clopez007 Posted February 7, 2011 Share Posted February 7, 2011 I am new to CG and image rendering but I am working for a company that is developing a new ray tracing renderer optimized for the new multicore architectures like Intel's Larrabee and Nvidia's GPU. Right now I am trying to learn as much as possible on the subject and trying to gather information on the most popular renderers. I would appreciate feedback from CG community here. How would you improve your rendering workflow? What is your favorite renderer? If you were to consider a different renderer what and why is the most important feature to look for? how important is shader availability? user friendly interface? Complexity to set it up? Community? speed vs quality? Thank you very much for your help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Hart Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 Hi Camilo, you have a lot of generalized questions there, and you'll find they have all been covered many times before on this forum. If you use the thread search menu, you should get some answers to most of these things. Have a look at some of the surveys that have been conducted on here. Welcome to the forums and all the best with your progress. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil poppleton Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 We are Vray users at 3dcom, and have been using this for a number of years developing our skills , material libraries, etc etc. To then change to a new render engine involves time and therefore money which unless it something ground breaking I would have to suggest we would not change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nic H Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 wouldn't change unless it was amazingly amazingly better - you cant beat vray's pricing, development, flexibility and user base. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 How would you improve your rendering workflow? What is your favorite renderer? If you were to consider a different renderer what and why is the most important feature to look for? how important is shader availability? user friendly interface? Complexity to set it up? Community? speed vs quality? I think asking what your favorite render engine is in a Vray forum is kind of redundant and Neil is absolutely right about the cost of time and money being the biggest expense of switching between engines. That would be the first thing I'd propose for improving workflow, a shader converter that perfectly duplicates shader's from most any render engine. Your engine is also going to need to support the most popular features of others like proxy objects, displacement, caustics, physical cameras and many more. I'm not sure what you mean by shader availability unless you mean a site like vray-materials.de or Maxwell's shader site and in that case I'd say there needs to be a place where people can share their materials. The interface should be as user friendly as possible with easy navigation and scene creation and the speed needs to be at least comparable to what's already out there. Licenses should be unlimited for network rendering, don't get into the trap that Vue and Maxwell have created where they expect people with render farms to pay extra to use all of their power. In addition support for the software will be almost as important as the software it's self, one of the reasons I use Vray now is because of their tremendously helpful forum. I previously used Final Render and switched to Vray not because I couldn't generate good work with Final Render but because I could never get answers to technical questions. That coupled with Vray's constant updates made it the clear winner for me so make sure your product supports the customer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clopez007 Posted February 9, 2011 Author Share Posted February 9, 2011 Thank you everyone for your feedback! I will continue to explore the forums for the wisdom of the community. The polls seem to be very valuable! Maxer, thank you for your detailed response. You have touched some really good points needed for a successful renderer. Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 10, 2011 Share Posted February 10, 2011 (edited) The thing that makes Vray stand apart is it balance of blazing fast speed with silky smooth, yet detailed lighting solutions. Typically you have to wait quite a bit longer in other engines to get comparable speed, or you have to spend a lot of money on GPU's. My daily work flow requires lots of iterations to images, and I consider the quality of light to be one of the most important things in an image, right behind a good model, and even with composition of an image. So unless a new engine offers the same balance of light quality and speed while still fitting into realistic budgets, then I would probably not consider something else. At least not in the near future. Edited February 10, 2011 by Crazy Homeless Guy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted February 10, 2011 Share Posted February 10, 2011 One other thing, don't pre-release your software like Maxwell did, save your self the headache and keep your Alpha and Beta testing private and voluntary until the product is ready for real use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koper Posted February 10, 2011 Share Posted February 10, 2011 Ooh ooh Can we put in a request?? MOST important feature is this [ATTACH=CONFIG]41239[/ATTACH] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted February 10, 2011 Share Posted February 10, 2011 yup, if renderers like Maxwell rendered in comparable times to vray i'd switch in a second. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricardo Eloy Posted February 10, 2011 Share Posted February 10, 2011 yup, if renderers like Maxwell rendered in comparable times to vray i'd switch in a second. Second that. Until then... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alyosha Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 And I third that...Maxwell is beautiful and provides one of the most perfect results i've seen out there, not to mention relatively simple set up and very decent user base/support. If they made it fast or if technology improved enough to make such engines viable i'd switch in a second as well. In autumn 16 core bulldozer chips from AMD come out...make it a dual socket and you've got yourself 64 gigz at base 2 gig per core in one practical workstation...:-) Multi-core technologies are getting us closer and closer to using unbiased engines efficiently. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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