Project Felix Render Composite Tool Now Available as Beta

Adobe unveiled a new project at the last Adobe Max conference, Project Felix. Designed to be a 3D compositing applications that any one can use, Project Felix is now available as a Beta. If you have a creative cloud subscription you can download and try out the 3D rendering tool, and render images.

Project Felix, V-Ray Under the Hood

Project Felix uses the Chaos Group’s V-Ray rendering engine under the hood, letting you render high quality images realistically. The compositing app is aimed at non-3D users though, so this means that literally all of V-Ray’s settings are hidden from you. Users are given a simple quality control pulldown with Low, medium, high and highest presets for rendering. Expect long render times.

Images are rendered directly to disk, and can either be saved as a PNG or as a Layered Photoshop file. The layers will contain a layer for the 3D element, the background, and what ever scene color you had initially. Remember Felix is for graphic designers with no 3D experience, so there are no render passes for various compositing elements.

Lighting, Shaders HDR

Lighting and shaders have also been dumbed down. Project Felix offers a simple drag and drop of materials which are in MDL (Nvidia’s Material Definition Language) format. If you are familiar with MDL you can likely import your own.

Lighting is also really simplified to a single click. Felix can set the scene lighting based on an imported image. You can change the lighting with a few simple controls if you don’t like what has been automated for you.

The lighting scheme is an IBL, using HDR images. You can import your own HDR images, jpg and png’s.

Models

Felix only allows you to import OBJ 3D models, other formats are not supported. It does read the OBJ file’s object groupings, and those are accessible in Project Felix. This lets you easily apply various materials to parts of your model.