What Renderer?!? Please help me decide.
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Hi All,
I am on the hunt for a renderer. I have been looking around and there are so many options its doing my head in, your help and suggestions would be very much appreciated as I see many of you have a huge amount of experience!
Below I have done my best to list requirements and my thoughts so far..I am doing architectural type work Interiors/exteriors in Sketchup, so I need a seamless workflow with sketchup and a suitable renderer.
Each project I do involves creating a model of a building, then doing about 40 renders of that building focusing on different areas, each shown in various states (Lights on/lights off mainly). (Possibly Maxwells multilight, Fryrender lightmixer/swap would be good??)
Ideally I could apply materials and IES lights once to the model in sketchup, apply render settings, view the results in real time and then be able to render all the scenes of the sketchup file. Batch rendering seems like a necessity.
Biased renderer would be fine - I would sacrifice a bit of photorealism for faster render times. (Possibly VRay rather than maxwell?)
Animation would be a plus (not required now but would be good for future)
The smaller the learning curve the better, while I am prepared to spend time on learning, the boss wants it now. I have some experience rendering with a product design background using hypershot/keyshot/bunkspeed shot, dabbled in kerkythea.
A big community/forum/material library would be amazing!
Ideally for both Mac and Windows platforms.
CPU or GPU, im not sure whats better or what will be better in the future. At this stage im leaning to CPU so it can run on existing hardware. We will need to upgrade soon anyway though so please dont let that influence your suggestion too much.
Finding the best solution is more important than the price at this point.
Below is an image which demonstrates the type of renders im after...
Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions!!
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I think you'll find a few Thea users on the forum, and it has pretty much all of what your looking for. It has both a biased and unbiased engine, and the biased rendering is interactive which is particularly great for previewing materials, IBL's, and lighting etc.
With relight you can go through lighting scenarios from full off to full on.
Right now it is still in Public Beta, so the price is really good, and to top it off there is a really helpful community on the forum.
Downloadable for free (with watermarks) for trial. http://www.thearender.com/cms/
Cheers and good luck which ever you choose. -
You do "about 40 renders" of the building!
Wow... You need something blazing fast, then.
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I have seen that you used keyshot...
As far as I know the only real-time renderer for sketchup are :
- twinmotion, is expensive, but it seems to be the one wich best match you description : non-biaised really fast render with large material and objetc library, with the ability to share interactive rendered models : http://www.twinmotion.com/twinmotion2/specifications.html
- [url=http://www.thearender.com/cms/:2eju6aa4]thearender[/url:2eju6aa4], seems to have an interactive rendering preview, it implements various rendering modes and a large choise of materials. They also are looking for GPU implementation, wich can accelerate render time.
- [url=http://www.light-up.co.uk/:2eju6aa4]lightup[/url:2eju6aa4], it has a fast learning curve with an integrated UI and the ability to share interactive rendered models.
- [url=http://www.refractivesoftware.com/features.html:2eju6aa4]octane render[/url:2eju6aa4], with GPU based realtime progressive render (as keyshot), but seem to miss some of the feature you described (light group, batch render,...).
Other have some interactive rendering preview but not necessary realtime render :
- artlantis is one the oldest professionnel renderer with sketchup integration. I don't know if it could use IES light, but for sure, it can use group light and activate them in various views for night or interior render.
- Vray...
- Maxwell...
- other majors...
Render[In] and Shaderlight are still in beta-phase but both have thoses abilities you are looking for.
I am not sure that could help you, but you have to make your choise.
Good work...
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@ecuadorian said:
You do "about 40 renders" of the building!
Wow... You need something blazing fast, then.If most of variations are based on different lights, then a renderer with a relight feature will help a lot. In that case one actually will not need to render 40 times, but just enable relight, animate lights and render all 40 frames with one pass. Sure, relight will have some cost in render time, but you have full control on all light properties during and after the render (if render buffer is saved). Take a look on a example of Thea Relight by solo: http://vimeo.com/14927113
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[quote="minguinhirigue"]
Render[In] and Shaderlight are still in beta-phase but both have thoses abilities you are looking for.
quote]The full release of Shaderlight was launched in October and can be downloaded from http://www.shaderlight.com. At the moment it's Windows only but a Mac version is due in Feb 2011.
Shaderlight is a tool designed to work with your workflow. Its simplicity and high quality results and seamless integration with SketchUp make it the perfect tool to dive straight in to.
Let us know what you think!
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