Hi, I’ve been with blender for some time now and have been with Cycles from the beginning, (see some of my earlier work on Blenderswap http://www.blendswap.com/user/Jay-Artist/blends).
I love Cycles - If you can love a render engine. But there are some occasions when Cycles just isn’t the correct render engine, one of the typical instances is interior architectural scenes. This is where Photon Mapping or similar is really important, Path Tracing in Cycles just doesn’t cut it even with excess samples – you could render a million samples but you just won’t get those rays into that corner to get that element of realism and a noise free render.
I was wondering what peoples thoughts are on other render engines for 2015, both free and paid. Some such as Luxrender, Yafaray, Mitsuba seem to be fading away judging by the amount of user art I’ve seen with them. Maybe users are more interested in Cycles as it’s more up-to-date and is continually developed, or are the old engines just not up to it anymore?
Is it even worth learning them if there isn’t really any new tutorials or galleries?
Luxrender always seems so slow too, even after rendering overnight on a quad core, and Yafaray has always been hard to get the settings right – a lot of experimenting = time wasted sadly.
Commercial renderers such as Thea, Octane and Indigo etc seem to be more popular than the old guys, but the users views can be mixed.
Also is Un-biased rendering really quick enough for a job? Can you render something within a few hours or is it like waiting for wet paint to dry when it’s raining?
Vray, the holly grail for some and is the king for commercial work usually, sounds great, but it’s very pricey for some and requires a custom version of Blender as far (as I’m aware).
Then there’s the up and coming free (free for non commercial) Pixar/Renderman engine this year (2015), but is this going to be any good for interiors or will you have to cheat the same way as you have to with Cycles to render them? (Removing walls behind the camera and all that jiggery pokery etc). Is there even going to be a usable plugin for blender?
Will Cycles eventually do something like Photon Mapping? Or is it just not that kind of engine? I’ve heard of MLT could be on the cards.
Plus there’s always the issue of some of us just not having the funds to pay for a commercial engine too, not all of us have good jobs, or jobs at all… sniff. So looking into commercial engines it’s important we don’t waste our time and especially are limited money.
Some users do have some loose change to spare (apparently) but oddly don’t use their paid for engines anymore – why?
I’m on Linux, so for some this can be limiting too what choices are available.
It’s a necessary topic for us all, what’s you thoughts guys, lets share!