Limitations

Real-time renderer

Flair is a real-time renderer, not an offline renderer. This means that there will be an inherent limitation in terms of the complexity it can render. The main bottleneck will be the amount of video ram of your GPU (VRAM).

We recommend 8GB of VRAM for 1080p (full-HD) content, and more for productions that need to render at higher resolutions. Flair uses between 1.0-1.5GB of VRAM to render a 1920x1080 image. So, when rendering at 4K, Flair would take 4 times as much VRAM, leaving only a few GB left for the polygons and textures of your scene–if you only have 8GB available.

Thankfully, stylized rendering often does not require the amount of detail and complexity of photorealistic rendering. Here are a few tips to make the most of your stylized production.

  • Focus on feeling the scene, not describing it in detail.

  • Make use of indication in textures to convey and abstract unnecessary detail.

  • If the background is static and the camera does not move, why are you doing it in 3D? You can paint it and use an image plane with its material set to final color in Flair, or composit it afterwards.

Additionally, when optimizing a production for Flair, think in terms of optimizing for a game engine. Here are a few things you can do.

  • Use displacement instead of adding unnecessarilly detailed geometry. GPUs nowadays can effectively tesselate geometry dynamically, allowing you to add detail only when required.

  • Use single textures or texture atlases when high-resolution textures are not required. Do not load your tiled 4K UDIM textures unless you really need them.

Missing Ray-traced features

As Flair is not a raytracer, some features will not be available. These include soft shadows, reflections and refractions. You can fake some of these in some cases or render them out in an offline renderer to merge them with some compositing magic. However, it will still require extra effort, so its important to highlight this as a limitation.

Stylized objects need to be meshes

Global effects can be applied to all elements that appear in the viewport. However, the Flair material and the embedded control it offers can only be used in meshes (polys or nurbs). Nurbs support is limited too, as it won’t support the use of VertexFX (as it doesn’t contain vertices).

Have you encountered other limitations or ways to get around some limitations? Let us know on Discord.