Render engines comparison

Artwork Blender Tests
1

Greetings!

First of all, sorry for muy poor English level. :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, this post is a test I’ve made thanks to an excellent tutorial that Andrew Price publised at blenderguru:

http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/rendering-an-interior-scene-with-cycles/

The fact is that today I found it and while I was viewing it I was thinking it would be great to make it in other render engines, not to compare engines quality, all of them are superb, but to the fun of achieve the same results with the different workflows and intrinsics related to each one.

What I propose to anyone is the opportunity to learn a bit more of rendering and texturing by adapting Andrew’s scene to his favourite engine or another that wants to try. In this case I have selected Yafaray because my hardware is not the best of all and I normally cannot get noiseless renders with the new engines. In this case Yafaray is really fast but I never managed to check if it suits for me because I thought that was a bit old (shaders) and its development is not as fast as others; so at the end always I returned to Lux, Cycles or Octane with the long rendertimes (I know cycles is not slow but I want to know another possibilities in case I need to and I don’t want to buy an vray license and in the case of octane, sometimes I run out of gpu memory or the render is more than 16 hours to be noisefree).

All of this is a personal thought, and I’m not saying that one renedr engine is better than other.

I will port the scene to my other render engines (I have a Thea standalone also) and lets see what happens.

The textures are the same from benderguru website, only I changed the walls saturation with gimp because I didn’t found how to do it with yafaray. So if you want to test the yafaray scene you will have to relink the textures and download them from cgtextures (links at benderguru site).

I expect Andrew forgive me for using his scene for this post.
I delete the scene to avoid copyright violation.

And this is my first render, yafaray and sppm without postpro, 36 minutes.

yafaray_sppm.jpg1000×1350 342 KB

2

I like it; it has turned our well. I’m not familiar with the tutorial, but it looks very convincing to me.

3

Thanks!

This is my attempt with Luxrender:

luxrender_path.jpg1000×1350 484 KB

In this case 35 minutes path tracing with the same computer. Materials as close as I managed.

With this two render engines workflow is almost the same; Luxrender has node editor, what I think is better for clarity. Preview render also with region altough I had problems with the camera configuration, I think the problem was the camera sensor fit. I set it to Auto and region problem solved.

I tried SPPM with luxrender, which is also fast but I didn’t manage to remove the photon splotches in the near wall, which are iluminated only by tertiary bounces or so.

Luxrender has a really good feature that helped a lot to set the ilumination, I rendered the scene with dynamic lights and when the parameters satisfied me I rendered another time with the lights merged so I can save rendertime, also
I think tonemapping is a bit better than blender’s (only a feeling because I was getting always burning).

The image is like the first only tonemapped and with a camera film applied.

Thanks for viewing!

4

Hi all,

Finally these are with my Thea render, this one is unbiased (TR2) 35 min.

thea_tr2_35min.jpg1000×1350 314 KB

And this one 28 minutes with the biased engine:

thea_biased_27min.jpg1000×1350 289 KB

Unfortunately I cannot post the blenderfile because the major work was done on thea standalone.
The material system can be opened while you’re in blender and it’s very friendly.

I have also tried Nox and Fluidray but I wasn’t able in nox to properly set the textures and with Fluidray I don’t know how to update an imported obj with a modified one without losing the materials. I have to play with them a bit.

5

Just from the title, I thought for a minute that Andrew died or something :stuck_out_tongue:

6

OMG! I have changed the post title, sorry!

7

Hey Asticles, I really appreciate what you’ve done there! Personally I am a fan of doing photoreal renders of interior architecture (not to say that I am good at it though, I’m really just starting out).

The lighting in Yafaray looks a little fake, though I think it is due to the lighting set up. Especially the lamp in the other room straight ahead.

Lux definitely didn’t have enough time to create a noise free image, especially seen by the shadows cast inside the room by the wooden panels. The wood also looks like rusted metal (probably due to not enough render time). The door handle of the wooden door in Lux also seems to have lost all its detail… But I think lux will really take a long time before you can get a nice image. Otherwise, it seems good to me. One thing though, did you add curtains to the window above the room door? It looks like a lot of difference between Yafaray and Lux in that area.

As for Thea, I think it looks a little darker, although I believe it has to do with lighting setup again. One thing though, the texture on the floor seems to become black inside the room. Did you apply the displacement map properly? It looks too smooth in both the Thea renders. Also, the biased one seems to have more noise in the shadows cast inside the room… The unbiased looks brighter inside the room as well…

If I have the time, I might try with Vray, after I finish my current project.

8

Hi perdification, thanks for your reply. I agree with your comments, but my goal for this test is to view how easy with a simple setup is to get realistic interior renders with different engines, not to struggle every one to achieve the best effect. Whole of them are done in two days; this is what I want to test because I don’t have much spare time during the week due to work and family, so for me to find an easy to setup and manage realistic render engine that with almost no setup would be able to offer good images is very important.

I agree with you that the least realistic is yafaray on this setup, but on the other side is the cleaner in the same time, more or less…
At work my boss, who is the person who makes the renderings, is a master on vray and 3dmax. Some months ago, when I was first contacted because they wanted a 3d modeler I was afraid and resigned to work with 3dmax but fortunately they told me that if I want I could model with blender and then export my work; also I have to render with vray sometimes and I uderstand how important is grainyless images in production, almost for us.

