fastest cpu renderer

just wanted to know which one is the fastest cpu renderer.
i’m just starting out w/ rendering and i don’t have a fancy graphics card so renderers like cycle is pretty slow.
I just wanted to know which one is fastest and if there are some supporting documents available for me to learn the renderer (i’ve been trying yafa and the lack of tutorials make it a bit difficult to learn)

Arnold is fast…(but expensive)

MicroRender is pretty fast too $130
(it has a realtime viewport render like cycles for setting up materials)
you can use it on as many computers you want.
and it has very good integration with Blender

Another fast option is Thea, it has a full suite of shading and lighting features and is the exclusive home for a cutting edge biased lighting algorithm that doesn’t even flicker all that much in animation.

It has unbiased pathtracing as well if you need that, there’s a number of optimizations that make it faster than many other engines in that category.

It’s not free though, but it shouldn’t be too pricey and even has an exporter addon for Blender.

sheesh Thea is $404 for 2 nodes($67 for each extra slave),
render engines sure are pricy.

He could just buy a fancy video card. Maybe he wants a renderer that is not a pile of money.

Which a highly competent one for rendering will cost you about the same as a Vray or Thea license :wink:

400 dollars is fairly mid-price for any software category (with anything below 200 being considered low-price).

Or he could just help try some of the new builds with the Cycles adaptive metropolis sampling patch, where there’s a few scenarios that are reported to have a 32x speed increase (and that is with patch not even being in enough of a finished state to go into code review).

On another note regarding a possible need for a fast CPU renderer in the FOSS category, there’s always Yafaray, but you will have to contend with a glacial development speed and a website full of outdated information.

you could have a look at nox
( http://www.evermotion.org/articles/show/8351/nox-0-40-released-brand-new-look-and-usability )

I’ve NOT tried it yet so cant say how good it is (hope to find time this weekend to play with it )

Mitsuba is a good starting point as was mentioned. Awesome SSS presets imo; on the other hand, I can’t get volumes to work like I’d like with the blender exporter.

This is new recently, and I wouldn’t recommend it for starting out, but you could eventually try Luxrender’s “biased path” mode. Set the exporter to ‘Luxrender GUI’ and render mode to either “luxcore biased path” or “luxcore biased path OCL.” I say I don’t recommend it for starting because glossy materials show remarkable difference from normal non-biased rendering without tweaking, no homogenous/heterogenous volume support, no SSS, no dispersion. Lux’s normal non-luxcore path, bidirectional, etc. modes have these features for the tradeoff of being the slowest of renderers (to converge).

Cycles isn’t bad at all if you have a GPU, plus you get all the docs, tutorials to get you running, and the community support to answer questions when something doesn’t work or a different approach/workflow is needed.

Even the new LuxCore Path mode appears to generaly be 3x as fast compared to LuxRenders normal Path Integrator :slight_smile:

The LuxBlend exporter isn’t really updated for the new features yet, and editing the scene files can be a pain.