I am about to buy Thea Render. I never got around to using the render in Blender yet but just thought of it. For those of you who are familiar with Blender’s render engine, what are the limitations that would prompt any of you to buy a retail render program? Just curious as I see great works coming out of this community.
I got and use Indigo, Octane, Yafaray, Luxrender, Cycles, Blender Internal, vray demo, Thea demo.
90% of my work is animations and I do them with Cycles or Blender Internal.
Stills, depending on what is required one of the other 4, and I use Indigo least because it’s highly uncomfy to use IMO.
I thought about buying Thea at one point as well, as well as vray. But Thea is covered with Luxrender and BI, and vray for the most part with Yafaray, althogh I think vray is great and also good to handle from inside Blender it’s really a pity you can’t make use of the material libraries.
Until cycles came up, I liked Octane most for the great node materials, but now with Cycles getting OSL working out I rarely use Octane… sometimes for simple 360° turntable animations.
I like the material editor in Thea as well and also the whole UI, but, it’s a fancy Luxrender to me with a few less features here and a few more features there.
There are some particular requirements that might make you need one of the commercial renderers, but usually you can just work around those with the free alternatives.
And buying something like Bunkspeed Shot, Maxwell or Arnold, not only comes with a huge pricetag, but also with a lot of follow up costs, because if you want to use those commercially, you need a lot of power behind them as well.
As you didn’t specify what you need to render, and if you mean Blender Internal or Cycles, although latter is more of an Blender in-house engine rather than Blender’s render engine, it’s hard to give any advice.
It’s really what you’re after - what features you or the current project needs and of what kind the project is.
I highly suggest you try the free built in engines before going and plunking down your cash. Both Cycles and Blender Internal can produce some amazing results, but of course it takes time to learn. 3rd party engines are usually even more complicated to work with. In the end it is the artist that produces a great render, not the engine.
It’s true that good art as well as good technical skills will allow you to get good quality out of almost any engine, but I have yet to see a BI user successfully pull off all of the subtle GI effects from Cycles and other GI engines in BI in a scene that where the difference otherwise is clearly visible (not to mention pulling off fake caustics).
That is with the skills of an artist though, someone could theoretically write a script that places bounce lights to give at least some sense of GI.
On picking a render engine though, I agree that you should first try the free solutions including the ones built in as well as Luxrender, Yafaray, and Mitsuba. You can even go with BI if you’re not planning to focus all that much on realism (at least in a physically accurate way).
isnt Thea like $ 500 usd? Nope. Get Vray instead.
If I had to choose an external renderer to pay money for, it would definitely be a close race between Thea and VRay.
Thea is MUCH easier to learn than VRay, and allows for some pretty incredible results. The material editor is, IMO, best in class. A quick read through the documentation and you’ll be good to go. It is the most idiot-proof renderer I’ve ever come across that also allows for a good degree of artistic freedom.
VRay is arguably the most powerful ray-tracing renderer there is. Given time, there’s not much you can’t do with it. However, this comes at the cost of a steep learning curve. There are so many integrators, each with so many settings and individual use cases that it can be a hassle learning it all. I’ve been using VRay for almost 5 years now and I still have to reference the documentation and talk directly to the developers to solve certain problems. On the other hand, VRay RT is great and VRay can be blazing fast given optimized settings.
If it’s between Thea and Cycles/BI, you need to understand that you’re comparing apples to expensive oranges. While Thea certainly can produce animations, this is not its ‘bread and butter’ as are BI and (eventually) Cycles. You will not get the same level of integration (although the Blender -> Thea exporter is pretty great). Honestly, Thea has some of the most promising tech of any non-academic rendering suite, especially looking at what they have planned moving forward. But I’d only plunk the cash down if you’re very serious about rendering. If you have the time and patience, Cycles will most likely mature into a very powerful piece of kit, much like Arnold. But also like Arnold, if your main area of need is Arch or product viz, then you’re going to be left wanting in the long run.
Thanks for your thoughts. Sorry I didn’t mention my intent. I am still learning Blender so in the mean time I primarily use Sketchup to model and Kerkythea has been my main render engine of choice because it gives such great results and it’s free. I chose Thea because it is by the same creators of my favorite free render engine so I figured having Thea would be like having Kerkythea on steroids. I have the Thea demo and I am liking the easier workflow with the material lab. I do have serious plans to include Blender into my pipeline for animation, natural environments, and anything else I anticipate will be too much for Sketchup to handle. I am still in flirting stage with Blender and been reading news on some interesting updates to the render engine particularly Cycles but never really dived in with any serious projects yet. I am also flirting with Terragen 2 and dream of having x-frog (both $300.00) but I see some interesting plugins for Blender that I can learn to use. In the end, I find that it really matters when it comes to setting up materials and tweaking lighting and such so the render engine is very important to me. So far I been doing Architectural visuals and I paint murals and wall finishes so I use 3D to show my clients visuals of what the walls will look like in their spaces. That means I need a powerful render engine that has sophisticated material parameters. Thea is perfect for this purpose but I can’t help but wonder if I am missing something as I never indulged in Blender’s render engine.
Hi Mistro I am also an object designer and might give some good input here.
Cycles I use it lately exclusively. I also own VRay and Thea. But then came Cycles.
In my point of view Thea has some serious render speed advantages compared to Cycles, specifically if you use indoor renderings.
But with a good consumer 3D card that advantage can be shortened a lot.
Thea’s material system as you know is very powerful and most important logical to use. Cycles nodes are a lot more work and hassle.
