Lyubomir Kovachev

For the last few months I tested 8 external render engines for Cinema 4D, and 4 of them are available for Blender as well: Luxrender, Octane, Indigo, Thea Render Octane is excellent for small scenes (interiors) but not for large outdoor scenes, because there's no instancing and it has to load the meshes into the video card memory, and that cuts down the usable scene complexity even more. And it's not very useful for animations, as it drops the live connection too often and crashes a lot, so the chances for successful overnight rendering are very slim. And you need a fast Nvidia CUDA videocard for it. I found Luxrender much slower than Thea and Indigo, so I didn't test it any further. Indigo is very good - almost full featured, stable and reasonably fast (for an unbiased renderer at least). And finally, Thea Render, has everything Indigo has, plus a very good second biased render engine, and a better price. Thea has fast translucency, fast instancing, fast and full featured unbiased and biased engines, and it's quite stable and easy to use. Thea is not as well integrated into Blender as Yafaray, but it has an exporter, and it has its own studio interface with interactive preview (ala Modo) that makes material tweaking and lighting much more interactive actually. I can't comment on Yafaray and the 3 days of rendering, I am a beginner in visualization myself and it all depends on the scene, but my speculation is that Thea is faster than that. A quick look at Yafaray feature list suggests it is a bit lacking in features as well. I personally went with VRay for my Cinema 4D, but for Blender I think Thea wins. And my humble advice would be to start your search from Thea

I am new to VRay and I want to know that too. Is there a difference in the way that the physical camera captures light intensities, compared to standard camera? The first impression by switching between the two and using the default parameters of the two suggests just that. But is that true? Or can I make the standard camera capture exactly the same exposure as the physical camera (especially with physical sun and sky)? I like the way physical camera captures the light from the sun and sky, to me it is similar to how unbiased renderers look, and having the same controls as on a real camera is nice too. But I find it difficult to set up depth of field with physical camera, without ending up with slightly different exposure, and for that, standard camera is much easier to me. Is there something else, besides the way you control them, that makes physical camera different from and more photoreal than standard camera?