< A couple of weeks ago someone also posted a comparison of AA in Brazil vs. Vray and Brazil was the clear winner
Have you the address of that?

I wouldn't compare the UI/workflow of Vray to Brazil. Even one of the guys from Vray admits they need a UI overhaul, while the Brazil UI is nearly identical to that of Brazil for Max. That could be good or bad, dependending on your point of view ; ) Modo's UI really is something on a higher level, being able to configure however you choose to. Definitely a cool feature, but overall not very important to the resulting image.

My workflow is normally to stay in Rhino as much as possible. It's gotten much more practical now that I started using Clement Grainer's mesh unwrap plugin. If I need more advanced UV tools then yes I will mesh the objects (sometimes in Moi, sometimes in Rhino) and send to modo, then return to Rhino again.

Also I just started using Fry and DAMN the results are so good. Will be amazing if modo finally opens up an SDK so Fry can plugin to modo. Imagine setting up in modo, click render and start Frying! : )

I'm travelling now just using my phone so I can't really copy/paste links. But the comparison was done by Paul Sherstobitof to compare the results at filleted edges. Vray had sharp blocky shading at a G1 edge, while Brazil transitioned it nice & smooth. I think it was about 2-3 weeks ago. This may not be indicative of all AA situations, but it's a very important one for product shots

How are the render times with Fry render?, is fry or maxwell a viable (usable) option for the casual render guy:), who don't have an render farm to support him?

I have a dual-quad so Fry is not bad. Actually gets pretty clean images in about 10-20 minutes. And the "light-layer blending" is so awesome, combined with very fast setup times. You don't need to worry about setting up antialiasing, sampling, caustics, etc. It's automatically done for you just as in reality. But on my wife's Macbook Pro (2-cores) obviously the render speed becomes an issue (then it's about 3x-4x slower than my desktop system). Unbiased engines are great tool to have. But not so well suited as the everyday workhorse engine. So it's good to have an engine like Vray or Modo to handle quick daily work.

Thanks Jonah for your advice!

Jonah, where can one find this uv unwrap plugin for rhino

It is on this page in the Rhino wiki:

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/UVcWrap.html

This works on meshes and nurbs, but when you input a nurbs object, it will just extract the render mesh into a new object, then hide the nurbs object, then unwrap the mesh. By default, Rhino polysurfaces have packed UV coordinates already... Clement's instructions are pretty clear about how to use it properly. As he mentioned, it was built using scripts so it has limitations. And McNeel is already starting to work on a true Nurbs unwrapper and UV editor. But Nurbs unwrapping probably won't have any benefit except to those people rendering Nurbs objects directly in Rhino...

jonah