Kerkythea.

Nice user interface, great potential, good documentation and supporting forum.

Just my 2 cents,

George

PoseRay is a standalone frontend to the POV engine. Works well with many formats, including obj and has clean output.

geo.

Has anyone ever tried Gelato? Not the lemoni flavored kind, ;-)
Gelato, the free rendering engine from Nvidia. It appears that it's
not for the faint of heart...it has plugins for 3DMax and Maya,
there's a script to export from Blender...It utilizes GPU computation,
running off the memory of Nvidia graphic cards, so it's supposed be fast.

Parthenon, another free GPU renderer which is sort of obscure is
also lightning fast, but the documentation is in Japanese and it's script driven.
If someone wrote a UI for it, then you'd really have something!

http://tinyurl.com/3xyv78


Jesse

Dear All...

Not to forget the oldtimer truespace 3.2 which can be downloaded free from the below mentioned side....does a pretty good rendering.....also with obj files....;)

http://s.maxthon.com/?q=truespace+3+free+download

God luck!

Rozens

/quote Blender is an probably an excellent piece of software except that it´s UI is quite confusing for a simple boatstalker like me: -) /quote

The wealth of functionality of Blender3D can certainly be confusing for newbies. Blender does modeling, animation, rendering, video editing, sound editing, generates realtime programs of the content, has scripts for any imaginable task and so on and so forth. People who grab Blender the first time usually have a very specialised task on their minds. Usually they don't comprehend what Blender really can do and blame it on the interface, which was true back in the days of Blender 2.25. Nowadays Blender has one of the WORLDS BEST INTERFACES AND WORKFLOW. I'm using it since four years now and i can tell. I'm really, really sick of this die-hard almost evil rumor. It really is just the opposite. BTW, it imports absolutely flawlessly from Moi3d via obj format.


It's not difficult to learn. If you prefer video tuts, there are loads out there. Just google for Blender and video tutorials and you will see what i mean. Or start right from the official site: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Video_Tutorials.396.0.html

What it does not have yet: Voice and blurry intention recognition with fully automatic neuronal network supported modeling, hehe. RTFM or watch the vids and stop whining if you didn't really try.

Hi All,

I happened to notice this morning that Bryce 5.5 is free and for the rest of the month the upgrade to Bryce 6 is on sale for $19.98.

http://tinyurl.com/ypmklp

Of all the free renderer's I've tried, this is the first one I've been able to get anything halfway decent out of, in less than an hour. It imports .obj's from MoI and it has a bunch of cool textures. This image was done with the "fast preview mode" so the shadows are hard, but it only took 13 seconds. I'm still poking around with some of the more advanced features, but the interface looks very user friendly as renderer's go. I wish I could mill that texture on a real model!

-Jesse

That would be some kind of crazy mill that could cut something that fine. Maybe someday?

Cool ring, kind of has an "ancient rome" feel to me.

Hey, you did that laurel leaf design recently too - are you on a classical inspired phase right now?

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks!

I wasn't intentionally pursuing a classical motif, but it sort of looks that way.. :-)
Maybe images I've seen of ancient Roman or Etruscan snake
bracelets have inspired me along the way...I think I just like curvy
surface modeling challenges. This might sound a little nutty, but sometimes in my
spare time away from work projects (which tend to have straighter lines),
I like to unwind by doing curvy surface modeling. It's a great stress reliever!

I didn't really have a plan when I started out, but the helix tool easily took care of the spiral section.
I lofted the head, which made a single surface, then I turned on the control points
of the surface and scaled/moved them around to give it a little more shape.

Getting back to Bryce, although it's geared more towards spacey surreal scenes and panoramic
landscapes, it's also possible to set up a scene with a neutral background.
I found a tutorial showing how to render small objects with reflection that look pretty good,
but not as good as some of the beautiful Blender renderings I've seen.

Perhaps one of the veteran Blender guys can give us a short tutorial on how take a model from
MoI into Blender or Blender/ Yafray and set up a simple product presentation scene.

Images I've seen from Blender with ambient occlusion and caustics are as good as, or better than
renderings from many of the commercially available renderer's.

Here is the tutorial I mentioned above:
http://stevesartgallery.bryce-alive.net/tutorials/bryce/environment/reflective.html


Update- That tutorial must have written a few years ago. I discovered that Bryce 5.5 does realistic reflections and 6.1 has HDRI, so the method described in the tutorial isn't necessary

Regards,

Jesse

Hi,

i prefer Kerkythea and Radiumrenderer over any other renderer out there. Radiumrenderer is an unbiased renderer so it could take some time to render a scene but the results are great. Kerkythea is both unbiased and biased. It has raytracing, path tracing, ambient occlusion, MLT, photon mapping+caustics and bidirectional path tracing. Both renderers featuring a material editor, a scene editor, physical sky model, .obj file import, etc.

