Q.- Will there be a DEMO of Arion at some point?
Q.- When will Arion be released?
Q.- What acceleration hardware is supported?
Q.- What will I be able to do with Arion Player?
Q.- What will fryrender RT be?
Q.- What happened to VirtualEditor?
Q.- What happened to RC5Player?
Q.- I thought that Arion would be a rasterization engine based on pre-computations. What happened?
Q.- I heard that Arion would be a tool to author VR applications. What happened?
Q.- What does Arion mean?
A.- From Wikipedia: 'In Greek mythology, Areion or Arion is a divinely-bred, extremely swift immortal horse'.
Arion Render is all about running faster and more elegantly, so we decided to make the iconography of the product revolve around the shape and spirit of Arion, the mythical stallion.
Q.- How much will Arion cost?
A.- The final price and licensing options will be disclosed when the release becomes imminent.
The price of Arion will be coherent with the performance and features of the package, and the fact that Arion is next-gen technology. There will be licensing options designed to cover a wide range of needs, depending on the hardware at your disposal.
Q.- Will there be a DEMO of Arion at some point?
A.- For the time being we do not plan to release a demo version of Arion.
However, we will work hard to provide clear and explicit content on Arion's website about features, performance comparisons, compatibility, etc...
Q.- When will Arion be released?
A.- When it's done.
Q.- How does Arion work?
A.- Arion is based on our proprietary mathematical models for light simulation (the ones used by fryrender) and has been written for scratch to take advantage of the latest technology in High-Performance Computing / GPU acceleration.
Our rendering core is branched and has been hardly optimized to run as efficiently as possible on GPU cards and multi-threaded CPU cores simultaneously and seamlessly. Additionally, Arion can be configured to drain power from the others computer in your network, using their GPUs and CPUs as well. This all put together forms a cluster for hybrid rendering acceleration.
Q.- What acceleration hardware is supported?
A.- The GPU side of Arion is based on nVidia CUDA, and thus, Arion only supports nVidia cards. In fact, all CUDA-ready nVidia architectures and models are supported.
At least for the time being, we do not have any immediate plans to support OpenCL or any hardware / API for GPU acceleration other than nVidia / CUDA.
If you would like to know whether your nVidia card is supported by Arion or are looking into what card you must buy, please check the official list of CUDA-enabled devices provided by nVidia.
Q.- Why did you choose CUDA?
A.- After evaluating different options we decided to go the CUDA way.
Q.- What makes Arion unique?
A.- We'd like to make the following 3 remarks:
- Arion is the first truly unbiased and physically-based engine in the market designed from the ground up to make use of hardware acceleration coming from multiple devices simultaneously.
- Arion's approach is to combine the CPUs and GPUs in your system (and the CPUs and GPUs in your LAN). This means that it is not just a GPU-accelerated renderer, but a renderer that drains every single flop available to your machines. That makes a big difference, as modern CPUs offer a great deal of parallel power which aids the GPUs significantly. As a side effect, this also means that Arion can run even without a CUDA-enabled device.
- Arion's framebuffer is not a draft approximation to the final render. In Arion there's just a single rendering core, unlike other interactive solutions which provide two rendering engines (an interactive one and then another for production). In Arion, what you see is what you get, all the way, to the point that if you leave the mouse still, the framebuffer will converge to the final render.
Q.- What is Arion Player?
A.- At some point (after Arion Render is released) we will offer a barebone version of the Arion viewport with all the editing and production features stripped off.
This standalone tool will be called Arion Player, and will be able to load up a fryrender scene and move the camera around interactively. In other words, with Arion Player it will be possible to navigate fryrender scenes in real-time.
Arion Player will be given to all our fryrender customers as a free upgrade called fryrender RT, as promised time ago.
Q.- What will I be able to do with Arion Player?
A.- You will be only allowed to move the camera around. The player will just be a barebone viewport window, without a User Interface.
