Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 13, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 (edited) Hi all, I have some experience with Blender Cycles but have been sneakily peeking at other standalone renderers recently. I just haven't been able to get 'into it' as a render engine. I think a big part of it is how long you have to play with nodes to get a relatively noisy picture, and the absence of a material library of any sort. The majority of my work is generated for Unity based content, but it would be nice to start getting some decent still renders of the work too. I will also be rendering mainly things like muscle, skin, eyes and so forth 1. Are there any render packages that people find do and don't work well with 3Dcoat exports? 2. Of course this is CG and nothing is ever 'quick', but it would be nice to use a package that lets you experiment with end-results as soon as possible. I.e. it perhaps has a nice material library good-to-go for instance. 3. is the upcoming PBR with v4.5 going to be a good alternative? 4. if vertex painting in 3Dcoat, is it possible for external render packages to render this? Anyway, please feel free to give me any and all of your thoughts on what you enjoy using. Edited February 13, 2015 by arumiat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Aleksey Posted February 13, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 (edited) personally don't use it, since i like to make my own materials, and i use c4d for final output, but from what you described it looks like keyshot is what you need. Edited February 13, 2015 by Aleksey 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member gbball Posted February 13, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 personally don't use it, since i like to make my own materials, and i use c4d for final output, but from what you described it looks like keyshot is what you need. Agreed, Keyshot sounds like exactly what you're looking for. Expensive though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 13, 2015 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 (edited) Thanks both. Are you referring to Keyshots material library and thus needing minimal input? Edited February 13, 2015 by arumiat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member gbball Posted February 13, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 (edited) yeah, it has fairly extensive library of default materials and light setups. Edited February 13, 2015 by gbball 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted February 13, 2015 Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 IF the upcoming 4.5_PBR add a SSS PBR shader, may be is going to be a good alternative to get WIP renders... i think yes. But... without render passes in render room... i think not for final render 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor Michaelgdrs Posted February 13, 2015 Contributor Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 Take a look at Marmoset as well , for open environments scenes its great , it carries no animation , but its under development... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted February 13, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 (edited) Do not count Blender Cycles out just yet... Of course with Keyshot, you get what you pay for at 995 dollars for the HD version. You a great renderer with pre-loaded materials and Studio Scene Set Ups. Now Blender: You can download some studio setups at Blendswap. Materials are the weak point. There are a few sites that have materials created for cycles you can download. Rendering Vertex paint as easy as pie. Just one node... Attribute... More simple renderings you do not need those sometimes overly complex cycles nodes setups that float about the net. Picture shows a Studio light setup I downloaded. Vertex painted model, appox 1,700,000 tris exported as Ply file. This model is shown in the first picture, no PBR setup since it is vertex painted, I used PBR materials though. I added a glossy node to add a little shine. Rendered using Cuda (200 cores) 500 samples= 4 minutes and 19 seconds by 1920 x 1080 If you use the PBR workflow then you can use a PBR shader that a Blender user created. Then it is just a matter of connecting texture nodes to that Shader. Edited February 13, 2015 by digman 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 13, 2015 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 This is a screenshot of the realtime keyshot preview, - took me less than 2 minutes of drag and drop to set up, and for full render, rendered at 1.5million vertices at 1024x768 in literally seconds. I am very impressed. That being said, your scene looks excellent too, and considering the price differential (!) I think I'd be an idiot not to explore Blender a little further first. Do you have a link to the studio light setup you used? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted February 13, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 13, 2015 (edited) I sent you a pm with the blend file. Also you can pay for a Studio Scene Kit, the regular or the Pro... http://cgcookiemarkets.com/blender/?s=studio This above site is part of CGCookie. A great site... Free tutorials and you can pay 18 buck a month to get a lot of training material if you so desire. I did for about 4 months then stopped. I will renew again when I want to learn some more indepth Blender stuff... Also tons of Blender tutorials on the net now. http://cgcookie.com/blender/ I am not trying to convince you to use Blender but making you aware of things you might not know to help in your decision process. Edited February 13, 2015 by digman 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted February 14, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 14, 2015 If you have a relatively recent and beefy Video card, I would highly suggest looking at Thea Render. It can use just CPU and has a really fast mode for that, as well, but it's about the only render I know that uses ALL your CPU power and graphic card to preview render and final Render (called Presto). It's