i’ve been thinking of making an animation of a car driving in the desert. i must say i’m not the best renderer, i normally specialize in modelling. so anyways i’m just wondering what render engine could i use in order to get color bleeding, and an overall more realistic feel, all while keeping each render to less than 3 minutes?? i’ve been experimenting with luxrender lately but obviously thats not too ideal for animations. and cycles isn’t as fully developed as i would like.
I use Blender Internal for 100% of my animation jobs. With some hacks and the compositor you squeeze the magic out of it.
On some rare occasions Octanes Direct Lighting module.
Luxrender can handle animations but you got to know your way in raytracing to set it up right.
Also vRay and Thea are good choises.
Also Messiah Studios renderer is made for animations.
Also 3Delight. But all those are pay to play or even expensive.
You can also check out Mach Studio Pro… it´s free now. I haven´t gotten warm with it yet but it seems to be very biased 
What you want is most likely a biased raytracer with lots of approximation and straight forward raytracing aka direct lighting. Everything unbiased using pathtracing, bidirectional pathtracing and pathtracing with mlt will only give you crawling artifacts all over the place unless you got 2h per frame
BI, Thea, or VRay are your best bets, Aqsis if you want a steep learning curve. As far as I know they’re the only free/reasonably-priced options which are feature complete.
EDIT: I wouldn’t recommend Lux for animations. Unless you have a LOT of time to waste. Mitsuba is promising, but is missing a lot of desired features like displacement and motion blur.
ok i’m just now starting get get very confused. so the other day i spent an hour and forty five minutes trying to get a noise free kitchen. and then i’m looking at mach studio pro and i see as the render time 2 sec… i’ve also experimented a bit in cycles but that still takes like ten minutes.
by the way thanks for all the suggestions i’m checking them all out now.
oh by the way is there an exporter or something for the mach studio pro?
No. FXB is the common ground as it is to render animations and FXB can handle that. But, well… ask Ton about FXB 
I contacted the Developers of MachStudio what their agenda is for a Blender integration, well ignored for months now, not even an answer, so they can keep their free stuff and I actually give money to Thea or vRay, where I have tight Blender integration.
MachStudio is so fast because it is not really a raytracer, more of renderer… it´s all a bit tough to explain, as OpenGL/Direct3D for instance is raytracing too, but on a simple level but not really thought of as renderer although it is one. And MachStudio is closer to a realtime game engine than it is to a traditional raytracer and it works a lot with approximations and fake methods to achive stuff.
I am really with m910.
If BlenderInteral isn´t enough, get Thea or Vray. They have superb blender integration are not too expensive, are feature complete (at least those features you expect in a renderer)
Personally I find vray more intresting. It comes with 10 rendernodes, thea just with 2, which is a factor rendering animations. Also vray is more of an industry standard and it can bake textures, but you can´t use vray materials in blender you have to recreate them… there might be an importer though at one time who knows.
Thea on the other hand offers biased and unbiased kernels and its materials studio and render studio with life rendering and scene setup is very nice.
Just try the demos of both, they both work with Blender like a charm, vray standalone costs 350 Euro + 25 Euro for the dongle, Thea studio is around 425 Euro incl. VAT and Blender Exporter.
Hi whare can I download the V-Ray Blender exporter ?
@arexma : can you talk more about luxrender , i am highly intereted by this renderer especially for animations like our friend
otherwise, what do you think about smallluxGPU, i have tested it these days and it look very promising , i tested the school scene with my average computer : c2d 2.66gh, win64 4go ,460GTX 1go and it was pretty fast ,
i had a beautifull image and relativelly noise free image in less than 2 minutes, so i guess that is a potential candidate for animation
rendering
what do you think guys?
Mach Studio is a rasterization engine like you would find in a game with added OpenGL for extra features, as the cost of real time rendering. It will always look “gamey” because of this.
The problem with unbiased renderers like Lux is that even if it looks noise free, when you start to render multiple frames you’ll get artifacts all over the place. The amount of time you’d need to wait for images to truly converge in Lux just isn’t worth it for animations at the moment, even with the new SPPM, and even that is ridiculously slow compared to the SPPM in other renderers like Yafaray. Lux has never been known for it’s speed unfortunately.
What m910 said.
All unbiased renderers are pretty much useless for animation unless you got a huge, and I mean huge renderfarm. In biased render algorithms, the stuff is repdouceable on a per frame basis. That is also why you use approximated AO for animation and not raytraced AO for instance. You get this moving noise in the frames and all looks like you overcompressed your video and got artifacts.
