Material Nodes and 3rd Party Renderers?

Hopefully this is in the right forum (couldn’t choose between Other Software, Material, or Render)

Recently I have been looking a bit into renderers other than Cycles out of curiosity. While I plan on playing around with a few simply to see how they work and what is on offer, ultimately if I include another renderer into my daily use, it would have maximum interoperation with Blender.

From what I can tell, the LuxRender extensions now can use Material Nodes within Blender. This is great because it means that only the rendering takes place externally.

Do any other 3rd party renders have extensions that allow them to make use of Blender’s Material Nodes? Yafaray? Indigo? Octane? Maxwell?

Or is LuxRender alone in that regard?

Vray does as well. Yafaray does not. IIRC the Octane plugin does some magic to take over Cycles node tree.

Note that at least for Lux and Vray, it is not the normal Cycles nodes you are using. They both have their own shader systems, and merely represent that in the node editor. It will be similar, but the actual nodes will be different and there usually isn’t a good way to translate materials between renderers.

Thanks a lot, J! Yeah, I am aware that the nodes themselves reflect the specific shaders idiosyncratic to each renderer, but using the same interface and editor and being able to at least see certain material changes from within the same interface in which I edit geometry will go a VERY long way.

I didn’t realize Vray maintained that kind of integration…I might have to check that out simply because of the way Vray avoids the noise-resolution issues of cycles and other PBRs.

I wonder how well Octane transfers Cycles nodes? I’m guessing Maxwell has no such interoperation?