Is there a lighting program for blender?

hi is there a free lighting program that goes with blender like there is Vray, mental ray, Arnold? equivelent? I am taking a lighting class that usually uses maya and they have a lighting part with mental ray but they say we can use something similar? I am so far not buying Maya Lt, so wondering if there is something for blender?? Thanks.

Huh?
vray, Mental Ray and Arnold are render engines. Blender comes with two integrated render engines (Blender Render and Cycles Render) and there are some more free external ones available as addons.

If you didn’t mean that you will have to make clear what a “lighting program” is supposed to be.

sorry, are there any free blender render engine add ons? I am using just blender for the class for now, but would like to know if there is anything i could use.

Use Cycles or Blender Render (also called Blender Internal sometimes) as IkariShinji said. If you can’t give real reasons for using external render engines as addons you most probably don’t need them.

There are commercial render engines with integration plugin, like
v-ray https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray/blender
octane https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/overview/

You will hardly find another render engine as well integrated into Blender as Cycles. I still don’t get why you’re so hellbent on using an external render engine you know nothing about. Why not use what you have and know (I just assume that with more than 400 posts in this forum you will have your fair share of knowledge when it comes to Cycles…)?

most of my posts are general feedback, plenty i don’t know. for instance compositing is a black hole void where there should be some kind of information but there isn’t anything there. I take everything into gimp right now cause I always seem to screw up with passes. still working on it though.

I guess I just thought there was something else out there and that I should know about it. But maybe blender is fine. Always heard Vray for instance was really great, or Lightroom?? and felt like there was some lighting program or rendering that was something i needed to know.

But so far I am doing fine in the lighting class, so maybe Blender is equipped with all the lighting things. The thing I struggle with completely (besides passes), is atmospheric lighting, and have just had a lot of issues with foggy lighting working how I want it to in the scene. And foggy lighting is amazing and makes scene amazing.


Like this ^ ^ looks really nice. And I have followed Glebs tutorial but I am still struggling on that, so thought maybe some other program does it and it’s not hard. Don’t know…

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There are ways to get better quality renders with real fog shading for the world.

1). You can set up the world shader so the volume density is zero after one bounce, this can speed up the rendering greatly.
2). Make use of the new denoiser (can help greatly with lingering noise in renders using volumes).
3). Fog is essentially clouds on the ground, so you want to have the volume contain strong forward scattering (set the anisotropy value above 0, but not all the way to 1).

Work on your skills, lackings in them won’t be compensated by some “yet another render engine”. There are no magic buttons and one click wonders.

Stupid question time: what exactly are they teaching? And if this isn’t totally theory-based and they are expecting some concrete results, why are they allowing students to go with “whatever”?

FYI, look into educational licenses. Autodesk and other vendors provide free educational licenses for most products which can be used for learning (you can’t use it for side-projects while you learn, for example).

Check out appleseed render, it has a blender addon ‘blenderseed’. :slight_smile:

Blenderseed support stops at Blender 2.92, newer versions are not Supported.

What’s the purpose of this class? Mental Ray sounds horribly outdated, even wiki seems to address it in past tense. If the purpose is to “light a scene and make it look good”, then Cycles should be good enough at least to learn the basics. If learning to think like a lighting engineer and Mental Ray for some reason have these features for free, Blender don’t have the equivalent of AGI32, Dialux, Radiance, or Lumen Designer. Blender, using false color only indicate reflected light, not received light, can’t generate a heat map, and doesn’t have any tools to generate a report.

Edit: Oh, the post was 5 years old? Lol.
Oh well, the article I checked was 15 years old. Was wondering why I hadn’t heard of a couple of them.

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