As for smallluxgpu it isn´t really meant as an independent raytracer as far as I am concerned. It is developed, and if something is working perfectly, it´s migrated into Luxray… step by step. At one point smalllux will be fully absorbed by luxray 
And nonetheless, it is an unbiased renderer again.
The only really fast and biased render method is direct lighting, or the good old “raytracing”. It lacks caustics and global illumination though. That´s where photon mapping comes into the game. With photon mapping you got caustics, global illumination, indirect lighting and even dispersion and photons are shot “randomly” and you can reproduce a whole set of random numbers in a computer, so you´ll shoot the same photons for each frame and you don´t get noise… You also got very good control over the quality as you can shoot more or less photons, and increase or decrease the photon gather radius.
Personally I think it´s the best combination for animations. And it´s too early to say anything really, but I am currently writing such a raytracer. Direct Lighting + Photonmapping. The first test already render sphere´s and planes with photon mapping, but it´s not very performant although the raytracing works with realtime preview, the photon mapping is slow like hell, I can´t even multithread the code because I just threw it together. I started to read into raytracing as I got full access to the ACM digital library and read several papers and some books, started with an empty c++ project and started coding. Within 5 days I had a direct lighting renderer with photon mapping and in terms of completeness its somewhere between the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel.
I am done today with work, I´ll head back to coding now and optimize the code a bit and try to get photon mapping realtime as well, as soon as its done i´ll post up some screenshots and maybe even the binary.
That all said, I got to repeat myself. For animations my heros are (in descending oreder): Blender Internal, Vray, Thea
If someone knows another kickass DirectLighting+Photon mapping renderer, I am all ears.
hmmm… well i really don’t want to spend money on a renderer. actually i would be perfectly happy if blenders internal renderer was able to have just a small amount of light bounces or color bleeding. i’ve noticed that things never quite look realistic if you don’t have some bouncing light. however something like luxrender just has way too much and takes forever.
@arexma that was quite an interesting thing that you mentioned, somehting call photon mapping. i would be interested in checking that stuff out.
and just one last thing. does anyone know what a profesional company would use for their cg renderings. such as pirates of the carribean or 2012? would they use something that might normally take a couple of hours to render and just have a huge render farm or what?
It really depends. Arnold Renderer, Renderman are the most common I´d say. But they have huge renderfarms. If it takes 1h to render a frame with your quadcore, it takes a minute with 60 machines.
Photon mapping is very easy. Acutally I can explain raytracing and photon mapping in two or three sentences 
Raytracing:
You shoot a forward ray from your eye through a projection image pixel. Now you check all objects in your scene if one was hit. If it hits, you look is it diffuse, glossy or transparent. Diffuse -> terminate ray, Glossy -> bounce ray further, transparent -> refract and continue. If it hasnt hit anything -> black or background.
Once we know the hitpoint, we shoot a lightray from the lightsource to the hitpoint. We check again if it hits one of the objects. If it does, the hitpoint is in shadow, if it doesnt, we calculate the normal on the hitpoint and calculate the shading.
The end
Photon mapping:
You simply shoot XXXXXX photons with Y bounces in random (for each pass the same random seed) directions from your lightsource. You do raytracing for each of the photons and let them bounce Y times. Each time a Photon hits, you store in the object that was hit, where the hitpoint was, from which direction it was hit and with what energy (color). Once this is done you raytrace again like explained above, but instead of calculating the shading, you gather the photons. You look in a sphere with radius R what photons are around the hitpoint. With their distance you average the colors and calculate the pixel color.
Shadows are done while flooding with photons same as in raytracing. If a photon hits, you shoot a ray from the light to the hitpoint to see if it has free sight to the light or is in shadow. Obviously you don´t need to do this for the first bounce, as the first ray originates from the light If your photon leaves the light, hits something and can´t see back to the light you actually encountered a black hole, bending light.
I like photonmapping, because in wide scenes, you use less bounces and more photons, to flood a wide arey, in a small complex scene, you use less photons but more bounces to get the light everywhere and maintain the same speed.
And if you got time you simply crank up photons and bounces.
Hey Arexma, do you have a YouTube channel? You’re extremely knowledgeable about this stuff, and in one post you completely cleared up all my suspicions (after a week and half of wasting time screwing around with one external renderer after another) that BI is definitely the way to go for animation. Not only does it quickly do convincing, even artistic, animation that the others simply can’t pull off for all their geewhiz physicist mickey mouse, but with Renderfarm.fi you can large bulk animation produced in a day. NOT possible with the others.
