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The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 5:40 am
by contegufo
Hi

Indigo we like and we wish the best of competition but in all honesty if we were to open one 3D rendering studio and having to satisfy a large number of customers who or what would be of special rendering engines most suitable?

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 6:04 am
by Oscar J
IMO:

In terms of pure output Indigo or Maxwell are probably the best, with Indigo having the edge due to its better AA. It is also significantly faster and has MLT etc., while Maxwell has more features and plugins.

Corona looks great and user friendly, has a good user base, esp for arch viz, but has lower overall rendering quality and there's no GPU support planned.

Octane is probably the most feature rich GPU renderer but shortcuts a bit in terms of rendering accuracy and is rather bad for interiors, speed wise.

VRay is a very diverse and feature rich renderer, but has a steep learning curve and isn't really physically based. Arnold handles massive geometry and textures with ease and has great animation/VFX support, but is rarely used in product/arch viz.

Thea is similar to Indigo, probably more feature rich but is Windows only, has a bit lower quality and its GPU engine is kinda limited from what I've heard.

It all comes down to your own preferences, priorities and requirements. :)

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 6:15 am
by contegufo
The ability to have volumetric light effects easily, and anisotropic shader velvet and satin would be very important.

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 6:17 am
by Oscar J
contegufo wrote:The possibility of having volumetric lighting effects easily, and anisotropic shader velvet would be very important.
I agree, these things are important. And hair/fur. The devs are well aware. :)

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 7:00 am
by Originalplan®
contegufo wrote:Hi

Indigo we like and we wish the best of competition but in all honesty if we were to open one 3D rendering studio and having to satisfy a large number of customers who or what would be of special rendering engines most suitable?
WOW Cool topic Contegufo :!:

(IMO)

Well it depends first of all on the budget we would have to spend on an engine.
I would say right now i would consider 3 (4) engines. ( Indigo,Octane,Maxwell ) ( + Unreal4)

Indigo is very good priced / value you get and it's the best engine on OSX
(which is a HUGE plus for me because i don't just do 3D stuff and having a OSX makes thing much simple and fluid. )

Second thought would be Maxwell but having worked with it for 1,5 years ....i know the pain of waiting for stuff.
And if i want to make more money @ the studio i have to be able to get good quality faster. Ergo make more work in 24hours.

Octane is very good. But not sure that i want to expand my budget and buy a + Nvidia card just for the engine.
And then buy the engine too.

Unreal 4 would be a very good option i think. But we need to get and learn a very different workflow...different from the 3D Apps we use. So it would require a +time and learning curve. And it's probably not the best way to start a studio if you can't work right away.

So it would boil down for two engines for me. Indigo or Unreal....and i would probably go with Indigo.
Just because i know that i can get support pretty fast and there is always someone here who can help with new expert stuff. So i think after all the v4 beta is done and all is golden under the hood.
Indigo is a very solid option

( Worked with Arnold too for a while....but they lost me never really got the hang of it...and it felt slow too.)

So from a BUDGET / TIME / FLEXIBILITY stand point i would definitely go with Indigo.

PS: just read that Maxwell v4 has GPU render too.....we will see how that will work out. I think it's an Nvidia CUDA solution same as Octane.

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 7:05 am
by Oscar J
Unreal is a game engine though, it's not really comparable. It can definitely be a good tool for realtime viz, but it can't replace a physically based engine. :)

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 7:08 am
by Originalplan®
Oscar J wrote:Unreal is a game engine though, it's not really comparable. It can definitely be a good tool for realtime viz, but it can't replace a physically based engine. :)
Yeah Unreal maybe should be disqualified as such. You're right.

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 9:52 am
by contegufo
We forgot to Renderman (OSX, Win, Linux).

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 1:18 pm
by lycium
My vote goes to Arnold, and well, so does the industry vote :P

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 8:00 pm
by Originalplan®
Originalplan® wrote:
Oscar J wrote:Unreal is a game engine though, it's not really comparable. It can definitely be a good tool for realtime viz, but it can't replace a physically based engine. :)
Yeah Unreal maybe should be disqualified as such. You're right.
Actually Houdini has a great render engine. And has a massive app for it.
So let me change Unreal4 for Houdini. :!:

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2016 12:39 am
by Zalevskiy
Indigo and VRay + postproduction

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:45 am
by juan_irender
contegufo wrote:We forgot to Renderman (OSX, Win, Linux).
Yes: actually, Renderman is a path tracer rendering engine. REYES was deprecated with Renderman 21 release.
And don´t forget Cinema 4D own rendering system, it has some special and almost unknown "sauce recipe" :) .

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2016 10:13 am
by noldo
No doubt. Fstorm render. Best quality/speed compromises.

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2016 6:17 am
by contegufo

Re: The best rendering engine?

Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2016 9:29 pm
by Jay-ko
For spectral arch/viz:
Arnold, Renderman and Corona clamp the colors values as a simple triplet at the beginning of the rendering process, they are not spectral.

Thea is a true chalenger.

I think the comparison is possible only with spectral engine, only in "arch/viz".