What render engine to buy?

Hello,
First of all excuse me for my bad English.
I will be buying a new render engine for blender, just not sure which one to choose. I’m looking for a commercial render engine that can do a lot more then internal and cycles. I came to the conclusion that Thea, Vray or Octane would be best. My renders will be architectural and some simple video’s. I want a render engine that can render beutifull images and also pretty good video’s. Render engines explained (in my imagination)

Thea: Can render gorgeous pictures but is not rocksolid or fast. (i’m not sure about presto though)
Vray: Can do it all, is more difficult to create the same quality as Thea or Octane but is very fast and rocksolid. Not industrie standard for no reason.
Octane: Can render gorgeous pictures, less variaty then Thea but is faster and less betaish. Has very nice blender integration.

I’m not sure which one to buy so I’m looking for some experienced advice.
Thanks for reading and potentially answering

You shouldn’t buy any of them. You should do more testing.

Without even having used it I say Vray. " Not industry standard for no reason." You answered your own question.

Hi, it depends on your hardware.
If you have a very good CPU system already go for Vray, if you have a high end Nvidia GPU go for Octane.
The preview of Octane 2.0 is amazing:
For good Octane performance you need GPU´s about 300-600 € (and a new Power Supply).

Cheers, mib.

if I had to buy one I’d look at octane, very fast and quite easy to use (is only for NVidia I think)
but there is an awful lot of free render engines, I’d try some of them before looking in wallet :wink:

thanks for all the great answers, i have a gtx 770 nvidia btw.

thanks for all the great answers, i have a gtx 770 nvidia btw.

Just stick to Blender Cycles. It just keeps getting better with each release.

You could also look at some other free renderers, such as Indigo, Mitsuba, and Nox.

What are people’s experiences with Indigo?

I ask because I’m rendering an animation that uses a world volume to represent a foggy haze. Even with every computer that I own on the job, I’m averaging about three hours per frame. That works out to two months of 24/7 rendering. I’m desperate for something that renders OpenCL volumetrics.

Because otherwise, my options are a quad-Opteron workstation. This is my most expensive option but would give me a great physics station. Or I could buy an Nvidia card and Octane. I don’t want to buy Nvidia because I don’t trust any company with a dominant, closed-source application library. And I’m willing to buy Indigo, but after this particular project is done, I’ll immediately switch back to Cycles and Luxrender, so I’d be spending $500 for a single reason.

That was all a bit rambling, but I hope you got my point. How is Indigo?

It’s nice enough, definitely. It feels just a little sluggish to me, but it makes some beautiful renders. IndigoRT is faster (which makes sense, it is “RT” after all) but doesn’t support as many advanced shading features.

If one of those lost features is GPU volumes than it’s a no-go. That’s the only reason I’m looking at it.

I bit the bullet and downloaded the demo (I hate installing things). This will let me determine whether it’s worth it. I’m not sure what outcome I want.

I did not spend much time with corona. first impressions it looked like cycles. What are the advantages?
I like lots of support. I find many have much less then BI or cycles. Im using octane student now and Im limited to posting on one section of the forum where there are few posters. The tutorials are limited for octane.

Corona is looking good, unfortunately it appears to be windows only …

Well, I downloaded the Indigo trial. It installed. The Blendigo add-on didn’t appear. I couldn’t install it manually so I tried to install it again. I got a whole bunch of errors and now it’s telling me that my 30-day trial is over. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it and now it won’t start.

I, uh, I guess I’m not using Indigo.

If one want proprietary, then Maxwell render seems to be king-of-the-hill, both in cost and efficiency. it CPU only, and use no compromisse correct image approach (no “no caustic”, “max bounce”, etc settings), require render farm to be usable. But if you can afford it, you really can take more attention to story and motion, not render trickery. Blender plugin is not perfect, but it work good enough for 2.x version.

Otherwise, stick with Cycles and Luxrender, they are not that bad in comparison for average scenes.

Thanks for all the great reply’s, really usefull!

Vray is pretty much industry standard for architectural renderings. It handles animation fine as well.
It´s pretty good and recomendable.
Just note that since release 3.0 render node liscenses aren´t free anymore. You can buy a package that contains a Vray liscense + 5 render node liscenses for around 1500€. Every further render node costs, I think 200, or something like that.

I haven´t used the other two renderes so I can not comment on them but to me it seems to be better to invest in a decent cpu renderer like Vray because you´ve allready got a decent GPU renderer in Blender for free.

If you do pro arch viz what you need to be very good at is post procesing. not so much about render engines.

today you can use cycles with a few very good render farms and if you know what you are doing you can do very well !