If you have a Tube channel, I certainly hope you do tutorials, especially about rendering in BI. You have too much experience and knowledge not to be teaching this stuff…
And I’d LOVE to see some of your animation!
3Delight has a free version that is nice (uses at most 2 cpu threads), it is fast. Fast motion blur, fast depth of field, fast AA and handles lots of polygons well. But it takes a bit more work/preparations to get realistic results, but that can be won back in render times. Matt Ebb has made an exporter http://mke3.net/
@Adam:
nope. No youtube channel. I am one of the guys dwelling in his cave warmthened only by the light of his screen If you are intrested in raytracing/rendering theory, you should check out http://ompf.org, and check out various books. I can list them to you if you need.
Most of my animations are somewhat suffering quality. Had to sacrifice quality for speed… deadlines are merciless and often clients are happy already with what you call a draft…
And most of my stuff is for internal company use nothing to publicly show around. Digital Education, product presentations for the clients clients, prototype presentations, tradefair videoloops and stuff like that.
I really love BI, I use it for 99% of my animated work, but it really lacks GI. That and a huge interest in raytracing made me start to write my own render engine. It´s getting along, but too soon to really be mentioned. Once it´s a bit more mature I´ll make a thread anyways asking what the blenderheads expect of it to start serious design documents. I could just try to implement photon mapping into BI, but that would take out all the fun I am having coding.
@Sim88:
nice reel, you obviously know what you´re doing. I doubt you´d use 3Delight in the free version for your stuff. Ever tried to render a minute of 1080p on a dualcore?
The free version at best is to play. I rather crank up all the magic in BI and use a rendercluster. Or use vRay.
@arexma: thanks, I think everything in that reel is made with mental ray, haven’t updated it in a while. But I have made a 2K render in 3delight’s free version in under 5 minutes per frame.
I’d like to try v-ray some day, it’s supposed to be really good.
If that is any indication the best studios in Sweden use PrMan, v-ray and 3delight.
BI is nice, especially since it supports all blender features.
I am freelancing, so I don´t have the big budget, but vRay is next on my list - I guess I´ll get it within this month. Its 350 Euro + 25 Euro for the dongle. Quite cheap IMO.
The free version only supports 600x450 and has a watermark but is fully functional for testing. Blender integration is really great and the control you got in vRay is grand.
Yeh 5 min per frame is not acceptable if thats the final performance. Usually I got to render 5 -10 animation-minutes per project. Often enough 20-25min per frame in BI on a quadcore, so I need to use a cluster
It´s also intresting that the choise of renderers and software often is very country specific. I guess the buisiness is just not that big, so many rely on the word of mouth on what to use and it also makes collaboration much more easy
The plans for my renderer is to make it .blend and .obj compatible and give it the functionalities of BI with additional irradiance maps and photon mapping. Bold plan…
I guess by the time I can render the first stuff Cycles beat me to it, because if I remember correctly you can render biased with it as well, but as I said, it´s more the way for me, not the goal
It is funny that I don’t see a mention of Yafaray. Perhaps I missed it. It is a free render system that works with Blender. I have used it in direct-lighting mode for quick animation projects.
Currently I am leaning towards 3Delight because the first 2 CPUs are free for commercial work at any render size without a watermark. It has a better camera model than Blender Internal and also supports all those Renderman features like toon, cell, micropolygon displacement AO, GI and more. I have been hacking away at Matt’s exporter to get the features that I personally need working and fix existing bugs. I have not done enough tests yet to know if the dancing noise problem exists in 3Delight. But having Renderman output, I think, is the way to go.
I was quite disappointed to see Cycles replacing Blender internal because I know they will never get it “clean” enough for animation work.For animation we will end up with answers like “all you have to do is wait for it.” And I personally do not enjoy node based workflow. I feel it is quite convoluted and slows you down. The screen space that a node system takes up is not efficient (notice all that empty area). From what I can tell, about 80% of the Blender users just model or make stills.
As Arexma mentions, there is real-world math involved with getting an animation out the door. I do the calculations before I submit my renders for overnight work. It is quite easy to do. Total Frame Count / Time Per Frame = Frames Complete in the morning. If I need 900 frames over night, I need a fast render system. If I were only working on 1 frame over night, perhaps I would pursue unbiased render systems.
I think you got it wrong. It´s 2 THREADS. It supports two cores, even if you have a quadcore.
A quadcore license costs 1200 bucks, if you want to use more than 1 CPU it´s another 800 Bucks.