In my many years as a 3D geek I've used these renderers, in chronological order:
01: Sculpt 3D (Commodore Amiga).
02: Turbo Silver (Amiga).
03: Imagine (Amiga and MS-DOS).
04: 3ds Max Scanline renderer (Windows).
05: finalRender for 3ds Max (the first Global Illumination renderer I tried, back in 2000 or so).
06: V-Ray for 3ds Max.
07: Maxwell for 3ds Max.
08: Mental Ray for 3ds Max.
09: iRay for 3ds Max.
10: Blender Render (formerly known as Blender Internal)
11: Blender Cycles (this is one of the two renderers I still use).
12: Luxrender (connected to Blender).
13: Pixar's Renderman (connected to Blender).
14: Keyshot (this is the other one of the two renderers I still use).
On a side note: I've left out the NPR renderers I used in the course of time. :)
To my personal experience, Keyshot is the most user-friendly renderer I've used so far, and Maxwell is the most photorealistic renderer I've used so far. But it's not merely realism I like to see, it's eye-pleasing visual dynamics I'm looking for. Each renderer has its own typical qualities. At the moment I like the look of Cycles and Keyshot renderings the most. But I'm always interested in exciting new tools.
Octane is excellent fast render engine ( https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/ ), it has predefined materials, of course, and rendering settings is similar like developing photo from raw file. For instance Octane has predefined colour settings according the most known film materials, (Agfa, Kodak, Fuji) and Octane use node editor for creating scene and materials, so it can be advantage for you as well, maybe.
Max and Zarkow use Octane as well ;-) , but your render via Thea and 3D Coat are nice as well, maybe it will be useful for all of us to start new thread "Rendering, tips and tricks", where we can share rendering and MoI settings or general experiences with rendering sw under one thread "roof"
it seems that you use Octane as well... One question i have about Octane, Zarkow's renderings look very often bad
due to it's severe aliasing artifacts in high contrast areas, which then ruins his otherwise good models. Does Octane
not properly solve those or are his rendereings more like draft renderings, depending on settings in Octane?
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.
If anyone needs photorealism, I can also recommend Luxrender, a photorealistic renderer that offers several different render engines. It's completely free, open source, and it connects to Blender, SketchUp and other 3D editors very well, with dedicated free plug-ins:
yes, I am user of Octane as well.
I started new thread regarding rendering in general, so we can try to solve this issue there :-)
May I ask you to send into new thread an example of aliasing artefacts which you mentioned in last post?
i don't want to post as an example, in the new thread, images from him without asking for permission... ;-)
But if you examine the metallic parts in his dragon mesh, especially picture 3, once downloaded, you will
probably see many areas which have aliasing issues.
P.S. o.k. his 3rd image says, once downloaded, draft, but i'm not sure if this is a rendering mode in
Octane or he named it draft, because of the visible ground plane.
