There are some fast render programs out there if you have a fairly good PC -

Octane is affordable and pretty fast if you have a good GPU card. My jewelry renders take about 3 minutes with Octane.

KeyShot is very fast on a modern PC, even better on 6 cores, but outside the budget of most student / hobby artists. My jewelry renders take about 1 minute with KeyShot.

When I purchased Hypershot (the forerunner of KeyShot) in 2008, it was priced the same as MoI. Now it's 5 times that price (granted it has added a lot of features over time).

Ed

You can try Daz 3D with Bryce, it is free.

http://www.daz3d.com/

>...good GPU card....

That's right! With an SLI motherboard and four high-powered video cards linked in, a rendering program that knows how to use GPU's would fly!

Man! Am I wasting my good time... I need to look into GPU-based rendering. ;-)

Mike,

When picking a render program, I'd look at the total time involved in the workflow, not just the render time.

For example, Octane with a good GPU card is fast, but it has a very long learning curve. Lots of controls to noodle with to tweak your final result. IMHO - a long set-up time.

KeyShot is both fast to set up, and fast to render. But at a higher start up cost.

Maxwell, IMHO is somewhere between the two above.

So I would decide where you see yourself in 1, 3 or 5 years. My guess is, since you've mastered MoI, you'll be into 3D modeling professionally soon.

And if that's the case, you may be money ahead in the long run to put your learning curve into a package that will allow you to under-bid your competition.

That may mean investing in a more expensive package at the front end to make more in the long run.

Also, decide what type of rendering you'll most likely concentrate on. Some professionals specialize in just one area: architecture, cars, medical equipment, consumer products, packaging, jewelry, advertisement, etc. Look at the gallery's for the various render programs and you can pretty well determine which specialty groups favor which program.

Ed

I'd say go for Maxwell because even if it's slow you can:

- Have access to a ton of presets (materials)
- Can quickly make physically accurate materials (plastics with real SSS)
- Get perfect lighthing and render settings out of the box (no need to configure things like in Vray)
- You can render your picture for 30min then stop the render and resume the render at any other time

For me all the time you loose in rendering, you gain it back in tweaking your scene and creating your materials

With Rebusfarm I rendered A3 sized images at 300dpi for around 15$ per image with gems and gold materials
(see http://shapenoid.com/Golden-Dreams )

It would cost a lot less for plastics and full HD images

Future will be Gpu-based renderers,or hybrid both Cpu+Gpu
Gpu renderers means also video drivers updated,maybe conflicts or crashes and so...(you know..videocards and drivers are "mine-fields" in every Pc )
If you choose Gpu computation is better to have two videocards:one basic and cheap to navigate,second just for computation (Nvidia Tesla like high-end)

Else for 0 $
your have Blender
with Internal Renderer
Cycles (like Octane)
or a ton of free renderers that you can manage from it!

Hi,

THEARENDER !

www.thearender.com

By

+1 for TheaRender :)

Top renderings ! ;)

> My guess is, since you've mastered MoI, you'll be into 3D modeling professionally soon.

Thanks Ed!
I feel good wisdom in your admonition.


Adamio.. Wow, nice examples!



...Does anyone know if Thea Render work with the GPU yet?

Thanks for all the replies.

What I need to render usually are small plastic housewares.
I have tested Octane and works very well. There are some fireflies but maybe is a matter of illumination adjustment. MOI .obj files work very well as far as I have tested and the price is really good. There is also a very nice turn table animation feature. On the other hand you cannot cast shadows on HDR environments.
Thearender works also very well. The price is a lot higher than Octane but still a lot cheaper than Keyshot. Thea has shadow cast materials so you can use them with HDR environments. Thea can do animations also.
Is hard to choose between Octane and Thearender.

Have any one try Arion render?

