Render Engine Advice!

[ihatesquids (Cathy)]

Hi!

Im looking for the best/quickest rendering engine that works with images and importantly, animations. I’m totally willing to pay a fee or subscription.

I would also love to know if its possible to render animations or images on a separate software which then also allows me to use blender while I wait.

This is my first post on here so apologies if I sound like a newb.

Cheers!!

[thetony20]

For quickest and I guess ‘best’ would be either Eevee inside Blender or Unreal Engine, both of which are basically free.

@ihatesquids

I would also love to know if its possible to render animations or images on a separate software which then also allows me to use blender while I wait.

Software really isn’t the problem, you can start up multiple instances of Blender and have one render while doing something on another. If its different software then it matters even less.
The main issue is actually hardware. Rendering usually use up a lot of resources, generally maxing out the GPU while rendering and using a fair bit of CPU to prepare the data for each animation frame to render.

If using the same PC, then either you are slowing down the rendering, slowing down what you are doing or both. Depending on the PC specs you could also run out of system resources, meaning the render fails, software crashes. etc.

[Matakani]

@ihatesquids

I’m totally willing to pay a fee or subscription.

So look at render farms.
There are some that are Blender aware. Use one of them. Pay a fee to have 100’s of computers render the scene / animation for you.

[const]

I saw this post a while back ago. Depending on what features you want and what you want to render and such… If you are interested.

FELIX Render features overview

Having worked in the ArchViz industry for more than 25 years, when we started thinking about FELIX, we immediately envisioned it as a tool that could offer a solution to all the paradigmatic problems of architectural visualization: The knowledge problem, the 2D and 3D asset problem, the quality problem, the hardware problem, and some other minor problems. The result is in our opinion a middle ground between two worlds. We think that FELIX in fact offers a quality similar to that of the most prof…

[ihatesquids (Cathy)]

Thanks for all the advice!

I forgot to mention I am using blender but unfortunately find the standard rendering functions quite slow.

Based on your recommendations I think the ideal solution would be to send my files to a render farm which has some sort of subscription?

Unless there is some sort of system / grapics card solution that works for a Macbook pro?

Cheers!

[thetony20]

@ihatesquids

Unless there is some sort of system / grapics card solution that works for a Macbook pro?

Yes, a PC with a Nvidia RTX card, assuming what you are doing is Cycles rendering, since Eevee should be near ‘real-time’ on any modern-ish GPU.

So it would help to know exactly what you are trying to render, how you are rendering it (CPU, GPU, Cycles, Eevee, etc) and what sort of resources they consume.

Chances are the Macbook pro really isn’t helping matters, but at the same time render farms are hardly free or ‘fast’ depending on what you are doing.

For example, there is a world of difference between CPU and GPU rendering. I mean with Cycles rendering a mid range GPU from 8 years ago can be twice as fast as a higher end CPU from a couple of years ago.

But then a high-end GPU from 2 years ago, is 10x faster then said 8 year old GPU, it’s all about getting and using the right hardware for the job.

If it’s an ongoing need, then it could be worth doing the sums, since while your own render node would have a higher upfront cost. The cost of constantly using a render farm will also start to add up pretty fast.