if i had an object which had tons of surfaces then that could be a daunting task....

It appears that this going to be a given as each rendering engine is going to interpret surface attribute settings differently. I just don't see how there is a way around this, hopefully, I am wrong.

Thanks for bringing these points to the forefront, I don't feel so inept but I still feel at this point that there is great potentail here and I am willing to make the investment in time as well as money, which we all know is one in the same...

Cheers

Hmm..with exterior renders or car renders I did, lowering the bounce in kray didn't have much speed gain. But in lw and fprime, lowering it I get nearly linear gain. So kray is really strong in multiple bounce renders like interiors. For low bounce situation, in lw and fprime I get faster render. And interpolated FG in lw is even faster and in exterior I think its not so noticeable but speed gain is great.
AS for the materials, from now on I dont use spec,gloss, refl values too much to be on the safe side so I dont get overblown renders. I hope nodes wont present a different problem in itself.

Hey Matt nice to see you. I think you pose a very good question. I am still very new to Kray, I think Macdoggie hit upon many good things. I have been much in the same boat as you, I have FPrime and have & still do really enjoy it. But for me, lighting has always been a struggle. I wasn't looking for a quick fix with Kray, I was looking at improving my renders but with a tool that I felt could help me do it. So I started looking at Kray. Many of the guys here, Johny's stuff in particular, help make that decision happen.

From still a newbies point of view, if I had to do it over again, I would purchase Kray again in a heart beat. It is robust, so learning isn't over night. But one of the things that has made learning this powerful, yet robust, render engine, has been this community. Extremely helpful. Because Kray is still in beta, and as a result, no real solid manual, tutorials, etc. this forum and the great willingness to share/help has made all the difference in the world.

I'm still presently using fPrime for exteriors just because it's quick and easy, Johny & Phedian are working on showing how to get great Kray's exterior. But for interiors, hands down Kray is the way to go. Extremely fast. One of the nice features about Kray, in the exterior realm, and I'm experiencing right now, is the ability for instancing. It's not as robust as HDInstance, but I just couldn't do instancing in fPrime and I don't know LW's native render engine enough to tweak the settings to get decent render times.

here are my 1st couple of test with Kray, they aren't great, but you can see what can be produced with limited knowledge and help from the boards. These are dr. in post, but I'm learning now days, just about everything needs some post work.

Reading Room animation

Wii Fit scene animation

Just use Sunsky.p on TextureEnv. and orange SUN. Thats all
6 bounce light in Kray (recurse 6;) I mean exteriors. Interior need minimum 2 MULTIPLIER in Kray + SKYPORTALS. In interiors Lumi sphere (dome) with same sunsky.p)
Turbity on sunsky turn over 6.

BTW FPrime: this is good tool for setup surfaces - ONLY.
I no use it for renders - too slow and noise.