Clarisse iFX 3.0

[Hirazi Blue]

Clarisse iFX 3.0 has been released...

Clarisse is a new breed of high-end 2D/3D animation software which is the fusion of an animation package, a compositing software and a 3d rendering engine. It has been designed to streamline the workflow of CG artists to let them work and constantly interact on their final image with full effects on. Clarisse is used in production by world leading studios such as Double Negative, Industrial Light & Magic or WETA Digital as well as mid-sized to small CG studios around the world! Just in 2015, Clarisse has been rendering images in feature films such as Insurgent, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-man, Mission Impossible 5, Spectre, Bridge of Spies, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Every area of Clarisse 3.0 workflow has been improved to bring the best all-in-one rendering experience ever to date.
This new major version delivers many new and innovative features
as well as a large number of enhancements throughout the entire application such as:

• A brand new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) embodied in a new rendering engine,
  new sets of materials, lights and volume shaders all supporting multiple importance sampling (MIS)
• A complete set of UV baking tools supporting UDIM, UVTiles and AOVs output.
• New scattering and layout tools along with importance-driven textured point cloud generation.
• New scriptable pattern generation using Open Shading Language (OSL).
• Improved Color Management and support for CDL and many user interface improvements.

(Quoted from here)

More info: http://www.isotropix.com/clarisse3

[Bullit]

Anyone here in the forum tested or uses it that can share an opinion?

[Rork]

There are some people on this forum using it.

Member druitre is, afaik, using it as a render tool for Softimage.

rob

[Bullit]

Thanks, let's see if he can give some input.

[NNois]

Some coworkers work with it here in france... personaly done the big video tutorial. That's a real production software really ahead every other DCC.

Maybe a perfect replacement for Autodesk DCC but for modeling and character animation. I wish Houdini Engine and Fabric Engine could devellop a plugin for it...

IMO the only drawback of it is it's a CPU engine, in the vein of the Arnold one.
You can say me that's great but in fact not, CPU's can't progress really further. Every new intel generation win like 10 - 15% of performance compared to GPUs... GPU are the big next thing and Arnold and Clarrise can't follow that because of the code they can't translate.
Yes you can rent some cloud computing but common that's not a solution, drying all that power just to go faster is insane.

[Bullit]

Thanks NNois

What about particles, mograph, sound input to effects?

[NNois]

GPU are the big next thing and Arnold and Clarrise can't follow that because of the code they can't translate.

Guess I was rude, Solidangle is actually develloping a GPU version of Arnold Renderer ;-)
https://twitter.com/arnoldrenderer/stat ... 5911159809

[Rork]

It looks like the big pockets of AD work out for once.... ;)

Would be nice to see where this is going. Also on online renderfarms, where GPU rendering can be a bit hard to find.

rob

[druitre]

Hey Rob, NNois, I hadn't seen this thread. Too busy working in Clarisse...

Yeah, as you said, I'm using it in production now as a companion to SI. Mainly for it's ability to hold huge complex scenes. We have to do a city, complete aerial fly-over type of shots, has to hold up in detail for quite a stretch and I figured I'd be able to build a procedural rig in ICE but not be able to hold a massive enough scene in Soft. We tested Clarisse a bit and decided to take the jump - it is capable of holding incredible amounts of scene items without a hiccup, still giving fast feedback in its progressive renderview, with full GI and volumetrics and displacements and what not. At the moment I'm at a geometry count of 40 million and primitive count of 3.8 trillion (!) and going on.

Interchange between Soft and Clarisse goes through alembic and transfers ICE data pretty well - in fact, I don't even use all possibilities this offers, you can for instance set up custom properties on particles and pick up the data in Clarisse. Standard data (pointpos, velocity, scale, rot) come across well. As I started out totally blank a few months back I'm finding out new stuff every day and feel pretty confident in saying pretty much all you want or need is possible between Soft and Clarisse. (By the way, NNois provided some compounds that saved my ass along the way while setting up the cityrig, big thanks!)

Have to realise though Clarisse is not a modeling or animation package, it's a scene layout system that does 3D and 2D instancing, lighting and rendering. Guess because it is limited that way it can do away with a big part of the internal scene data DCCs like Soft have to keep track of, and purely concentrate on managing large numbers. So it is no replacement or standalone, it's a companion software.

One thing is as NNois points out - it is CPU based rendering, where GPU seems to hold a better future prospect. The software is so tied in around the renderengine that may be a problem. I'm a Redshift adept and see such big leaps in hardware (thus renderspeed) there that it really feels like the way to go. Interactive rendering (progressive) in Clarisse is blazingly fast (can compare it only with FPrime, if there's people here that know what I mean) but for a full render of a complex scene (trillions of primitives) you have to think hours, not minutes (for a 4K frame), or think renderfarm. My scene atm uses about 16 Gigs of RAM, so for a GPU-renderer that would only work with big cards/VRAM (altough Redshift does smart memory stuff making it possible to render big scenes too). The way things are developing on the GPU end, soon that won't be an issue anyway.

And then there are some other things where you can see Clarisse is actually quite a young software, some features you'd expect to be there but that simply haven't been addressed yet. Making items aware of other items properties, linking stuff etc. (Of course, it could benefit hugely from an ICE-like system, but that is a bit of a stretch probably).

Cheers,
Jasper