I’ve been trying to render my substance painter models in blender, though a unique cycles node setup for each material is unrealistic… (realistic renderering eh eh pun). So I’ve been looking at external renderers including mitsubi, yafaray, luxrender, pov ray etc. Does anyone have a recommendation on which of these or other renderers in blender are capable of rendering physically based content with spec/gloss or metallic/gloss texture maps and are quick to learn. Considering the textures are fine-tuned extensively in substance painter, I’m looking for a render engine i could simply plug the texture maps into and mess with some lighting and camera settings for a simple orthographic render of 3d models. Thanks very much
I’m not sure if any of those renderers you posted do energy conservation for PBR, I’m assuming that is what you are trying to export from Substance Painter? I think that Cycles does, so the spec/gloss workflow should be doable with it. The metal/gloss workflow is different in that fresnel reflections become important. Cycles does have a fresnel node but I’m not sure how to use it. Either way you will have to export your texture in albedo/diffuse, gloss/roughness, and metal texture images. Then load them into cycle nodes to use them in Blender.
I do a similar workflow between 3D-Coat and Octane Render. I export the texture layers individually and then rebuild the texture in Octane to use them. Here is how I worked it out for Octane:
I’m looking for a render engine i could simply plug the texture maps into and mess with some lighting and camera settings for a simple orthographic render of 3d models.
In my experience, the only ones that would allow you to just connect textures and have almost everything done for you are Arnold and Renderman (and even there you’ll have to fiddle around with many settings). Cycles is quite capable, but as it doesn’t has an official PBR ubershader yet you’ll have too create your own setup. The good thing is, once that’s done you can keep using it for everything, so it’s a one time only effort.
Take a look at this, follow the tut and you’ll have a nice reusable setup for PBR in Cycles
This is the final video of a series, but I recommend you to watch them all 
It is best to use Substance using the Metal/Rough work flow that it was originally designed for and then use the in-built format node for outputing to Diff/Norm/Spec to be used in Blender.