Hey everyone, I would like to use Blender, but I’m wondering what my options for rendering are. My favorite render engine is V-Ray. I know that there is an exporter for it, and I tried the demo, but it crashed on me multiple times with the test scenes. Also, it seems that only the 32 bit version is compatible for Mac with the render view.
I feel that Blender is pretty much the best already software since its modeling and animation workflow are excellent, but I feel that rendering is lacking. I don’t want to get involved with the internal engine. I don’t feel that the quality is there. Apparently this is why Cycles is being developed which looks like it could be promising, but not all of Blender’s features are supported yet, it’s noisy, and rendering takes a very long time. Since my video card is an ATI on a Macbook Pro i7, GPU rendering is not supported. I would like to do animations, so speed is important with the CPU like V-Ray is.
So, I would like to know… is there a rendering option that offers similar quality and speed as V-Ray, makes use of all Blender’s features, and also integrates directly into Blender’s rendering window (not a separate program window)?
So, I would like to know… is there a rendering option that offers similar quality and speed as V-Ray, makes use of all Blender’s features, and also integrates directly into Blender’s rendering window (not a separate program window)?
No.
Whether Cycles is slow depends a bit on the scene (especially the lighting situation). You can look into noise reduction, to get rid of the grainyness.
It depends on what you are rendering. You can go out with FBX to anywhere you want and render. There was a VRay exporter for Blender, but I think the project got abandoned. Also, there was an exporter for Octane – but that is also an unbiased renderer, so you will run into some of the same issues you have with Cycles.
IIRC, the latest Cycles build is attempting to add a switch that allows you to make it less unbiased and more biased – that is the direction it needs to go to be helpful for animations, IMHO. But I haven’t followed the cycles development very closely.
there is yafaray that is not bad at all, but for me the lacking of render passes is a big big problem.
There is a nice exporter being developed for maxwell render. I don’t know the engine much, but the quality is high for sure. I don’t know about the speed, since is a really accurate engine.
there is a project which is still in a very early stage but is very promising. It’s called micro render, it’s fully integrated in blender and is some kind of Internal, faster and with GI. A really interesting project indeed.
Finally, I used the vray exporter and it looks really stable for me. Im on win7 64bit.
There is also luxrender, but is quite slow, mostly for architectural renderings.
Octane is also out there. Unluckly there is just an unofficial expoerter for blender which is not ideal for working.
If you don’t need Render Passes, have a look at Mitsuba. I found it to be the fastest of all open source renderers i’ve tried, and it has some nice integrators… (Also supports Cluster-rendering
There’s also 3Delight (Renderman Compliant), free for (i think 2 Threads), which seems very fast too, i just could not get used to how shaders are made…
And lastly there is Appleseed, but currently i can not make it run (on mac), atm not so interesting imo, but keep an eye on it
It’s worth mentioning Thea Render. I haven’t used it lately, but its precursor, Kerkythea, had nice results back in the day. I personally just quit using third party renderers after Cycles because the workflow is so much easier without exporters, and after a little practice I feel I get excellent results (clients still send me work). Sure, Cycles is slow, but I bought a new computer to make up for it, and now Cycles is almost as fast for me as other render engines were on my 2 year old computer.
Thank you everyone for the replies. Yafaray seems nice. I guess some people are referring to it as the free version of V-Ray. My question with that would be, is render passes the only thing that it lacks compared to BI engine and taking advantage of Blender’s capabilities? Besides this, does it support all of Blender’s features such as particles/hair/ect…?
i am afraid it only supports particles as istances, but I am not too sure about it. Maybe try to check out the yafaray website.
I don’t think it can be considered a free version of vray. It is a really good and realiable free engine. It has a good GI and overall quality, but I don’t think it can be used without problems on any kind of project and situation.
Have you really tried the custom build of VrayBlender offered here?
I haven’t tested it on Mac but on Windows it works perfectly and supports nearly EVERY feature Blender offers + Vray proxies, I don’t see any reason why it should be so buggy on a Mac when it works so good on Windows.
I think the Preview issue with V-Ray and Mac is more a problem of 64bit V-Ray not beeing able to output preview somehow, not of the exporter itself. Since 32bit seems to work fine.
“I don’t see any reason why it should be so buggy on a Mac when it works so good on Windows.” lol
Yes, I did try the custom build. I think the reason why it is buggy on Mac is because it’s not native to mac. The frame buffer that launches is “vray.exe”.
I am not sure why you think Blender Internal is not good enough to pursue, but I would recommend starting there for the fastest and cleanest render option. Also there is 3Delight which gives you full control over shading via RSL. Implement as many features as you need for each shot.
