The other day I purchased an upgrade on my FryRender plugin to the new maxlive renderer from RandomControl. In this post I’ll describe my initial thoughts on this plugin.
Before I begin let me clarify that this is NOT a full-on review of the product. At this point I’m not familiar enough with the application to provide such a review. However, I wanted to pass along what I have discovered up to this point because it may be helpful to others that are considering the purchase or have already purchased it.
The other day I saw the announcement for “Arion 2.0, The hybrid GPU renderer for 3ds Max“. I started reading about it, and it sounded pretty good. I noticed the upgrade options for Fryrender 1.x which I have a copy of so I figured I’d give it a whirl. I purchased the upgrade and had the application installed shortly afterwards. I encountered no problems with the install/licensing procedure. However, it’s about this time that I noticed there’s not really any helpful documentation available for the maxlive plugin. :/
There was no documentation with the installer and if you go to the “docs” page on the site you’ll likely encounter this message “This section of the Knowledge Base is not yet finished. Expected date for completion: End of summer 2012.” when clicking most any of the topics. No biggie, I’ll just check out the forum…oh wait, they have no user forum either. I quickly realize that I’m left to figure out this one on my own.
I fire up 3dsmax and assign the maxlive plugin as my production and activeshade renderer. I wasn’t able to immediately illuminate a scene. The passes/render elements, things like AO, normals, depth, etc., came out fine but the beauty pass was black. I tried various lights, emitter materials, etc., nothing. At this point it was late in the evening so I sent an email over to their tech support link and the next morning I had a friendly reply. Turns out that you need to have a 3dsmax skylight for HDRs/EXRs and/or a sunlight for daylight lighting. I had a skylight in my test scene, but it was disabled. User error on my part in other words. Anyway, that solved the black renders.
With lighting out of the way I started exploring the materials. Again, some documentation would be great. With that being said, I was up and running with the materials in a short amount of time because the settings are logically named and similar to other render engine material settings. To my surprise I found the option to automagically convert existing scene materials over to Arion/maxlive materials. I ran that option and it did a pretty good job of converting the VRay materials in my test scene.
With the materials converted and lighting issues resolved I was ready to render, here’s the first render (click for larger version):
Not bad! I really liked the ‘richness’ in the colors and many of the film options available in maxlive. I did however find it difficult to get a completely ‘firefly’ free image. The render above is scaled down which can help mask those issues. Here’s a small crop from the original 8k render showing what I’m referring to. The original render ran for 5 hours using my single quad-core processor, Quadro 6000 and two Tesla 2075′s. That seems longer than it takes to get a cleaner image with either Vray r/t or iray. I’d have to run a test with this exact scene to confirm that point though.
I only encountered one bug at this early point. It seems that if I try to modify any of the maxlive CPU settings it will immediately crash 3dsmax 2013. I also noticed the activeshade option works really well but seemed to distort my camera angle, but that’s probably something I’m doing wrong and will need to figure out. Other than that, it runs smoothly and seems very stable.
Overall I was fairly pleased with where this render engine is going. The materials, lighting, and options are pretty nice. I’ll need to spend more time with it to figure out how to reduce the fireflies and render times. I also wish the documentation was complete at this point but hopefully it will be complete soon.
You can read about all the features of maxlive here as well as in the Arion 2.0 features list here.
NOTE: I purchased the HDR and roadtexture in this test from HDRI-Hub.com. They offer some nice textures/HDRs at reasonable prices.
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Nice shot for the first try, Jeff.
One more promising engine..
..If You do any comparison,
please Include OctaneRender.
It would be interestng to see
The difference of those =)
Sinc. Glimps
Not until they optimize their voxelizing process. Last time I tried to use Octane it crashed and I was told I needed more system RAM. In fact I needed more system RAM than I could fit into my workstation! They said for this particular scene I would need at least 32gb of system RAM in order for the voxelization process of the scene to happen.
Mind you, both iray and vray r/t render the same scene without such a requirement. Seems completely illogical to me that I would need that amount of system ram for a scene that consumes about 4GB of GPU memory.
Looks like they released a newer version of Octane since my last try. I’ve installed it and will try to put together a comparison of Vray r/t, iray, Arion maxlive, and now Octane.
I’m looking forward to this comparison, Jeff! And while I’m posting I’d like to thank you for many years of great tutorials, tips and articles! Posting this was so damn overdue
Best regards from Berlin/Germany
Nupsi
Thanks
Congratulations Jeff,
Your progress has really came to light.
Crapper John is still holding your legacy in q2 wodx : )
Very interesting Jeff.
It would be really great to see the exact same test with VRay RT GPU and iRay.
Hopefully you’ll have some time to test it out.
I have noticed that with Vray RT GPU the “firefly” effect also takes a while to go away, slower then I hoped.
