@unknownuser said:
Indigo:
- slow
- outstanding quality
- easy to use, thanks to Whaat's excellent plugin
- good support
Vray:
-very fast
-possibly too complex for beginners
-great deal of tutorials etc out there
-produces great images, if configured correctly
Podium:
-fast
-good quality
-easy to use
-great support
-specifically geared to non-specialists
Thea:
-versatile (biased, unbiased and gpu-based rendering)
-has a studio app
-bit hard for beginners, I think (though this might not be the case if you stick with Tomasz' plugin, instead of using Thea itself)
-good support
-materials, tree models etc available
I'd consider all of the above apps as 'good'. For beginners, I'd suggest Podium. Although Kerkythea (which I didn't list) is a decent choice also.
It's free, and there's comprehensible tutorials available. Twilight (Kerky's little brother, if you will) isn't a bad choice either.
Important: try before you buy.
Thank you for this great post. It is interesting that all renders that come from Kerkythea look quite promising. Even though I like what I see from Vray, I really think it would be quite difficult to begin with. After taking a closer look at Thea I must say that it looks quite promising but you are probably right when you say its rather complicated for beginners.
Right now I think I go ahead and try Podium and Twilight as my start point and may move up to something like Thea, Vray etc. in the future.
As I seem to be attracted to renders from the Kerkythea family I might even try to learn Kerkythea. When I tried it some time ago I had trouble with libraries and so on. But now that the website is up again and everything starts to get organized again I might be able to work this out.
@numerobis said:
Maxwell Render!
http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php/gallery
Highest quality with strictly unbiased rendering and physically correct materials and camera model.
Great feature set and free plugins for many applications including photoshop, nuke and after effects (http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php/products/maxwell_render_suite/plugins/) - and a standalone app. (a great SU plugin) I use it since beta v1 now (2005) with SU and 3DSmax - since a few years as main production renderer on a daily basis (arch viz).
...progressive rendering (incl. save/resume), multilight, interactive rendering on CPU supporting all features, layered materials, render elements, mxs instances, grass, multilens, material gallery (http://resources.maxwellrender.com/), a great support - especially for the SU plugin
http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php/products/maxwell_render_suite/features/
Problems are caustics behind glass/dielectrics and the shading of bump/normal mapped rounded shapes under direct light - which i really hope will be solved in the upcoming V3 (october) but i'm not sure about it. And maybe speed if you don't have a farm, but more for interior than for exterior shots.
Here are the new features that are announced/leaked so far:
- Great speed optimizations for large scenes
- GPU accelerated multilight/multilens modifications in realtime
- Completely new, easy-to-use material editor
- Procedural textures
- Rendertime Boolean and subdivision surfaces
- Double-sided materials
- Object cloner (Scattering/instance tools)
- Light projectors (for film projectors etc.)
- Open exr 2 and deep compositing support
- New special lens models including spherical, pin hole, fisheye and orthographic
- Wireframe rendering
- Custom textured Sun + Custom Sun radius
- Alembic support
- API Extensions
looking forward to the release... ![:green_heart: π](https://community.sketchucation.com/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f49a.png?v=3orp1bvic7q)
Thanks for the detailed post. I had a look and some pictures in the gallery are really amazing. But I have to admit that Maxwell looks quite intimidating to me
I will consider it for my next step after taking foot in the whole rendering world.
Thanks everybody. This has been really helpful. Please feel free to share more experiences with different renders and what you think makes them unique.
Best regards
niX.