Although there has been quite a buzz for quite a while on Isotropix Clarisse iFX, hovering along with it is a bit of confusion, ambiguity, and skepticism not only from its boastful claims, but also due to the fact that Clarisse iFX is just so very different than any other production tool that we have seen in the 3D world.
Both the answers “no” and “yes” are true for the questions is it a compositor? is it a 3D application? is it a renderer? is it an animation application? as Clarisse iFX is all of these thing, but none of these things isolated, and is certainly destined to alter the way that we think about 3D and computer generated imagery production.
Work on your images until they get final without feeling the need to switch back and forth between applications. Achieve your shading, lighting, layering and compositing at the same time without the need to save in-between images such as masks or passes. It’s really easy and you don’t have to worry about massive disk space and network bandwidth usage
Recently Isotropix has posted a series of promotional videos, demonstrating, explaining, and showing off Clarisse iFX’s capabilities to further solidify how truly revolutionary this product can be. Clarisse is a multi-threaded application and can use all the available CPU cores -In fact the more cores you have the faster it works, and, as Clarisse doesn’t really do anything on GPU’s at all, it alleviates the need for a high-end graphics card.
Aimed squarely at production pipelines, Clarisse iFX comes in at around $2,995 pricing it as a professional tool along the likes of Autodesk Maya, Softimage, 3Ds, The Foundry’s Nuke, etc. and if you have been skeptical on the boastful claims of Clarisse iFX, there is a 15 day demo that you can download and try out, and more so, a personal learning edition of Clarisse iFX for experimentation and orientation. Although Clarisse iFX is available for platforms including linux, Mac OS, and Windows, the PLE version is limited to Windows and Linux versions at the moment.
