Fast, least expensive and well integrated with Blender 3rd party renderer ?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

So I’ve been reading that Cycles is not great for indoor scenes. So I am wondering if it worth investing into a 3-rd party renderer, for rendering of interior spaces.

Can someone recommend such renderer (gotta be faster and higher quality than Cycles; gotta support GPU rendering; gotta be well enough integrated with Blender so I won’t be jumping through hoops to get textured scenes from Blender into renderer; gotta be affordable)?

Thanks.

P.S. Or maybe I just have no idea how to render noiseless indoors scene with Cycles :slight_smile:

2

Have you tried lighting your scene with portals? That will have a positive effect on interior lighting.

If you’re determined to go for a 3rd party renderer, my suggestions would be either OctaneBlender or V-ray for Blender.

Be advised you need the standalone versions of them as well first.

3

I use Octane myself. Its (relatively) cheap and works fast as long as you have a good graphics card.

You may want to try Luxrender. It’s very good, but last time I used the thing it was horrifically slow. Since then, I’ve heard they have GPU accelerated it (not tried this myself so can’t vouch for that), so it might be worth a try.

In the latest version of Cycles, you can use portals to funnel your image based lighting into your room, or you can use blue area lights on the windows to fake incoming skylight.

4

You can try Indigo too.

5

damn cycles, you need billions of samples just to get a clear image. they should get rid of the engine until they figure out a way to denoise or whatever.

6

After reading this:

it seems that there isn’t a clear winner in rendering interiors :confused: (or at least the article makes it seem so)

7

Cycles is hard for interior scenes but it can be done, especially with the addition of portals for HDRI lighting; it just needs a bit more of trial and error (which in commercial projects means money)…

I’d recommend you to use V-Ray, Octane, or to try the new exporter addon for Renderman, I tried it and it is really good.

8

RenderMan isn’t free for commercial projects, but it seems to have relatively affordable commercial license. I wonder why there is Annual Maintenance license (if an artist has to buy both, it’s not really affordable).

9

There’s also the new bounces parameter for environmental lighting (enabled by having it use MIS). This will increase performance since you typically would not need as many bounces for the environment as say, the sun shining through the window or the indoor lamps.

10

You can also stop the bouncing in materials and let AO shader take over after a couple of bounces.
Isn’t it also advised to render out mixed lighting in passes?
Also, have anyone else attempted to use indoor point lights for diffuse and meshlight for rest?
I’ve done some experiments, but I can’t even remember if I came a conclusion :slight_smile: