FurryBall (GPU)

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Since June 2018, the company stopped developing. They give the renderer away for a "Server Maintanance Fee" of 49 Euros per year. It is the fully commercial version without restrictions. So the latest supported DCC releases are Maya2018, 3dsMax 2018 and Cinema4D 19.

A citation from the website:

You can see your render in real-time hairs, Maya Fluids, with bumpmaps, textures, soft shadows, reflections and refractions, ambient occlusionandcolor bleeding, depth of field and many other features directly in Maya viewport.No more waiting for render! FurryBall is about 30-300x TIMES faster than CPU renderers on regular Graphics card.

The company developed this renderer as an inhouse tool for their own movie productions. To be honest, these are not really a really good example. But the renderer is getting better and better. They do a lot of comparisions with other renderers. You can download the examples scenes and try to get the best out of your renderer and compare it with furryball.

They have a educational version for 99 Euros. It is available for students or teachers. They now offer a watermarked trial version and a credit version. You get a credit if you send them images which leads to an exitended free usage without limitations. A smart way to recieve a lot of images for promotions.

Features:

Release RT 1.4:

The new release introduces the possibility to export scenes from one supported application in a furryball 3d scene description and load it as a opaque standin into another one. e.g. you can export one scene or geometry from 3dsmax and import it into maya. Not sure if they support a (extremly helpful) lowres preview, at least they do not show it in the demo video. Well, it behaves like a normal standin geometry with some more options what you want to import and what not. Nice detail: In the feature demo video they show a "huge" scene, a simple interior set. Pros call this a small detail and huge scenes start at ten thousends of objects and hundred million polygons. As another feature they introduced toon shading with a lot of options. It works as well with hairs and can produce very interesting results. But I think the most important new feature is the implementation of aiStandard as furryball shader. This allows the user to switch between renderers easily and use furryball e.g. as a fast preview tool.

Release RT 1.3:

Furryball now has been replaced by Furryball RT.

Release 4.0:

This release supports multi GPU rendering as well as NVidia Optix and DirectX11, sounds really interesting. You are able to switch between biased/unbiased rendering. The implemented tile rendering as well as physically based full GI on Nvidia cards. Now a standalone application is available. Network rendering is implemented. With Nuke you can render directly into the nuke interface. A very interesting new release. With the furryball standalone for about 660 Euros, they have a very interesting option.

Current release 3.0:

The new release implements furryball completly into maya as a regular renderer without the need to export and render in another application. Watch their demo videso, its impressive. Indirect lighting, objects as lights, particels and hair. They are really pushing the limits the guys at aaa studio.

Current release 2.2:

They added instancer support what is a great feature as well as environment fog and a texture analysis procedure that will load only necessary mip map levels, what leads to better usage of texures. And they cut the price in November to 50%, cool!

Current release 2.1:

Furryball now offers realtime DOF inclusive bokeh effects. Thats really great! Same with realtime motion blur. Its now also possible to export motion vectors, but why should you export them if you can do it in realtime?

Current release 2.0:

They improved a lot of things. They have Deep Shadow maps, complete fluid support for maya fluis (wow thats great!), hair system, a minimum hair screen size to avoid flickering of hairs.

Furryball is one of the new next generation GPU renderers. With a DirectX11 capable graphics card and Windows Vista or higher, the renderer creates high quality renderings really fast. They offer realtime displacement mapping as well as subsurface scattering.

The price compared to other renderers especially GPU renderers is quite nice. Its about $999 per license right now (May 2011).

 

 


Last update: 01.2021


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