Renderers! One of my favorite subjects! :)
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 (a lot of easy dragging and dropping), and Maxwell is the renderer with the most photorealistic look I've used so far. But it's not merely realism I like to see, it's eye-pleasing visual dynamics, a certain look, not necessarily indistinguishable from a photograph. Each renderer has its own typical visual qualities. At the moment I like the look of Cycles and Keyshot renderings the most. But I'm always interested in discovering exciting new tools.
If your budget isn't high and you're looking for a great look and very flexible material options, I'd recommend Blender's Cycles. It's completely free, open source, seamlessly integrated into Blender, and lately also available for other 3D editors, such as Cinema 4D and Rhino.
If your budget isn't high and you're looking for photorealism, I suggest to give Luxrender a try, 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:
http://www.luxrender.net
Last but not least, a currently rising star is AMD Radeon ProRender. Also fully free and supported by a number of 3D editors, including Blender and Maya. It uses OpenCL, so it utilizes rendering power of both CPU and GPU.
https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender/
Regards,
Metin
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visualization • illustration • design • 3D (print) models —
https://metinseven.com