Blender Render Engine

Apology for my ignorance but I am quite new to Blender.:eek:
I was going through cgcookie and noticed a link to mod. I did not know mod so I followed the link.

I noticed that the render engine for some reason seems better (in terms of quality) to what Blender renders.

I also noticed for some reason that even Cinema 4D rendered images looks sometimes better than what rendered in Blender.

Does anyone know about why? Is it just mainly due to textures selection or is it just that the render engine in Blender is not as good as the other engines…

Thanks

Leone

as I understand it, the blender render engine is optimized for speed not quality
it can produce some spectacular images, just look in the gallery at blender.org, but that’s not the main focus.
third party render engines are focused on quality not speed
just look at the unbiased engines like luxrender, they NEVER finish an image, they just keep making it better.
it’s a trade off
blender will show you a quick render of an image so you can see what it looks like
if you can’t get the quality you need for your final image (which often you can) you always have the option of using a stand alone render engine

Dave

Oh boy, here we go again :slight_smile:

Because I just love to make people feel happy, I’ll give each one of you reading this message an orgasm right now, by saying one word: “unbiased”.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the real deal here: other renderers produce better results (and faster, when using features like glossy surfaces, etc) because they’re not as old as Blender Internal (as they’re calling it) is. It’s in dire need of a really really heavy upgrade to get rid of the old techniques it’s using.

Unfortunately, there are no programmers left to perform such an upgrade.

Well, I’m a little bored, so why not add my $.02 :stuck_out_tongue:

IMHO, there’s really nothing ‘wrong’ with Blender Internal. Sure, a lot of people have difficulty getting high quality images out of it, apparently (I only did in the beginning) … but if one takes one’s time, and applies materials, textures, lights, etc … with care, one can achieve perfectly good results with Blender Internal.

Granted, I don’t have much experience with the current stock of render engines, and don’t particularly like to use un-biased renderers as I don’t do photo-real renderings.
However, ANY render engine takes time to learn properly. Some, granted, are easier to get good rendering just by pushing the render button. Blender’s engine, it seems, doesn’t come that way. YOU have to set it up right, and all the other stuff I mentioned. And then there’s compositing, by which you can do faster corrections than by re-rendering.
I think that’s kinda the thing about Blender Internal right now, is that it’s more focussed on integration with the Compositor … what with render layers, render passes, OpenEXR, etc … I honestly believe a LOT of people just aren’t using Blender Internal right.
Sure, if you want photo-real images, you’re probably better off using an un-biased engine like LuxRender et. al. … but if you want to do fast non-photo/effects/what-have-you, there’s NO REASON to not stick with Blender Internal …
… or RenderMan if you know how to use it … perfect case in point for what I said above. Trying to make a quality render with any RenderMan renderer I’ve tried is a serious PITA. To get good renders with it, you pretty much need to know RenderMan Shading Language, as well as how to output different passes and then, again, composite them together. Yet RenderMan renderers have made ASTOUNDING images throughout the years, on huge screens, etc … LuxRender is easier to achieve a photo-real render with, yet it’s not really capable of producing glowing sparkly fog creatures that swarm around a live-footage human now, is it???
:stuck_out_tongue:
that’s all from me, for now … thanks for listening =D

Artao,

only in a fraction of the time did Octane render produce a high amount of better renderings than years following Blender.

If you only had initial problems with BI then maybe you do not need functions which are essencial for our tasks and which render Blender Internal for certain jobs not an option at all.

That is not a secret as even Ton states that.

Blender can produce very results for what it is intended to do and how far coders were able to improve it given the restrictions they had (time, money, man power)

But in the whole scheme of render jobs Blender can do many things VRay can do, however VRay can do more than Blender can do. Simple as that.

In terms of non realistic rendering Blender is pretty good in terms of GI rendering Blender has nothing serious to offer because you hit limitations instantly.

Why do you guys always talk about Renderman? VRay, MentalRay, Air, all those are terrific engines and very simple to use. Setting up a material in Max or Maya with VRay is equal to Blender Internal.

Not much more complicated at all.

@ Leone

C4D and others all have a force of paid programmers working the render engines.
Developing such a system takes time and money, both Blender Foundation does not have at that rate.
In addition effective and modern render engines are quite a challenge to design.

Blender as an open source software needed first to make a recovery from the paid product to open source and with the following open movie projects point by point where tools programed the artists needed for those jobs - mainly compositing, modeling, interface, and animation tools.

Rendering was on the list as well, but because of the complexity of that and the need of fast rendering only options were followed which were doable and needed for such a movie project.

This is the reason why Blender in many areas has very outstanding tools, from smoke simulation, to particles, to a terrific 3d compositing system, to a quite powerful animation system, but compared to other render engines a rather outdated and feature lacking system which unfortunately if you want to go only with Blender can quickly be the bottle neck in Blender.

However since the evolution of 2.5 Yafaray a free OSS GI engine as well as other and commercial engines such as VRay are being actively now integrated into Blender.

This way you can model, texture, and animate with Blender but render out with a more powerful system.

This is something I am very looking forward to me since Ton confirmed that Blenders Internal cannot catch up without any magical help and VRay as I own it is a terrific render module.

Blender in that instance is then just the modeling host.

However this is also the same with many other commercial products.

Maya uses external render modules

3DMax uses external render modules

Maya can use MentalRay, VRay, 3Delight, Renderman, or its silly build in engine.

And nobody has a big issue with that.

So to be honest I would not focus to much on the issue of Blenders Internal engine being drastically outdated but rather see Blender as a free platform you can use to feed other external engines and do honestly what the industry is doing anyway.

In that light it doesnt really matter that BI is just not that good anymore.

I see I have cross-threaded myself and hereby institute a 24 hour posting ban upon myself … aka - until I’m more sober :stuck_out_tongue:

Huh what? cross-dressed? Did I read right?

The point is that it seemed everyone was backing the old BI renderer when it was thought to still have a future (the rewrite of the shading system and the overdue dawn of true GI).

Now since Brecht has left to work on a more modern commercial renderer it’s now getting more known that the future of Open Source rendering is by using Blender with an external render engine (mainly Luxrender and Yafaray).

Considering from what I read Brecht is even going to help eliminate the need for using Blender Internal by largely working on the render API more than the renderer itself, what allows Octane to have tighter integration and more access to things from materials to nodes will help the open source exporters as well.

I am not sure if he is going to eliminate it.

For the Blender Foundation and all their future projects this engine will still be the bases and for many 3D users BI is really good enough as long as you do not need certain features.

Hair, particles, all those things do NOT work with any external engine for the most cases.

But I can see that a good render API will help Blender being able to work better with external engines which can broaded Blenders acceptance.

Only because I can soon render with VRay doesnt mean that everybody is going to buy VRay.

I am also sure that Ton is smart enough not to let the render engine get too bad and thus positioning Blender in an area were it cannot compete anymore.

I never said Brecht will remove the BI renderer I just said he’ll assist the agenda that involves developing the render API so that every possible thing in Blender can be rendered in an external renderer.

I believe there was a commit in the past months that now allows external renderers to render hair particles provided the exporter supports it.

I’m not sure where you are getting the ‘not everyone can buy Vray’ thing, my statements include external rendering in Lux and Yafaray as well.

I understand what you mean.

What I tried to say is that many only use Blender and not Yafaray for Lux
For many projects I do it is fine to be honest - and I think this is the same for the majority of users here.

For those who rather use it for animation projects which are more character orientated we will have to see what will happen.