Just a few years ago we had so little options to choose when we had to use external renders in Blender to boost our visualization work. And today there are so many options that an artist could get really confused to choose only one, and with Cycles as a welcome newcomer the challenge to pick only one can get even harder. But, how many options do we have? To help with these, I`ve put together a list of all external render engines compatible with Blender 2.6 that could be used for architectural visualization. I will put a not on the side of the name for free renders.
Here are the options:
- YafaRay – Free renderer (GPL)
- LuxRender – Free renderer (GPL)
- Pov-Ray – Free renderer (GPL)
- Mitsuba – Free renderer (GPL)
- Indigo Renderer
- V-Ray
- Octane Render
Did I miss anyone?
Maxwell Render via B-Maxwell addon 🙂
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bmaxwell/
Sunflow?
Thea Render, KeyShot.
And of source the new NOX fo Evermotion et Appleseed too!
Good list isn’t it!
In Related Post is NOX Renderer 🙂
Hi Alan,
I think about NOX of Evermotion here:
http://www.evermotion.org/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=398
and
Microrender here:
http://www.msbsoftware.it/microrender/index.htm
And
Appleseed here:
http://appleseedhq.net/node/335
and 3 engines with Renderman format:
3Ddelight here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?209094-3Delight-Blender
Pixie here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?251446-PIXIE-Using-3Delight-Exporter-with-Pixie-2.2.6
RIBmosaic became -> Aqsis here:
http://www.aqsis.org/
http://www.blendertorenderman.org/
Byby
Nox Renderer from Evermotion
Please for production use consider this (just from my point of view):
Mitsuba is not a mature Renderer, useless for production use !
Octane still is in Beta-Stage since a long time as well ! An the futur of the developement of the Blender-Plugin is unclear at the moment.
In V-Ray there is no full feature support ! But it is a pretty good solution, because it supports proxies and the Renderer is very mature.
Indigo Renderer Plugin is in development since years, I have not a good feeling about it. Some poeple work with it, but I had to many errors by testing it.
Luxrender is to slow for production use.
Pov-Ray: The quality of the renderings do not convince me.
If I’m allowed to do a recommandation I would say:
Cycles (GPU) for Exteriors (is supports Instancing to do large areas of grass or trees) because its very fast.
Yafaray or V-Ray (CPU) for Interiors (both support Instancing meanwhile I guess) because it’s faster than Cycles (GPU).
Kind regards
Alain
Luxrender is Not to slow for production use. Definitely not.
And it really shines compared to cycles because of the volume shader and bidirectinal rendering. I hope this will get implemented into cycles soon.
Small light sources+Gi are a nightmare to render with cycles, even though i have a rather fast gtx 460.
And for production!! use, you probably have several computers connected.
It depends!
I use both, currently I render sections of my 3dmodel with blender cycles, works quite well. 🙂
http://imageshack.us/f/38/35158006.png/
http://imageshack.us/f/839/whatdoyouthink5.png/
I don’t like yafaray too much, don’t get me wrong it’s not a bad renderer, but it is not progressive, you’ll waste a lot of time compared to lux. And it’s not that activly develloped compared to lux or cycles. I think it’s a dead and 🙁
On commercial side.
Maxwell renderer via bmaxwell or BtoMW (GPL on github)
cheers
Luxcore
https://luxcorerender.org/
Sunflow was based on Java’s turtle language. It’s not dead but zombified since 2007.
http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/