List of free Blender renderers

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

I figured to summarize the available free renderers for Blender.

Please feel free to correct me or add suggestions, thanks.

In alphabetical order:

¹ Free with certain restrictions.

² At the time of writing this renderer is not yet available for Blender 2.8
(please let me know if I’m mistaking or if this has changed).

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I also wrote an article with more info about the available free renderers:

2

Hey… I’m TheBounty developer…
I’m working on the version for Blender 2.8, adding material nodes. It is not too stable, but functional as you can see in the thread of this forum…
Moving TheBounty to Blender 2.8

Cheers.

3

Thanks for the addition. I’ve added it to the list.

4

Thank you for added to list.
BTW… There is also a project website, although sometimes it is down : TheBounty web site

Cheers…

5

Thanks for the link. A minor remark: the latest news post on that page is from April 2016. That doesn’t give the impression the project is alive. :slightly_smiling_face:

6

What’s the restriction with Octane Free Version?
I don’t seem to find it on their website.

7

I believe Octane is only free for one GPU. See this thread for more info:

8

Oh. Okay. Thanks.
Do you use any of these rendering engine (other than Eevee/Cycles) regularly?
I have been trying to use Luxcore but haven’t been able to get a hang.

9

Personally, I’ve used the following free renderers from the list:

  • Appleseed
    ➔ Looking good, but no GPU support.

  • Cycles
    ➔ Still one of the best all-round and best-integrated Blender renderers. And with the arrival of OptiX support and OIDN denoising it’s keeping up in the race with the competition.

  • Eevee
    ➔ Fast and looking pretty good, but a bit cumbersome to set up (too many render settings, light and shadow settings, material settings, Irradiance Probe, Reflection Probe, cache pre-rendering, no GI update per animation frame, etc.)

  • Luxcorerender
    ➔ A very potent, realistic renderer with lots of settings and advanced material options, which need some studying before you can reach optimal results. My personal favorite renderer when it comes to really refined results.

  • Octane
    ➔ Tried a trial version of the stand-alone Octane a few years ago. I quite liked the rendering look, but I thought the node setup required too much research. It’s a whole system on its own. I also read that next to single-GPU restriction you’ll also have to pay if you want to use the OptiX-version.

  • Prorender
    ➔ A fine and reasonably fast renderer that needs more development to beat the competition. I used this as a Cycles replacement when I still had a Mac. Right now I’m back on Windows with an NVIDIA GPU, and Cycles is more optimized for NVIDIA, especially since OptiX is added to it.

  • Renderman
    ➔ Renderman gave me some of the best rendering results so far, especially when using the PxrVCM bidirectional path tracer. But Blender integration is crippled, and there’s not even 2.8 support yet.

10

ProRender Blender 2.8 plugin was released

" Detailed Features

Current features of the AMD Radeon™ ProRender plug-in v2.0 for Blender™ 2.80 for Windows®, macOS®, and Linux®"

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender-blender

11

I know. The current “1” behind the Prorender list entry indicates the amount of clicks. :slightly_smiling_face:

12

imagen
imagen1203×459 257 KB

July, 07 2019… the last post. Yes the site its not very active, I agree. But the project is alive!!
Cheers…

13

currently as above caused me slight confusion, the word not yet for 2.8… granted this is at the time of writing… so again slightly confusing. :slight_smile:

14

:slightly_smiling_face: There’s no superscript number at the end of ProRender, which means it’s available for 2.7x and 2.8. Only renderers that have a “¹” at the end are not yet available for 2.8. I thought you were confused because at the moment you replied there was a “1” link counter icon next to Prorender in the list. :slightly_smiling_face:

15

Yeah… thing that was the case… feeling slightly stupid now … :slight_smile: Need more COFFEEE.

Either way thanks for the list and your quick summary.

16

Any update on Yafaray?

17

If you have a look at the Yafaray forum activity and latest messages, it seems that Yafaray is discontinued. But it might be picked up by someone else.

18

Changed some small things in the initial post: Appleseed and LuxCoreRender are available for Blender 2.8 in the meantime.

19

Any update about Renderman for 2.8?

20

Not that I know of. The last thing I know is that the API for the latest Renderman version(s) is not available yet. I wouldn’t place my bets on Renderman as your go-to renderer in Blender.