Hello Jeff Patton,
at first sorry for my not so very well formed English and many, many thanks for this website, and all the fantastic
posts and reviews. I was reading some of them today and was very impressed what other peoples are doing with their computers. It is amazing what you are rendering with your program from Autodesk called out 3ds max. I am more hardware, network and security oriented. And by the way why you where talking about yourself, that your are a small fish? Inside the 3d and graphic arts scene you are one of the biggest freelancers out there, your work is speaking for your selfs! I will prefer come back from time to time and read more of this articles you were writing here, it is really interesting to see and read what kind of stuff other peoples around the world are going to
produce with their computers, I love to read about those stories. Is this your main job, creating those fine and wonderful graphics? I read at some lines above that you are using 4 GB RAM and I was guessing, that is a little bit
less or better called underperformed, sorry for writing you this, I know you are the artist and not me, but I am the hardware/network freak. Since Windows 7 with 64Bit and multi core cpu´s are on the market it is not only able to address much more ram, it is also able to manage this many ram. Perhaps interesting for you to thing about, if you are going to assemble a new one at one day. To find out the minimum ram size I´ll count for each cpu core
2 GB of ram, once more again for the minimum. That means for your 4 core cpu = 8 GB as the minimum.
As an 3d freelancer and graphics artist you are keeping more an eye an the video ram, that should be symmetric, likes your Quadro 6000 and the Tesla C2075 duo, all with 4 GB video ram, this is I thing for the whole scene that must be fitting in the video ram of each of your cards, owed and related to the main render job, is it?
But the system ram is much more urgent as the most peoples will thing about and even urgent for a smooth work flow! If you are using Windows 7 you will need 2 GB as a minimum for the system it selfs, but if you open 3ds max it´ll be “called”, running through the cpu and will be stored and placed in the system memory, but if you begins now your work and you open some files, they will be count high also to the system ram and then with a 8k till 12k file size it must be swapped to the hdd, which is much much slower. So if you going to buy ram, thing about, the one core per 2 GB ram thing, I don´t really know how many your mainboard will be able to support, but 8 – 16 GB I want to guess you even to install. At the time ram is really cheap, ok I am from Germany, in Europe and I don´t know the pricing i the USA, but this are not so hard differences I mean.
If you start windows and you are logged in, please try out to open the windows task manager and have a look how many ram Windows is using from you system memory and then once more again after opening 3ds max, the rest will be for your file!!! For the same art of work I was assembling a new machine based on a ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS with 64 GB ecc/registered ram, ok this was supported from the Intel xeon e5-2960 cpu´s, but this guy is using
Autodesk AutoCAD > Revit > 3ds max for rendering large files, they are constructing big machines like stone crushers and so on or better called demolition machines. Through doing searches and researches I was finding this great page from you.
Ok perhaps it looks like, that I am bragging a little bit, but on the other side it is also not a secret wisdom, that much system memory is speeding up any program and project also much. And in your business time is money
And thing about will not makes you a poor man
Greetings from good old Germany
Franky
Hi Franky,
It’s not that my workstation only has 4gb of ram, I have 12gb for that. Full specs on my workstation are listed HERE (#13). I use GPU based rendering instead of CPU based rendering here as it works extremely well for the types of scenes I work with. Therefore I’m constrained to the memory footprint on my GPUs (which is currently 6gb). Again, that’s alright too as most of my scenes fall within the 3.5gb to 5gb range. This limitation seems to be changing as GPU rendering applications evolve so hopefully it won’t be much of an issue going forward.
At any rate, the issue I outlined above was that Octane Render was needing far more system ram than I can physically install to my workstation in order to complete its voxelization process on a particular scene. Whereas on other GPU rendering applications the scene rendered and only consumed about 4GB out of 6GB total GPU memory. So I gave up on Octane until that could be addressed. Last night I installed an updated version of Octane so perhaps the voxelization process has been refined further…I don’t know at this point. Either way, since it’s installed again I’ll include it in my comparisons.
Danke!
Jeff
Hey Jeff – hope things are good with you. Thanks very much for posting your testing to date. I’m keeping an eye on Arion as it looks tempting, but definitely have my reservations about it. I’ll be really interested in hearing how things come along.
Brett
dear Jeff,
thank you again for your sharing, you are the pure inspiration for my works.
you encourage me so much,
blessings to you!
Interesting render you have their Jeff
I never tried Fryrender, but i was writing an review about Arion (that time 1.6 – if anyone is interested: http://www.3d-sphere.com/software/arion-160-review). I was really surprised about the result it can do (i guess the “technologies” are similar while comparing Fryrender to Arion) but comparing it to KeyShot i was a bit disappointed about the speed. If you already tried all renders around, maybe try also KeyShot for comparing? 
