Hi Blenderheads,
after a long time, I decide to come back to blender and finish my short film, and setup a machine for freelancing, doing 3d or CG animation commercials, (I have a few projects already waiting for me) :eyebrowlift2: I am a graphic designer, so my next step is freelancing with 3d, product visualizations and character animation, what I love!
My only little problem is the animation renderer, cycles? luxrender? Thea? Vray?
which one to choose for the task? is 2015 already so i hope to have very “mature” and “ready to fire” renderers
I will buy in the next 2 month a NVIDIA TITAN 12GB, so I can use the GPU for rendering (or maybe a better option) so I will
render all the character animations “in house”
I was reading about luxrender 1.4 “openCL” and the new path tracing, looks promising, cycles is getting better, Thea have “presto cuda hybrid”
I need your help to choose, the one that can be better for character animation jobs and rock solid render time/quality
Somebody that have experience in real freelancing\deadline renders, which one you suggest to get?
thanks
for now I just have a quad core Xeon machine, ATI FIREGL 2gbs, 12gb DRR3 ram. thanks
I’ve been testing renderers for very similar reasons and have narrowed it down to…
Cycles -
Pros: Keeps getting faster with each iteration and you can always use Render.st (make sure to bill the rendering into your freelance charges)
Cons: It’s still slow and has noise
V-Ray
Pros: Proven in many many productions. Integrated very well into Blender. Super fast renderer
Cons: Single thread for converting (slow to get to the render part). No GPU rendering
Lightwave (MDD export from Blender and render everything in Lightwave)
Pros: Crazy fast renderer with good quality. Good shader tools. Scene setups are easy, fast and reusable.
Cons: Two software packages adds to complexity. No more .mot (motion file) export on Blender’s side as of 2.7x. No way to get camera data out of Blender… (you can always pay someone to write these scripts as i will do if this ends up being my choice).
Unbiased renderer, so good for animation and GI. It also has a biased mode.
Really fast, and it is fully optimized for Maxwell architecture so you will be able to take advantage of your Titan X. Because of the optimizations my 980 is faster than a Titan and a 780 in Octane, but still slower than the 780ti and, of course, the Titan X.
Has a Blender plugin that is fully integrated (the first I think) and works similar to Cycles.
Supports SSS, displacement, daylight + HDRI lighting, Alembic, OpenSubDIv, etc.
The upcoming version 3 out this fall will also fully support volumetrics/OpenVDB, OpenSL, PTEX, and OpenCL as well as many more features.
Runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux just like Blender.
Cons:
The plugin requires you to use Octane native material nodes and is not compatible with Blender/Cycles nodes. This might change though when Octane supports OpenSL.
Octane only runs on the GPU, there is no CPU mode to fallback to (not a con for me, but for production it might be).
The plugin requires a special version of Blender, that can be at times a version behind the official Blender version. In my experience Otoy has been pretty quick in getting the plugin out for new versions of Blender.
The plugin also can be finicky to set up and requires a separate OctaneServer process to run as well as Blender.
The special version of Blender does not have Cycles enabled, I install the official version of Blender for Cycles.
very nice options, well, I was thinking about lightwave as a render engine too, I have V11.6 and is very fast! well, my only problem can be: smoke, particle effects, fire, rigid body dynamics, interacting with the character animation/props coming from blender…
cycles + Nvidia Titan X maybe can work…12GB…mmmm … still checking the benchmarks…
Thea render + presto + titan ???
luxrender + opencl ??
let me know too, I just crazy thinking about this… hope by the time I finish my first I can make some scene render tests…
This is for now the best option that I am thinking, I just want to make one investment, (titan X) and hope to be ok, for a few months …updating maybe with another titan after a few freelance gigs…Octane + titan X (or any other nvidia setup)…this is why:
Check out thea render.
Works with cpu/gpu and cpu+gpu.
Cuda/Open CL (in progress)
Interactive/Biased/Unbiased.
Robust integration with blender.
Affordable.
thanks guys!
well Unreal Engine 4 looks very good, and the quality is good enough for what I am planning to do…I think I will start testing unreal first, and then lets see what happens…
Keep in mind, your particles will need to be created in Unreal. Also, your shaders are created in Unreal. Good news is, UE4 has an awesome particle system and shading system built in, it’s very powerful, with a great interface.
I’d wager that the people who in all honesty suggest UE4 for these tasks have pretty much no practical experience in either animation in Blender or Unreal 4 (prove me wrong!). The character export workflow to UE is barely working and since it’s a realtime engine it is much more limited in its capabilities.
Unreal 4 will work great for product or architectural visualizations but would be a challenge for animation (like Killer Bean there). Killer Bean btw came from Animation Master. Anyone remember that program? If so, you will be showing your age.
I wish I can use Arnold jejeje