Thea is more a point and shoot solution with terrific results.
But I must say the reason why I went back to Blender is I hate having different model and render tools. I like being able to render quickly while modeling as well. So I stuck with Cycles and recently it got many more important material types added.
So if you dont want to spend the money on Thea and can maybe be ok with somewhat longer rendertimes (without GPU) I think you will not miss anything if you take a look at Cycles.
Also this
“In the end it is the artist that produces a great render, not the engine.” slogan is so heavily overused it should be banned to be used because it is plain wrong.
A good camera can make good shots or bad shots. But a bad camera can only make bad shots and never reach the level a good camera can.
Same for software!
Yes this is far too simple.
You’ve also got to look at the type of workflow you want. For example Static “press render and hope for the best” (Vray/BI) or more dynamic rendering (luxrender/cycles).
Plus of course research the features and support/compatibility you absolutely need.
Some camera’s make it easier to take pretty shots, some harder. Some area a pain to use others are fun. Some cameras use tricks to make pretty shots which you may like or not (ie instagram).
Slightly OT, but instead of Terragen 2 I’d recommend to take a look at:
- World Machine 2, 89USD Standard, 189USD Pro: http://world-machine.com/about.php?page=features
- Or Blenders small scale solution: ANT Landscape addon
- You could also use Bryce which regularily has free versions on DAZ3D.
As for X-Frog, you should take a look at:
- Frecle’s Tree[d]: http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=treed.about
- Blenders Addons: IvyGenerator, Sapling
I like Claas’ camera analogy as it is absolutely true. Once you are capable of a certain degree of professionalism, there’s only so much you can do to bypass or mask the shortcomings of an engine and often with an extra amount of time which you usually don’t have hitting a clients deadline.
But this camera analogy goes a tad further - one reason why I started to use Octane and Cycles as soon as it was mature enough is the viewport interactivity.
In product- and architectural visualization, you got to frame the product and mood perfectly, circling your target like a photographer, changing lights, and when I do this I want instant feedback and not wait for a testrender, or a small tile of a full quality preview render.
In Cycles/Octane, if a shadow is cast too long, I see it and change it, if a shadow is too soft or too sharp, I can fix that right away, if there’s a highlight in the wrong place, I move the object or change the camera angle… you save an insane amount of time with this in your workflow and ultimately money.
There are other renderers with interactive viewports as well, but they are either integrated in another tool (Lightwave), not production ready (SLG) or got pricetags in the 4 digits (Shot, Arion, Fryrender …)
Another renderer noteworthy, although I haven’t tried it yet is Spectral Studio.
90USD for the license, OSL, OpenCL physically correct .OBJ based renderer with .blend import
http://www.spectralpixel.com/
This thread just reminded me I wanted to try it… downloading now, reporting later 
hth
Well, so far no luck getting it to work. The .blend import feels to take aeons.
And although I have the Intel OpenCL SDK and RT, as well as CUDA SDK and latest Nvidia drivers installed, it just crashes switching to photo realistic rendermode.
Other than that it looks nice.
I jumped in a thread in their forum, seemingly the only thread, that this happens.
Curios if it works for someone else, otherwise you could join the thread to help them gather info on why it’s crashing 
Agree to a point. Perhaps you have forgotten what it is like to be new at this. Newbies to the field often think that some great software or renderer will suddenly make their work look better. I know I did. And it is hard to deny that it is the amount of skill with the camera that makes the great shot, not just the camera. Take blender internal and put it in the hands of a master, and give a novice the best render engine in the world, which will make a better picture?
I have a $5000 camera, it makes my so-so photography skills slightly better, but it doesn’t make them great. My point to the OP is that they need to take the time to learn whatever engine they are using o its full extent, and not search for the perfect render button.
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Lighting and Rendering”
I don’t know much about rendering but Franky I can see why people are looking for better render engines as I created a very basic lighting with cycles and its giving me many issue’s already.
I’ll just say if your going to pay for a render engine then make sure it is VRay, Vray is the industries standard and most Professional artist use it so it would be your best bet.
But remember there is no prefect render engine, so research them first.
To me a good render engine is all about power and what the engine does on its own in contrast to the user having to articulate every little effect. I like an engine that has accurate lighting based on real physics and can handle user input of IOR values. I like an engine that you can be very simple or go into rocket scientist mode. I don’t care how much talent I may have, the tools used makes a difference not only in terms of quality but in time which I found is a major factor when it comes to 3D projects.
With all the praise I see Cycles getting I also see plugins for retail render engines which made me wonder if Blender’s render engine or Cycles had some serious limitations. Because if Blender’s render engines did the job for me, I would not use a third party engine specially if it saves me the trouble of having to go back and forth between programs. Also there is this assumption that what costs money must be of better quality than what is free (in some cases it is true as open source developers are not obligated to meet any standards to satisfy customers). But then of course some who saved and spent money on a given product is going to be biased to justify there patronage no matter how much a free product of similar interest can do the same or even exceed. Though I have not yet dove into Blender seriously, I see things coming out of it that to me puts it right next to those programs that are in the 4 digit price tags. This is why I ask why use third party software (is it by necessity or just pure preference of tools?)
I decided to hold off on buying Thea for now. I do intend on getting it one day because I really like it but I misread the price which is advertized in euros. I only saved 300USD according to the 295 I saw and I have to put my car in the shop so will have to wait till the next opportunity. In the mean time I will get serious with Blender and see for myself.