Thanks for the link. Seems like a lack of good documentation is an ongoing issue with the RandomControl applications. Hopefully that will be addressed in the near future.
I’m going to stick with VRay r/t, iray, octane, and Arion/maxlive for the upcoming article because I can see already that it’s going to be a rather time consuming task. Perhaps once the initial article is complete I will revisit it and add in Keyshot, Bunkspeed, and possibly Indigo, etc..
I know what you mean with “time consuming” and its great that we can read your findings by this
Hope to see more comparing in the future, good luck 
Hi Jeff,
It’s going to be interesting to hear your thoughts. Especially comparison between iRay and V-Ray GPU. Bunkspeed shot uses iRay anyway so it should not be much different then what you get with 3ds Max.
Keyshot on the other hand is CPU only. It is really fast, it is actually much faster then V-Ray RT running in CPU mode.
I’m going to compare Keyshot to PI-VR Vred since both work in CPU mode. I have to install my 60 days trial of Vred later this week.
“I’m going to compare Keyshot to PI-VR Vred since both work in CPU mode. I have to install my 60 days trial of Vred later this week.” – Be sure to let me know when you get the comparison completed and I’ll post a link to it as well.
Thanks for the overview. I always love it when there is a new post on the Jeff Patton blog!
One render engine I have not read much about on your site is Maxwell. Have you ever tried it? If I remember right, it’s unbiased, but not GPU…. Anyway, I just remember being impressed with how they handled materials with a very slick layering system. The newest update to iray seems to be getting much closer to this too. Maxwell’s option to adjust lights post render also looked incredible – not sure of the memory requirement for that though.
Drew
Yes, I purchased a license of Maxwell several years ago when it was in the ALPHA stages and was included with the +1 license deal. Long story made short: I didn’t stay up to date with the community/development there or installation here and now they say they are unable to locate my account information. Meaning I’d have to purchase yet another license unless I can find my old one on a backup drive here somewhere. Perhaps one day if I get time to dig through my old hard drives and find my old license I’ll contact them again about this…but until then I’m certainly not buying a third seat of that software.
Thanks for being Jeff!
Man, your existence has been so helpful to me over the years, and obviously to many many others. Glad you exist bro!
Can’t wait to see what results you find.
Thanks again Jeff
That’s pretty awful of NextLimit’s part.
Stinks they can’t locate my info but I can only fault myself for not keeping better records here. I’m hopeful that I have a copy of my license stored on a backup drive.
On the upside due to this issue I’ve learned to keep duplicate copies of all my software licenses/info on a spare USB drive.
Really useful blog! You are one of my favourite artist, since people is asking about Octane and Maxwell, can I ask for your Thea impressions?
My thoughts on this. Firstly, Fryrender is an excellent unbiased renderer which I have been using for years; reliable, stable, intuative – I’ll probably be upgrading to Arion 2. That said, if Maxwell offered me the chance to jump ship for the same price, then I would. Why?
The reason being – if I had anything to complain about it would be the company, RandomControl. Having got off to a good start with Fryrender, which was updated frequently, they set to work on several other projects including RC5, (a real-time walkthrough package). At some point they decided to cancel RC5, but made no mention of it and instead allowed the hype in their forums to continue, before releasing Arion 1, deleting posts related to RC5 from their forums and threatening to ban several users in the 10 page complaint thread that followed, (which was eventually locked).
The only reason they have switched their forums off is because of the constant negative feedback they were receiving, mostly regarding the length of time they were taking to release software updates that they had been promising. Lack of documentation has always been as issue with them, although in the past the forums always made up for this.
I’m not trying to dig up the dirt on past events however I am genuinely saddened by how a small team that started off by listening intently to their customers ended up alienating so many users, (presumably even more so now they have cancelled all but two of their plugins). Sometimes focussing 100% on the product isn’t enough, you need to step back and listen to what your users are telling you!
Thanks for the informative post. I remember at one time they had a forum when I purchased FryRender in its early stages but I wasn’t around when all that stuff happened. Sounds like quite a mess and reminds me of how the old maxwell render forum was for a while. At one time it was pretty easy to get banned there too.
Interesting to see how developers and customers interact sometimes. Sometimes it goes well (VRay forum) and sometimes it doesn’t.
I have bought maxwell and fryrender in beta stage. Fryrender mostly for the announced RC4/RC5-realtime engine. Like said above it has never been released… I’m a Maxwell user and yes, they had some big problems too before the v1.0 release. But they fixed it and compensated them with a plus one license and always communicated with their customers! The service and the forum is great!