fastest render I've seen thus far, and that is compared to VRay (2.4 with Intel Embree), finalRender 3.5 and Moskito (100%GPU), Mental Ray, iRay, and has a lot of different render passes. Even came up with the first ever bucket rendering on the GPU, to help overcome Memory limitations on GPU's. It has a pretty good material library, and a free IBL light studio. And it's pretty inexpensive compared to other competitors on the market. I'm pretty happy with it. Cycles in Blender makes ton of sense, too, IMHO. https://www.thearender.com/site/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2Zo4BZGq-c#t=135 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 14, 2015 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 14, 2015 (edited) I replaced the pillow in Digmans scene with the same model as previously and a simple diffuse & glossy for all the materials. Here is 775k verts rendered at 750 samples with Cycles bounces kept to a minimum. Took 1minute, which is very good. The studio setup makes all the difference... Gah, for $995 it's very difficult to justify the outlay on Keyshot really. Additionally I can't find that it has native support for rendering vertex painted meshes, which would be a real shame. Only thing I'd say was Blender was very slow to navigate the viewport. I'm going to check out a trial of Thea Render too.. I've got a GTX870M graphics card and i7. Interested to see how it does. Thanks all! Edited February 14, 2015 by arumiat 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted February 15, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 15, 2015 I replaced the pillow in Digmans scene with the same model as previously and a simple diffuse & glossy for all the materials. Here is 775k verts rendered at 750 samples with Cycles bounces kept to a minimum. Took 1minute, which is very good. The studio setup makes all the difference... 750cycles.JPG Gah, for $995 it's very difficult to justify the outlay on Keyshot really. Additionally I can't find that it has native support for rendering vertex painted meshes, which would be a real shame. Only thing I'd say was Blender was very slow to navigate the viewport. I'm going to check out a trial of Thea Render too.. I've got a GTX870M graphics card and i7. Interested to see how it does. Thanks all! Demo the Thea bundle for Blender, that way you can quickly jump back and forth between Cycles and Thea to compare rendering. It also provides it's own stand alone, which I find is very much like Lightwave's Layout. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheaRender/videos Make sure to download > install the IBL HDR Studio pack and try it out. Makes scene setup super easy and fast. http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=13153 Extra assets like shaders/materials, XFrog plants, etc. http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=111 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted February 15, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 15, 2015 Here is another Thea Youtube Channel with some relatively new tutorials. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5m0z3Rnhd6qH28Z_kL1_Q 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted February 15, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 15, 2015 This is a screenshot of the realtime keyshot preview, - took me less than 2 minutes of drag and drop to set up, and for full render, rendered at 1.5million vertices at 1024x768 in literally seconds. keyshot.JPG I am very impressed. That being said, your scene looks excellent too, and considering the price differential (!) I think I'd be an idiot not to explore Blender a little further first. Do you have a link to the studio light setup you used? Looking good. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted February 15, 2015 Report Share Posted February 15, 2015 If you like to test one more... Guerilla Render is a production renderer for the animation and the VFX industries. It is developed in production, for productions. Its free. //sidenote There is The Ptex branch of Blender, if any1 like to test. Can download it at Graphicall.org 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted February 23, 2015 Report Share Posted February 23, 2015 If you are using Cycles, may be like to take a look at LUXRENDER (The exporter plug-in for Blender 2.6x is called LuxBlend) last version 1.4 looks very promising LuxRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine. Based on state of the art algorithms, LuxRender simulates the flow of light according to physical equations, thus producing realistic images of photographic quality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 23, 2015 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 23, 2015 AbnRanger I couldn't get the Thea plugin working in Blender so I'm holding off testing Thea for now, but thanks for those tutorials, it does look very promising as you say, especially with the library setups they have available. Carlosan are you using Luxrender with Blender 2.7x? Currently only looks as though the plugin is working for 2.6 ( although I'm right in thinking I can still download 2.6 builds to test with if I want?). From reading it sounds like a great engine, is there anything in particular you like about it? T Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted February 23, 2015 Report Share Posted February 23, 2015 The last version_1.4 is for 2.72A and above http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/standalone#windows im testing it, yes its biased, im comparing it vs cycles... quality(noise) and velocity Latest Stable Release (v1.4 31/01/2015) Version Windows Mac OSX Linux Author: Piita Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 23, 2015 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 23, 2015 Cool thanks Carlosan I'm going to check it out. I've got the exporter installed, - if you are aware of any golden tutorials for getting it up and running let me know, the wiki seems to be a bit out of date. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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