MfG
sk2k

I agree that Kerkythea is probably the best free renderer these days as far as features and user friendliness....it also has a vibrant website and forum. Radium also looks impressive, but but not as many people on the forum.

My criteria for renderers is rather specific, I've been waiting to see if anyone can render diamonds with Kerkythea...it should do well with colored gemstones since it has caustics.

Here's the same model as before but with softer shadows done in Bryce. It took me a while to figure out I had to shut off "fog and haze" to get a rendering that wasn't so cloudy!

-jdk

Hey all,

I've tried Kerkythea a couple of times. I can't seem to get results from it.
- navigating within the work space.
- materials.
- lighting.
All these things I can't get my head around.

-Dooki

Well there's apparently HyperShot: http://www.bunkspeed.com/hypershot/products.html

This was mentioned over at another board I frequent - looks pretty decent...

-Will

I just checked Hypershot! Looks great!
Will make a test and see...

Yep, Hypershot looks ideal for those doing product visualization. Those renders of that new Ford model are awesome, btw.

Seeing who their chief scientist is, its future seems to be very bright.

It has to be highly optimized to be able light these objects solely from hdri's in such a short time, in regular renderers these types of shots lit solely by Hdri's are very time-consuming.

Wow,

I just lost all motivation to learn Blender, Indigo, Maxwell or Vray.

Regarding the high optimization, I wonder if they're using GPU
( http://tinyurl.com/32se9g) rendering algorithms since they
say it's rendering all the time?

What ever is going on, if their claims are true, with $195
for the junior version, all other professional renderers
are going to become obsolete.

I'm waiting for the demo to be released, it looks very cool!

-Jesse

Just read the FAQ and I see there are many limitations (materials, model formats etc) It is a very promising product though...
@ JDK: The power of other renderers are their plugins... Also, the final quality of Maxwell for example is much better

I'm not sure that an 800 x 450 image is of much use. And It's a big jump to go from $195 to $995 for the HD version. I think they should drop the Web version, make the HD version $495 and sell a lot more copies. The Pro version costs something like $9,995.00 ! I'm not so sure that every render engine will drop their current technology to go after something like this. Guys like Maxwell, VRay and others have too much invested in a proven technology. From what I've read, Bunkspeed has been supplying the automotive industry for a few years with a real-time engine for a price of around $25,000. Now they've decided to produce a mass-market version of it called Hypershot... I agree that people will never be satisifed with "slow" render speeds after seeing this (even Modo looks slow next to this). Just not sure how current technology can be optimized to match it. Otherwise, it would be done already. Maybe in a few years we'll see some clones of this engine. Certainly it will shake things up and maybe (hopefully) drop prices... there is obviously some major advancements happening in real-time displays right now. Look at Truespace and C4D. They are amazing. Even CAD-based packages such as Rhino are developing real-time bumping, shadows, anisotropy... The future of real-time display is getting very interesting...

cheers,
shorty

Yeah I didn't bother to look at the results of this product, I just looked over the pages briefly...

It's really that fast huh?

Yeah I felt the pricing was skewed also - that's a bigg plop of cash just to render something and the resolution is still limited even at the $1000 level.

I guess products like Blowup and Genuine Fractals ( http://www.alienskin.com/blowup/index.html, http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=2 ) can help a bit but you can imagine after too much up-rez'ing, your gorgeous render is going to devolve into a marsh of jellyfied (larger) pixels no matter how good the algorithms are...

Being ye 'o too many-a-renderer (having Lightwave, XSI, Carrara 5 Pro, Vue 5i, ZBrush etc., I didn't even consider this (need to get more use outta what I got! :-p )

It'll be interesting to see what happens as you mentioned though.

-Will

Well this was made with a really limited use in mind, so you can't really compare it to Maxwell, vray, mray etc.

Basically the only things that this is practical for is product visualization, where you'd use a hdri as a backdrop and achieve the same lighting. So any kind of complete scene etc. is really unpractical for this, and if you've used hdri to light stuff in other renderers you'll realize this. Basically think of this renderer as a 'dome lighting renderer', as that is just what it does, lights and renders your objects with a hdri dome. But it does it really, really fast.

But there are a lot of people (moi/rhino users too) which would fill most of their needs with this renderer, as these kinds of renders is all they do. But as soon as you get into scenery, archviz, etc. which need more advanced lighting obviously this is not practical for that.