Renderers

After struggling to reduce the render times. I thought it would be quite prudent to research into different renderers to see if there was one out there that could deliver photo realistic renders with a faster render time. I already knew of mental ray and Vray but I wanted to get a definitive answer as to which one would be more appropriate.

It seemed like there were particular renderers that were better for other processes. I learnt this through a forum on CGTalk:

sacslacker

07-01-2011, 05:56 PM

It really depends on what you're doing and what kind of budget you have really. Do you need GI/FG? You're going to want to look at VRay (though MR can do this well too) or even Maxwell. Are you doing lots of hair/fur or 3D motion blur, you're going to probably want to use Renderman (3Delight or what have ya). It almost all cases you're going to use specific shaders for the render engine so it's a good idea to learn the concepts and be prepared to apply them to different renderers. You're not wasting time learning Mental Ray since the concepts are very similar to other renderers really. That's just my opinion though, others might disagree.

Generally asking what is "best" isn't a solid question because render engines have pros and cons just like all software.

Another member of the forum posted this:

Kakkoii

07-01-2011, 09:48 PM

Since you already have Maya, go ahead with studying MentalRay. It's one of the most used renders in the CG industry. And most of the stuff you'll learn can be applied to most other rendering engines, especially shader wise. If you can learn to make great looking work with MR, VRay and others will be a breeze.

You'll get varying opinions on here about Renderman though. A lot of people are thinking it's slowly starting to die out and be replaced with pure raytracing renderers now that they are becoming more optimized and negating some of the benefits Reyes used to provide.

But it's still a very valid and useful renderer to learn, since it's still used quite a bit and isn't going to die any time soon. So if you can, learn both.

Renderman is the quickest renderer however requires more time to setup shaders/lights.
Mentalray is the slowest renderer that i have tried (i havent tried physically biased renderers) but easy for end users
Vray is in the middle, easy to use and quick to learn, with average rendertimes.

This was quite dis heartening knowing that I wasn't using the slowest renderer and still had pretty hefty render times. But to read that most CG companies resort to mental ray it made me think I should probably stick to exploring it due to the fact its like the mother of all renderers and if you know how to use mental ray you can transfer your knowledge to all the others. This will hopefully benefit my future because if I persist on the one main renderer then I wont need to constantly top up my knowledge due to less advanced renderers.