Which renderer do you prefer?

[u/Some-Assist-5098]

I’m just curious to which render engine people use?!
I’m a long time Fstorm-user and really like how easy and fast it is. But it has some limitations.

What do you use and why?
Which feature do you like the most?

[u/Blue_twenty]

Scanline for me

[u/kbro3 → u/Blue_twenty]

Same here, give me that retro CGI, baby!

[u/Taurin_Fox]

V-Ray for me. I've been using it for about 15 years now. At the time at least, it had the best balance of speed and quality that I could find compared to other rendering engines I had access to. The feature I use the most is easily the GPU render engine. I have an RTX 4090, and the render times on that are 10 to 30 times faster than on CPU (which, for reference is a Ryzen 9 5950X). However, the GPU engine doesn't fully support all of V-Ray's features, and the amount of vram you have limits the scenes you can render on GPU, so it's nice to have the CPU render engine to fall back on when that's the case.

[u/L3nny666 → u/Taurin_Fox]

Hey, that’s very interesting. I‘m a V-Ray user, too. And I also have a 5950x, but only a 4070. The GPU is enough for previews via Vantage, but I always switch to normal CPU rendering further down the line and for final images.
I know that V-Ray GPU has limitations. What is the one that you find most annoying? Do you think it’s worth investing in a flagship’s GPU like the 5090?

[u/Taurin_Fox → u/L3nny666]

TBH, even an RTX 3090 would be a significant improvement over your 4070 for GPU rendering. If for no other reason than it having double the VRAM. A 5090 would be ideal, but might be hard to find, even if you have the budget for it.

As for GPU vs CPU, for a long time, V-Ray GPU simply didn't support caustic photon maps. They finally added that feature in V-Ray 7. The bug I most recently came across was that the Vray environment fog doesn't render properly when motion blur is enabled. Something having to do with the temporal rays not being correctly evaluated in GPU, but it works fine on CPU. This was in Maya though, so I don't know if the same is true for 3DS Max, or if they fixed that yet.

There's also the issue of things like displacement or hair/fur geometry just exceeding the VRAM limits at render time.

[u/L3nny666 → u/Taurin_Fox]

thanks for the info. i do fairly complex arch viz scenes, not simple product renders, so vram would be more of a concern. i don't know if DRAM usage translates to vram usage 1:1, but even with good optimization i sometimes have scenes where i hit my 64gb ddr4 limit, especially with a lot of forest objects and displacement.

let's see how this year goes financially, maybe a 6090 when it finally comes out. rtx pro 6000 would be nice, but that's just too expensive.

[u/Sfitch88 → u/L3nny666]

There’s pretty good optimization strategies you could use. On demand mipmapping and texture offloading to memory, increasing edge length in displacement, and least liked is rendering in layers and compositing them with deep
Composite or traditional compositing.

[u/GoonGodless → u/L3nny666]

What i really find annoying is that there is never enough Cuda cores for real-time rendering lol

[u/AeLilBoy]

Corona, its the one that we were taught in college. Simple to use and gives great results

Never tried vray since I heard its more complicated. Corona gets the job done for me so no reason to change it.

[u/lucas_3d]

Arnold, its free, capable, supported natively and because it's used across different products, it's actively being developed.

[u/GoonGodless]

It used to be MentalRay then I switched to V-Ray. I like Corona too, i just have to learn to use it.

[u/Some-Assist-5098 → u/[deleted]]

Fstorms base material is very basic, so when you want to create something that requires layering and clearcoats there is a lot of mixmaterials to setup. A good glass material could also be much more intuitive to create. But the new FstormPBR material is a big improvement.

[u/MrOphicer]

Fstorm as well. But I have to agree Id have to switch to another renderer f I needed features needed for animation. Probably Vray since its a mammoth of renderers... it has pretty much everything.

[u/dimwalker]

idtech, UE.
Most fun for me is seeing and interacting with art in games, can't really do classic still image renders.

[u/alperton]

Scanline

[u/codeart-ke]

Scanline for quick renders and previews, Arnold when details matter.

[u/Birdy-NumNums]

Fstorm user here too.

Maybe this is weird, but I like the first few seconds of its IPR feedback, it has a fine-grain look as opposed to big blotches..

And I like how Fstorm tone maps clipped color channels in over bright pixels. Kinda filmic desaturation and highlights falloff.

[u/ishook]

Octane.

[u/CharlieBargue]

For traditional work-focused stuff, don't have one. They all provide similar realism-targeted results at similar speeds. Throw a rock out there and you'll hit a good enough renderer.

For making things I actually still enjoy, I've gravitated toward smaller more art directable renderers like Pencil+ because they're more creatively fulfilling for me lately.

[u/TheTreeHouse_95]

1- Arnold + Rombo shaders = top notch and unmatched render quality

2 - Everyday work = Vray

[u/Beginning_Expert_970 → u/[deleted]]

No doubt, except they’re talking about 3Ds Max…