Hello Mik.

@You "...please have a look at Octane web ..."

Thank you very much for your suggestion and sharing.

But...unfortunately, beyond all the technical aspects that are very important, I have also to consider my actual budget :)
$399 is too much for me now.

For this year (and at least for beginning of 2018) I think I've spent almost all my budget that I saved for "computer related things" :)

Now I have these 4 rendering packages :

1) Thea Render : Fully GPU support with its "Presto" render engine. But I still have to dig into it too see how it can deal with my requirements
2) Blender 2.79 : Very good results with its "Cycles" on the Gtx 1080 Ti and also it's totally FREE!
3) 3D-Coat : It's built-in rendering engine is rather limited but good enough for quick rendering of high-poly-count voxels.
4) InstantLight : a brand new ultrafast realtime rendering engine that works very well with the Gtx 1080 Ti. But I have to dig into it.

And I'm also testing Simlab Composer Pro. It's only CPU bound and even if my i7-7700K is still the best "4 physical cores" CPU of the market,
it has only 4 cores, so it's not comparable with other CPU with lots of cores (some i7 or ThreadRipper or Ryzen or i9 etc...)


But, beyond the "budget" aspect, I still have to continue to test Thea Render and SimLab too see if these packages can deal with my MAIN requirement,
that is :

Getting very good rendering results, with NO UV-MAPPED Objs.

This is absolutely my MAIN requirements.

I need to make things fast.

Modelling with moi and 3D-Coat is a superfast task, but all this speed is totally penalised if ,after modelling, I need to (maybe Retopo)/UVing/Texturing

The UV/Texturing phase is the killer point for me.

I want to create 3d sketches/concepts very quickly and render them with good results.

In that stage I DON'T NEED Photorealism.

I will use these quick renderings into my 2D works and creations, working on them both with my PC and with my iPad Pro.

So...at the end of the day, now I want to see if Thea Render or SimLab can perform this task with sufficient/good quality of rendering results :

1) Import a mid/high poly-count obj (or ply) WITHOUT ANY UV/Textures
2) Apply material to it from their database of premade materials
3) Perform high-res renderings (at least 4960x3508 A3 300 dpi) with transparent background and see if they have good results (NO bad seems, no too much material stretching, good refraction/reflections)

I hope that in the next days (or better...nights) I will be able to get a final decision about SimLab, to see if I can spent $99 for a Pro license,
or at least I hope to understand if my actual licensed copy of Thea Render can do the same job (using my GPU).

I will let you know.

I hope that my final considerations will be useful for other guys that like me are exploring the workflow I've talked about.

Have a nice day to everyone.

P.S. last minute google search...

I have to dig also into this topic "MATCAP MATERIALS withing Blender Cycles and/or Blender base Render engine"
I have also a license of "Filter Forge 6" so it's very easy to create a database of MatCap materials.


Ciao!

Marco (mkdm)