Lightwave Plugin F.Prime 3.01 [The most wanted plugin ever]

Published by Ice Zero | Filed under Video

F.Prime is a rendering engine with a unique design focus. Unlike traditional renderers, F.Prime is not just a final output step. Instead it is your companion during the entire process of creation from initial setup, through texturing and lighting, keyframing, and of course final rendering. It revolutionizes workflow by giving you constant feedback about your current scene and the effect of changes. You can always just see your render.

The enormous success of F.Prime was entirely due to its revolutionary change to LightWave’s workflow. Since that release, we’ve improved nearly every part of the software, all with the focused goal of boosting LightWave workflow even more. Users have sent literally hundreds of ideas and requests for improving F.Prime. F.Prime 3 delivers all four of the top demands, tightening LightWave integration, culminating in F.Prime 3.

LightWave 9.2’s powerful new Node texturing system goes far beyond LightWave’s older surface textures. Nodes include not only texturing, but also advanced shaders and new materials. F.Prime 3’s core has a new surface engine, rewritten to emulate and support all Node types. Surfaces in F.Prime 3 accurately render interactively, even complex node graphs. Node shaders and materials, including the advanced raytracing types, are all supported. You can see and edit even Dielectric, SSS, Skin, and Sigma surfaces interactively with F.Prime 3!

LightWave 9.2 also has a new versatile camera system, including not just camera types like Orthographic, but also different rendering modes like the Advanced camera (good for generating environment maps) and surface baking tools. F.Prime 3 fully supports all of these cameras as well. One F.Prime window might show a closeup view of your characters face, and simultaneously, another F.Prime window is showing a real-time baked view of that face’s UV map.

F.Prime’s already-fast raytracing engine has been updated to provide even more speed, even better multithreading, and optimized memory use. The core data structures have been reorganized to efficiently support 64 bit LightWave without doubling RAM use.

An unsupported bonus tool, WSN, allows network rendering with F.Prime 3. The WSN launcher creates remote Screamernet nodes that look and act like LightWave’s “LWSN” nodes, but use F.Prime’s rendering engine.

F.Prime Rendering System
F.Prime is a rendering engine with a unique design focus. Unlike traditional renderers, F.Prime is not just a final output step. Instead it is your companion during the entire process of creation from initial setup, through texturing and lighting, keyframing, and of course final rendering. It revolutionizes workflow by giving you constant feedback about your current scene and the effect of changes. You can always just see your render
F.Prime Workflow
F.Prime is not a previewer. It is a renderer, and fast enough to compute and display your rendered image interactively. The workflow change this makes is best experienced firsthand, but even the demonstration videos on this site give a feeling of its power.

F.Prime is particularly adept with complex scenes with many lights, transparency, reflections, high polygons, radiosity, and area lights. Like all 3D programs, F.Prime’s rendering speed is highly scene dependent. For simple low polygon scenes with just a few lights, both F.Prime and LightWave render at roughly same speed. As scene complexity increases, (especially as transparency, reflection, area lights, and radiosity are added) F.Prime’s renderer tends to outstrip LightWave.

F.Prime Progressive Rendering
F.Prime’s interactive renderer is faster, but it also has an offline Render mode which is even faster. But even better, it is not just a simple rendered sequence saver like LightWave. F.Prime’s design is workflow oriented, with the powerful ability of progressive refinement. This simple but powerful idea allows F.Prime to revisit rendered frames or stills and efficiently increase their quality iteratively. For example, you might create an initial very fast draft render of all of the frames of your project. As you’re viewing that first low quality (but complete) sequence, F.Prime is already working to repeatedly improve each frame. No work is wasted or quality lost. You never need to specify render quality in advance. Instead, you simply let F.Prime’s refinement “cook” for as much time as you want or have. You can also abort renders in the middle of frames and resume them later, which is particularly important with very slow or print-res renders.

A few examples may illustrate how progressive refinement changes workflow:

It’s noon, and you need to deliver a rendered sequence at 3 pm. You start F.Prime rendering. At 2:50, you hit “stop.” You don’t have to estimate or predict what antialiasing level you have time for in advance.
Very soon after you start your animation render, you can inspect a draft version to sanity check for gross errors. As F.Prime continues, you can preserve a copy of the animation at any time to hold as a safety backup. You can even deliver a complete animation early to your producer or customer when they panic and ask for it sooner than you expected.
You want to make a test animation or large still render while you’re out to lunch. You simply start F.Prime, and view the result immediately when you return. F.Prime will not stop too soon and waste CPU time. And yet you won’t have to wait for it to finish after you get back, since it’s always ready.
Your slow render is about one hour into a two hour print res render. You want to reboot your machine since you just installed some new software. You just stop F.Prime, reboot, then have F.Prime continue from where it was, with no time wasted.
You have some idle CPU time. You can load up your old scene from a few days ago and give it some extra (unneeded but welcome) polish.
Your print resolution render takes 5 hours to render, even in F.Prime. After 30 minutes, F.Prime’s already saved a full resolution but low quality placeholder image. You use this to set up your Photoshop layers and actions. When the final render is ready, you just swap in the final image and apply the prepared Photoshop effects. This method works with animation processing and compositing too.

Download plugin here [1.56MB]
http://rapidshare.com/files/70864232/LW3DpluginFprime3.01.rar
No password needed
No Mirrors Please

Download Video Demonstrations here [19.5MB x 3] + [3.8MB x 1]
http://rapidshare.com/files/70865183/Video_Files.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/70866161/Video_Files.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/70867061/Video_Files.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/70869064/Video_Files.part4.rar
No Password Needed
No Mirrors Please