For the sake of clarity, this is a list of the type of things you will -not- be able to do with the player:
- It will not be possible to configure any of the properties of the scene interactively.
- It will not be possible to render animations or render at custom resolutions either.
- It will not be possible to use Arion Player as a production renderer.
- The player will be limited in the use of CPU and GPU resources.
- The player will not support network rendering.
Note that all these futures are only available to Arion, and will be completely stripped off from the standalone player.
Q.- What will fryrender RT be?
A.- Arion Player will be given to all our fryrender customers as a free of charge 1.x upgrade, as promised time ago.
With this upgrade users will be able to navigate fryrender scenes in real-time.
In other words, fryrender RT will be a 1.x upgrade for fry which will include Arion Player. The term RT refers to the ability to navigate fryrender scenes in real-time.
Q.- What happened to RC5?
A.- RC5 (RandomControl, 5th Generation) is the codename that we used for our proprietary real-time rendering technology over the past few years. RC5 used to refer to an in-development technology, and was actually never intended to become a product itself (at least not under that name).
Arion is the commercial name for our real-time product line, so if you want to put it this way, RC5 is the former codename for Arion's core. Internally, we use the acronym RTRT (Real-Time Ray-Tracing) to refer to the Arion core. The term RC5 has now been dropped.
Q.- What happened to VirtualEditor?
A.- VirtualEditor is the codename that we used to refer to the interactive editor / renderer based on RC5. We picked Arion as the official commercial name for our real-time product line, and the term VirtualEditor has now been dropped.
In other words, Arion is the product formerly known as VirtualEditor, and Arion's core is the technology formerly known as RC5.
Regarding the old names VirtualEditor LITE / PRO / ULTIMATE, they have all converged down to Arion v1.0.
Q.- What happened to RC5Player?
A.- RC5Player is the codename we used for what will now be Arion Player.
Q.- I thought that Arion would be a rasterization engine based on pre-computations. What happened?
A.- When we envisioned our real-time technology a long time ago, rasterization and pre-computations were the only way to offer render-like quality in real-time. As a matter of fact, we worked hard in that direction to the point that an early version of RC5 was nearly finished. We even disclosed a video preview based on that technology which was posted on our website.
We always felt that despite powerful, this technology was not quite as good as what we dreamed of offering to our customers. Mostly because the pre-computations phase was a serious workflow stopper. Our ideal goal was to do real path tracing at interactive rates.
Some time ago we branched the development of RC5 to explore the possibility of getting rid of rasterization and pre-computations taking advantage of the latest developments in GPU-based acceleration. This research phase was successful and eventually took over the old rasterization engine.
In a way, we could say that it's taken some time for the GPUs to get to a point of maturity where what we wanted to do initially has become do-able the right way. We are extremely happy that Arion no longer needs any pre-computations, shading tricks or cheats to be what it is today. We are confident that what Arion has become is in many ways better than what we envisioned in the beginning.
Q.- I heard that Arion would be a tool to author VR applications. What happened?
A.- As a matter of fact, when RC5 was nothing more than a bunch of ideas in a scrap of paper, VR authoring was one of the possible directions we thought such technology might take.
However it is clear for us that the market for such applications is not our market at all. We are a company specialied in visualization and light simulation, and all our resources are deployed in that direction fully. In other words, for the time being, VR authoring is not something Arion will do.
Q.- I own a copy of fryrender. Will I get Arion for free?
A.- No.
Arion and fryrender are completely different technologies, completely different render engines, completely different standalone applications, and completely different products. They are sold separately, and owning one of them doesn't give you any privilege over the other.
It is important to stress the fact that fryrender RT and Arion are -not- the same thing at all. Arion is a full and entirely new product. While fryrender RT is a 1.x upgrade for fryrender that will be released at some point. fryrender RT is just fryrender + the Arion Player (explained above) which uses some of Arion's technology, but with the editing and production features stripped off completely.
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