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