Axel

I just bought Arion for a discounted price as a Fryrender customer
Arion use all GPU and CPU's of your hardware (hybrid)
It deliver unbiased results or,if you want,you can save rendering-time switching to -draft-mode( a faster solution close to unbiased)
I use it preparing my scene in C4D R10.5 with my Fryrender plug-in to export the scene in that format then open it in Arion,so i can't say how it works importing directly Obj files
you can choose what video card will work for computation and how many cores of Cpu will work too,leaving some free hardware's power to modify your scene if you want
If you think to do an heavy-use of it you must have two videocards,like i told in my previous thread(an high number of CUDA cores and at least 1Gb video memory)
If you are a Max or Xsi user you also have LIVE plug-ins and animation
...sadly Randomcontrol have decided to "kill" all others export plug-ins(C4D-SKP-MODO-RHINO-MAYA)..and Fryrender too !
anyway i'm an- unbiased rendering- supporter,so my suggestion is choose one of them

Hello,

I have used Thea to see how clear PMMA parts would look (under 10mm in size) prior to production. Taking the parameters from material data sheets, the renders were very accurate when compared to actual parts.

It's probably got something to do with the particular rendering engine being "unbiased", but I'm unsure myself.

I notice that if I give Metropolis Light Transport mode (TR2 in Thea) enough passes in Keryky, even the most tiny detail will be captured, but at the expense of time and the graininess factor. Also the number of polygons given to the smaller details will affect reflection detail as well.
More polys kill render time though.

I know some modes I've tried will make cleaner broad surfaces with little noise but have issues with tinier details.
Some render engines are better with rendering globally illuminated objects, and some modes are better with caustics and indoor light elements.

It sounds like you are approaching the search sensibly,

It is worth trialing as many as you can. TR2 in Thea is a little different to MLT in Kerkythea though.

Intergration of GPU in Thea is on the horizon.

Usually you wait a little for the implementation of features in Thea but to me the benefit is that when it is implemented it is a finished fully functioning high quality product.

For me the big benefit of Thea is the material creation system. It seems very logical and well laid out to me, designed for the user just like MOI.

I use to have a snobby attitude towards Blender. But the new version is pretty usable. It works with a range of renderers. But I'm even impressed by the new internal ones. Check this out.

http://blendernews.org/xe/?mid=Feature_Articles&document_srl=1274


While the rendering may be capable, it seems there are issues importing MoI OBJ files. If you get over that hurtle the best renderer may be a free one…

As for the scale of your objects, why not cheat? If the renderer you choose can’t do small stuff scale it up.

their last movie ( a little hard to follow the story :)
By Blender Foundation

Hi Shaun,

> While the rendering may be capable, it seems there are issues importing MoI OBJ
> files. If you get over that hurtle the best renderer may be a free one…

Actually the issue is that Blender doesn't do very well with importing OBJ files from any CAD program, not just something specific to MoI in particular.

The problem is that they just ignore the "vertex normals" information in the OBJ file - that data in the OBJ file is not read in, and there are also various other problems with vertex normal handling in Blender as well like even if they are read in they get discarded at render time.

See here for some previous discussions on this:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5083.6
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4515.3
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4272.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4409.79


The omission of vertex normals import makes it pretty difficult to get high quality renders of CAD data in Blender. Every other rendering program that I'm aware of does not have this particular problem, but it has been an issue with Blender for a really long time now.

So if you need to render CAD-generated polygon data such as the data exported from MoI, Blender does not really work particularly well for that right now because of this particular limitation in it. You can get the raw polygon data into it but when the polys are shaded you will likely have various kinds of shading artifacts that sort of "leak" some resemblance of the polygon structure into the rendered result. Those kinds of artifacts do not happen at all when the vertex normal data that's included in the OBJ file is used for doing the shading, so you really want to use a renderer that is able to import and use that data instead of ignoring it.

- Michael

You can make blender work it you don't mind doing a little hand work. The way I have done it in the past is export it as a NGON without welding the mesh. this removes the problems around the joins (as it isn't joining) but there are usually still some problems on rounded areas but If you go around the mesh and remove the small triangles you can get nice looking meshes out of it. it's not ideal as it would be nice if you could just do an import and be done but it is free And I have had to work out making MAX work nicely with MOI as well so....

Val