But concerning Arion and Fry…
Developing a software for about 6 years (starting with Fry) for various platforms (max, maya, cinema4d, sketchup, xsi, lightwave, Rhino), selling it as platform independent software (i use max and sketchup) and then canceling the support for five of them! Ok, you can’t really call it development , what was going on there for the last years, but now it has been canceled completely without any warning! Same thing like they did before with their other product fryrender “Swap” and the long announced and never released realtime engine vaporware RC4/RC5 for fryrender!
And this time they disabled their forum too to avoid the complaints of frustrated customers and clean the forum from old promises like the one that every old fryrender and Arion customer will get one live plugin for free as compensation for the RC4/RC5 thingy! Chema said last year on their forum:
“The RC5 project was cancelled years ago, and proper explanations were given as to why that was necessary. So please, stop waiting for it because it will never happen.
However, as explained in another post, existing customers of fryrender (and Arion) will be given one of the LIVE plugins for free (the one they choose).”
The part with “the one they choose” is obsolete i think, because there are only max and maybe xsi in the future… and about the rest… i think the answer is the deactivated forum…
And to remove the forum without any announcement or statement is really a joke!!! Is this the way you treat your customers?!? And they have no forum now… this is really some childish and stupid action. Unbelievable! Let’s see if they come up with a relauch after some time – maybe after the reduced price update period.
Really… Great software!!! I can say for me… Randomcontrol (The name says it all!) – never again!!!
Does Maxlive support the Participating media?
Hi Jeff,
can you tell me where is the function you mentioning ” To my surprise I found the option to automagically convert existing scene materials over to Arion/maxlive materials.” ? thx
a. Right mouse click in a viewport.
b. When the menu appears select the “Convert materials to RandomControl LIVE” option at the bottom.
Thx Jeff got the hint, unfortunately for me it wasn’t working “so great” like for you
however after one day of testing like an idiot “because the documentation is not so good so far” i was able to get an result i was happy with 
http://www.3d-sphere.com/renderers/v-ray-20-review “the renders are on the last page” Tomas
Great blog again Jeff!
May i just add; Arion render is suposse to work with keppler gpus as well with cca 15%-20% increase in performance compared to gtx 580 vs gtx680. I heavent heard whats performance with K10 and K20. As well standalone version of Arion 1.6 had a choice of network rendering across different systems (Windows, Linux etc.), where now standalone version is less in price however the network rendering is out of picture, they kept in for max live only.
I am getting conflicting info on Kepler performance with Arion, I guess ill have to try on my own. Would you know Jeff what GPU is better for Viewport or and Render in Arion ?-Guys here http://www.treddi.com/forum/topic/93187-test-gpu-render-arion/ are saying what i wrote in previous post however I mailed to RC and they said that Fermi has more power.
Hi Andy,
Unfortunately I don’t have any Kepler based hardware at the moment. Soon as I get my hands on some I’ll be sure to run some tests. That being said, I’m hearing the same thing as you outlined, Kepler based hardware is running similar render speeds to Fermi based hardware. They (Kepler) do use less power though. Also, I’m not sure what kinds of software optimizations are in place today for the Kepler stuff.
Hopefully in the next month or two we will see some of the Kepler based Tesla’s hit the market and any associated software updates/patches. Maybe that will provide more horsepower for the Kepler based rendering solutions.
Greetings Jeff
I got to some more data about Arion so i thought to share, K20 however 3000 E is performing of course better than everybody, 111w total power consumption and fast as any two gtx cards no matter 580 or 680-Very very nice half consumption and double the power. Guys posted that 680 has 20% higher fps i rendering with Arion than gtx 580 does. (Like this gtx 480 = 1,41fps,gtx 580 = 1,58fps, gtx 680 = 1,98fps (single xeon 3.0 ghz with amd v7900 2gb = 0.8fps, i7 920: 0,28 – 0,38 m/ps = 0,33 m/ps
X6 1090T: 0,35 – 0,44 m/ps = 0,4 m/ps
i7 920 + 2x gtx480: 2,60 – 3,40 m/ps = 3,00 m/ps
Quadro600: 0,18 m/ps)) However Random control guys are saying that Gtx 580 is 10% faster.User that soon plans to buy couple gpus extra just for rendering purposes will have no clue whats better. Gtx 580 3gb power consumption-300w and Gtx 670 4gb power consumption 180w. I posted this TEST file on http://www.fileupyours.com/view/334429/ArionTest.rcs
http://www.fileupyours.com/view/334429/Concrete_01.jpg so others can try it out (thats file tested all those fps numbers here) and maybe let us know how is performance with their system.
Oh yes when you get Test file , make folder-name it resources and put jpeg concrete in it and then open Test file.
Now we havw direct from randomcontrol http://www.randomcontrol.com/customer-area however only for customers and you can see results on http://www.randomcontrol.com/arionbench