I am looking for a renderer to use for my projects, and I’m just wondering what others use. If you use more than one, just say which one you use the most.
I find that Blender Internal’s quality isn’t great. When I look at Blender art and I see something awesome, if the renderer is specified by the creator it is almost always ‘yafaray’.
I find that Yafaray can have noise problems and other glitches that are often annoying to fix.
Luxrender is good, but it is really really slow no matter what settings I use.
You should put the available render engines in your poll, not just a few
There a quite more that work nice with blender.
And what does it help you to know what renderer we use when you don´t know what project we use for.
And if a majority votes for “Other” it doesn´t help you either…
You´ll use different render engines for an animation, a stylized still and a photorealistic still, a photorealistic compositing animation…
You should selectively ask what renderer to use for what kind of project and I am sure people will advice you and tell you it´s advantages and disadvantages to the best of their abilities.
Personally for animation and stylized stills as well as technical stuff I use BI. It is fast with nice results and with a few tricks you can work around its downsides and no one will notice in an animation.
For photrealistic I use octane, it is lightening fast and cheap, downside is you got to buy it and it only supports CUDA and depends stronly on your vRAM.
I occasionally use Smallluxgpu as well or Luxray as it is called now, it is not as fast as octane but got a nice blender integration.
I don´t use yafaray because i simply don´t like the look and feel of the render results… subjective reason.
Like arexma, I use Blenders renderer for animations and Octane for stills. I like Octane because it uses CUDA and renders very quickly, although it is still in beta.
In case you’re wondering, CUDA is a technology developed by NVidia to allow programs to use your GPU to perform calculations. GPUs have many more cores than CPU, thus more threads, and faster renders.
I use them all (except Yafa lately due to the lack of exporter for 2.55, nor VRay due to the cost… perhaps someday), depends on what one is trying to achieve. I feel renderers are like material shaders, they each do what they do well, but can be used to create it differently (i.e. you don’t use a toon shader to create realistic metal). Overall, I do tend to prefer the unbiased renderers, Lux & Octane, however, there are many, many things that only the BI can achieve (thanks to render layers and shadow controls).
With biased rendering, there is more scene setup and more knowledge about light needed, but faster renders. Unbiased being the opposite. So it sometimes depends, do you want to spend the time doing setup, or spend the time letting it render. Admittingly, it’s not quite that black & white though.
Anyways, bottom line, all renderers are tools. No tool is correct for every job, but every tool is invaluable when it’s needed. Part of the “art” (or is it a science) is having instinct to know what to use when.
That’s my thoughts anyways (I didn’t vote just cause).
I have not decided yet, as i don’t render alot as of yet. But for i am leaning towards to jump onto the Aqsis wagon since i saw the dev-video about the coming speed optimization for the mico polycon displacement. But supposedly V-Ray is good too. I consider myself an uneducated render-noob.
I didn’t put in the other renderers because they are not free. I don’t have the money to spend on software, especially since software is usually overpriced or has restrictive licenses.
Why do so many use Blender Internal? It doesn’t even have global illumination.
I mean light bouncing around. For example, a light pointed at a wall illuminates not only the wall, but things surrounding it. This means that, just like in real life the wall will reflect light, and the color of it will also be reflected onto surrounding surfaces.
I think that’s what global illumination is anyway… Or is that called something else?
I don’t remember the exact name, but the industry calls it “something” (has to do with diffuse reflections, the scattering of reflected light), I know exactly what you mean though (I have a training DVD from a guy at Pixar that has a chapter on that exact thing), and you’re right, BI doesn’t do that (directly).
EDIT: You can fake in BI however if you are creative and use light layers and the composition nodes.
ambient occlusion is a fake way of indirect lighting.
it just darkens places where object are close to each other.
global illumination calculates the light as it should behave in the real world.
thats why global illumination looks vary realistic and ambient occlusion sucks.
indigo is a vary quick renderer for realistic results
it works just like luxrender but it is much quicker.
the free version is limited to 0.7 mega pixels about 800x600
the full version however costs somewhat 500€ and there is no exporter for blender 2.5.
If you use the compositor to create a multiply-map (this would use the AO pass, shadow pass, and diffuse pass together for example), you can create a more convincing fake GI than with AO alone as it allows you to do things like removing the AO effect from brightly lit areas, I used this for a few images in BI before the render branch came along, being disappointed in the more realistic GI shading option before hopping onto the Lux wagon.
Well, just to clarify, what Frogging101 is referring to has to do with diffuse reflection. To picture the setup, take a diffuse red ball and set it on a diffuse white table on a sunny day. The ball absorbs all colors but reflects red (even though diffuse, that’s why the ball is seen by us as red). The red reflects and becomes diffuse, it bounces about. Some of it hits the white table, acts as a soft “red lamp”, creating a soft red “halo” around the ball. This will not be the same as AO, where the AO would be most intense where the ball meets the table, and as we radially move outward, lessens intensity. Where the red will look more like a “life saver” or a “doughnut” around the ball on the table. Mixing with the shadow, it looks “normal” because it’s what we’re used to seeing.
This diffuse reflection is what the BI will not achieve with AO & GI alone. You could either use a second lamp on a render layer and composite it back together, or in some regards as Ace Dragon said create a texture map and multiply the layer. You could also turn on “Reflection” and try to get a “diffuse” reflection, though you may be plagued with specular highlights that you wouldn’t want. It can be faked with BI, but you need to understand exactly how light works in order to fake it.
You can work around it in 2.5 if you use indirect lighting and use materials with low emit values - it´s not really “automated” like it should be, but it makes perfect sense in combination with emit.
++ arexma’s insight on indirect lighting. Most of the examples of Indirect Lighting posted online involve very cool intense, exaggerated examples, but you can get very nice diffuse reflections with lower settings. You can set the emit value on a material so low that it effectively isn’t seen (0.01, e.g.), but then you can adjust the Indirect Lighting value to a strong enough setting to make is just visible on adjacent surfaces. It isn’t true diffuse reflection, and has some limitations, but woks quite well in a number of situations.
