Awesome Free Renderers

Hey,
So I’m looking for some free renderers to use w/Blender. Here’s what I have so far:

  • Mitsuba
  • Fujiyama
  • NOX (I think)
  • Kerkythea
  • Corona

I’m to lazy to get Fujiyama, but if I have time, I’ll get it running. I can’t seem to get Mitsuba working, but hopefully I’ll be able to get it working soon. :slight_smile:

Does anyone have any suggestions for other renderers?
Does anyone use these renderers? If so, I’d love to hear your feedback.
Happy blending!

You are missing some of the bigger ones like luxrender, yafaray, cycles and BI…
this has a few on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_3D_rendering_software

Yes, the legendary POV:
http://www.povray.org/
Bye

Luxrender is in the midst of a rewrite, but when it’s complete, it’ll pretty much be able to render any lighting and shading situation you can throw at it without taking forever.

Right now it’s somewhat slow compared to other pathtracers (people on the forum have struggled to render indoor scenes with it), but the rewrite should fix that. You can already speed it up somewhat by taking advantage of the noise-aware sampling, but be reminded that it’s almost impossible to have an implementation of that working well with bidirectional methods.

If you don’t plan on using volumes, LuxRender supports GPU rendering on OpenCL. That turns it into a speed demon.

EDIT:

Also, I think it important to point out that most of these renderers will produce very similar images once you have learned their interfaces. The only two things to be concerned with are feature set and speed.

I know about the big renders, and in fact, I use cycles.
Yeah, I wasn’t really wed to Luxrender when I used it, and I don’t know why. One of my main problems is that I can’t render in GPU, which stinks. I’ll check and see which card I have. One of my other problems is that I couldn’t get any of them to work (Luxrender, Mitsuba, and Povray).
Does anyone know of any other lesser known renderers?
Thanks for all the input!

appleseed
http://appleseed.hq

I just recently learned about FluidRay. They may be worth a shot.

http://www.fluidray.com/

Could you tell me what happened when you tried to use POV-Ray? we have very little feedback. have you installed it first?
and then followed the instructions on the wiki?
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Render/POV-Ray

Well, I installed POV-Ray itself, but I was too stupid to know how to get it working in blender. I since uninstalled it.

Have you activated the addon, chosen, the renderer and pushed F12?

It should be as simple as that really, as explained in the “Quickstart” section of the wiki linked above.

Yeah, I sort of gave up, but at some point, I’m going to try again.

3Delight is sort of free*. (Renderman compatible) *4 CPU cores with the free licence.
http://www.3delight.com
ive seen it used on youtube, but I havent tried it.


It would be great to see tuts on how to use it.
Unlimited subdivisions computed at rendertime !
From what I have seen its really fast too.

I do prefer biased renderers such as MentalRay / Vray. Its a shame the MentalRay exporter was never finished. I am so used to MRs settings.
I still like Blender Internal. I wish they could give that a rewrite and optimize it. Throw in GI, and forget about caustics. Caustics are overrated.

Does anyone still use POVRay ?
If so, why ?

Wow, 3Delight gives you 4 cores now? It used to be only 2. Still one of my favorites when dabbling in RIB.

Yeah, both of my machines are quad core so essentially its free.
I dont use it but I like its results.

Yes, some people use POV-Ray because it’s still developing but more mature than other renderers. Personnally, I felt that POV’s feature set and way to work with photons (importance, final gather, spacing…) is actually the one that most closely matches a Mental Ray workflow, as far as the open source rendering world is concerned. as a sidenote, it has fake and true caustics than can both be (de)activated in the exporter.

For really quick smooth (actually completely noise-free) renders, Povray can’t be beaten. I’m using it with commercial animation that way. With advanced rendering features, there’s more competition from Lux, Cycles etc. but for just quick render it is very efficient. With i5 and i7 boxes I use, complicated scenes take more time for Blender to calculate than Povray to render.

Additionally you can use Povray native features with exporter, if you know how. Perfect mathematical Booleans, even with mesh objects. No artifacts, like poly topology usually causes. You need to have very good topology though.

And there’s no license hassles, both Blender and Povray are nowadays GPL compliant.

Thanks for all the feedback!
I found out some more…

  • Sunflow
  • Appleseed
  • Aqsis
  • Pixie
  • 3Delight

And of course, the ones that everyone’s gabbin’ about.

  • Luxrender
  • Cycles
  • POV-Ray
  • Blender Internal

The reasons why I didn’t list the big ones is because I knew about them. I was wondering about the lesser-known renders.
Keep it coming!