James,
I am glad you have had great luck with material converters in your workflow and you have a great body of work! There are plenty of newer render engines out there that I haven’t tried so I can’t comment on the built-in converters. However, I have tried a lot over the years and use ‘Universal Material Converter’ https://www.3dstudio.nl/autodesk-material-converter and nothing I have tried is foolproof or provides great results going from one render engine to another. I have always had to go and tweak things, but a lot of the issue is the scene itself and how different lighting systems present the materials. There is the whole biased versus unbiased render engines………. So I would love to find a ‘Scene Converter’ that did GREAT conversions, but I don’t think that is a realistic expectation.
There is also the Proxy object dilemma if going from one render engine to another, basically, you dispose of the proxies and start over, or convert to editable mesh and then explode basically, but they are typically huge…… Just haven’t found an eloquent solution for that either.
That touches on one of the two most important items in archvis as far as I am concerned, and that is third party content and vegetation scattering/proxy systems, ForestPack Pro being what I use. Whatever I use it is kind of a given that I need to use something that works with that. fR4 does work with it and most of my content, there is some content sometimes that doesn’t seem to recognize the render engine. Lauberworks also works with fR4 so for the most part, fR4 is working for me. It also has it’s own proxy/scattering system built in, which some other render engines have as well. My goal here is just to experiment with fR4 and see if I will slip it into the workflow, it seems to have a lot of potential and decent price structure. It is also kind of fun to be in on the early release and have correspondence with Edwin when I run into something.
Currently the 3DAS team is using vray and Corona and I rarely get to render, but when I do it has typically been mental ray as I have used it for years and used it in XSI and of course sometimes vray has been the right tool, but right now I am enjoying playing with finalRender and haven’t hit any walls that there weren’t workarounds or features that substitute how I have worked in the past. There are a few features that I have requested and I know some of them are problematical due to the hybrid CPU and GPU rendering at the same time, but so far it seems pretty solid and it is a good match for me right now.
With all that said, if you can show me a program or converter that works on whole scenes as you seem to imply, I would love to see it as I don’t believe the boundary between render engines is as transparent as you seem to be indicating, but this old dog can always learn something and doesn’t think he is always right. I am not certain what "Connecter" you are referring to, could you elaborate, could be I have been missing the boat and should be using something.
Thanks for your feedback and insight/perspective and would love to hear what you using and what your workflow is.
Happy Halloween!