I would go for a common render engine.
I think cycles behaves quite nice with its node based material, but as with all engines you got to learn it.
But then if you want dealine production speed, i wouldnt go for an inhouse machine, with some fancy render engine.
Use an oline renderfarm, scale out the renderjob over multiple machines who are just optimized to do that.
Use your own PC for some in between quick renders, so you can make new stuff while rendering something in the background remotely.
Your work schedule would get some more space since you wont have to wait on your PC till its ready from the previous render job.
true true, thanks Razorblade, because I still have my main job, my plan is freeelancing and let the machine render while I am at work
If I am happy with my tests, I will get or a Nvidia Titan to begin, and then prepare a rig with a few titans SLI, in the future…time time…to tests…cycles is still a great option, because is integrated in blender, is the main blender renderer…
testing Thea Render 1.5, I can say is very fast, using GPU + CPU, I think It will be my next purchase, why nobody talk about this in the forum? is 50x faster than cycles…and with an official plugin! ok …testing testing…
I have been eyeballing Thea for some time, but not really done anything with it. But now that you mentioned it, I checked it again and saw they have Substance Painter material converter!!
With renderfarm clients like Brenda and Renderbot in the Amazon cloud you can render so dirt cheap that any kind of renderer that gives decent results and doesn´t require render node liscenses is great.
I´ve been rendering 100s of frames which take 60 or so minutes/frame on my GTX 670 for a while now. You can just throw two dozens of cheap Amazon CPUs at it and it renders fine. It´s great even for scenes with little to no direct lighting. Just render with a couple of thousands of samples and you´re set.
I did test it also less than half year ago, exporter had bugs all the time, crashes and errors. I liked a lot render speed and results when exporter was in working mood.
I tested Thea and it renders quickly indeed, but the interactivity isn’t as fast as Cycles, the CPU+GPU simply kills your computer, you can’t do anything while rendering, and the blender plugin is a bit of a mess, too many settings scattered everywhere.
You can’t go wrong with Vray, especially for animated shorts.
For still images, I have to say that I love Cycles. It may not be super user friendly for beginners, but as an experienced lighting and shading artist, it mostly does what I want.
The noise that can be tricky to fix, which is linked to the render speed. But as Lumpengnom said, you could render on the cloud for cheap with free Cycles licenses if you have tight deadlines. It just needs a proper denoiser ala Renderman and a multilight addon.