At home I owe one or two cheap commercial engines because I want to do in some future some freelance working. The problem is I love unbiased renderings due their realistic results but by now my hardware is not strong enough for that. This post is to find also what fits to me and maybe help some other people to find their preferred render engine.

Answering to the curtains question, I try the same aproach (with more or less success) as the original tutorial do to be coherent with it, that is a mix of glossy and diffuse material to simulate the curtain behind the glass.

In Thea case, you’re right, is too dark from behind. Easily fixed with an overture behind the camara to the blue environment, but I looked at the original image (not render) and liked more the dark. Also, I’m a bit dissapointed for the dissapearance of the bump mapping along the corridor. The strange thing is that it happens with the two engines I tried with thea. I don’t want to use true displacement because on the other engines I didn’t do it. (Also don’t know if thea support it).

It would be great if you make a test with vray, but please try to maintain the render times to 30 minutes more or less.

Yesterday I tried with mitsuba 0.5.0 but bump is not working for me, I will post it on mitsuba thread to see if there is a solution.

Sorry for my long reply and thanks for your’s.

9

Hi,

This is the Blender internal one, 17 minutes. I had to replace mesh lights with area and point lights.
Everything is a bit tricky with BI :stuck_out_tongue:

There is no dof bacuse blender internal does not have without postpro, i think.

blenderinternal_17min.jpg1000×1350 394 KB

10

Asticles,

I’m not a render critic…they all look good to me, even BI. :smiley:

The 2 Thea renders have a slightly different perspective…did you move the camera or change
the focal length?

I downloaded each one and looked at them sequentially in Windows viewer to see the differences better.

I uploaded the 5 renders above in a zip file if anyone wants to open them together for comparison.

BTW, your English is very good. Are you Greek? :smiley:

Attachments

RenderEngines.zip (322 KB)

11

Thanks megacal. I’ve removed the blendfiles because I realized I could violate copyright of blenderguru site. I will ask Andrew Price about that.

I had problems with the camera due sensor sizes. Finally I set them on auto. I think I will repeat thea renders also because bump weirdness and background ilumination.

Also, I’m spanish :wink: writing from the reigns of the almighty 3dmax. xD
Regards!

12

Here’s is the Cycles version from Andrew Price’s tutorial (with his kind permission)…
very nice reflection on the foreground floor, seamless from the background floor.
But then he is a guru after all. :smiley:

Attachments

final2_jpg-580x783.jpg580×783 97.7 KB

13

considering yafaray is free, it looks really good :). well done asticles ;). luxrender does seem a bit more realistic, but for the amount of noise for almost the same render time, it seems a bit unesesary (did i spell that right?), the yafaray render looks “good enough” to me :).

14

Thanks @f3l1x, but I only set the materials and yafaray render, all of the hard work was already done from the tutorial itself.
I think I will try with Clarisse, its PLE is free and I’m a bit curious. Unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to do anything until next weekend.
:slight_smile:

15

nice work achieving similar results with renderers.if i may make a suggestion,it will be better to use a scene which needs more indirect lighting(this scene is more direct and i think Andrew uses fill lights too)and lights from natural positions(windows etc).i am linking a good interior with very natural lighting done by Sharlybg in luxrender

http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=10045&start=10

16

Yeah, rusted you’re right, it could be great to use such a scene to make comparisons. Lately I’ve not so much time but I also was thinking to make an indirect interior and with only white diffuse materials to test sampling and illumination.

Since I’m learning wings3d these days, I will try to make something interesting and I will post the obj here.

Thanks for your reply!

Here is an interesting post related but with IBL, I think they have also the models to test:

http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=4&t=48218

Regards!

17

in wings3d, try selecting some faces and intruding them. it makes some funky shapes :slight_smile:

18

Hi, just for fun render the file with Octane, 3000 samples 9 minutes.
Camera was hard to set up, small texture size problems.

guru_floor.jpg1000×1350 427 KB

Cheers, mib.

19

Thanks for your test @mib2berlin, did you used the same bump images?

Also, I think it’s time to make things more difficult :stuck_out_tongue:

This is a small scene I’ve done to test with difficult indirect ilumination. If anybody wants, it would be great to improve it to have a better scene with your sugestions or who wants to make any modification. Also it will add some caustics to other scene. It’s some sort of cornellbox.

Sampling is very high because I’m testing with regions render.

render_engine.blend (641 KB)

Regards!

20

I would like to make a few observations about YafaRay if I might. And, this especially applies to animation. Blender Render (BI) is faster then YafaRay even when using Direct Lighting. But, check ‘Mirror’ in Blender Render and that goes to hell quick.

For an example I have a large hardwood floor in a project. And, while I’m pretty comfortable with BI I can’t get a natural looking sheen on that floor without using ‘Mirror’. Well when you do render times jump to an unacceptable level and you’d better be watching the processors temperature. Whereas in YafaRay sheen on that floor is no problem with acceptable render times. Add to that Caustics with Direct Lighting in YafaRay and…

You didn’t mention animation but surely you will run into that if striking out on your own part time.