Would you consider a new rendering engine?

[clopez007]

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!

[Gog]

Hmm raytracing? isn't base raytracing a bit old hat? or is there more going to be under the bonnet then you mention?

As to research take a look at the different popular render engines and try to see how they fit by sector (I'm trying to hint rather hand hold here)

for example:
- similar engines what are they used for?

Maxwell / Indigo / Luxrender
Vray / Mental Ray
Renderman / Aqsis

Some of these have multi CPU or GPU renderer versions already, so you have some tough competition. Are you looking to get real time or will it be a long renderer like some of the metropolis light transform style engines.

Work flows? if you are looking at getting into studios, much is about integration, how data is passed from person to person / app to app. Most studios and individuals tweak the flow to their own needs. So there really isn't a one size fits all workflow, arguably then flexibility around workflow may be one of the biggest boons.

Personally my work splits into two parts. Arch Viz where I use Indigo or Lux, and product viz - often animations that tend to be done via an internal render engine

[Peter Satera]

As a person who creates product renders a good robust render engine is important. However at the right price people are always interested.

I was very interested in the last render engine that I looked at which can blow away some amazing competition. http://www.randomcontrol.com/arion-gallery-architecture

as well as I've tried using Kray which is very impressive.
http://www.kraytracing.com/

To answer your questions though, to improve my rendering work flow, a huge set of premade materials for those who don't know what there doing is great. Being able to use your own lighting rigs rather than only allowing the physics inbuilt lighting is important. My favourite renderer right now is between Worley's Fprime, and Lightwave's inbuilt render which is a fantastic render engine, being robust and very fast as it chews through renders with minimum fuss. If I was to want to change, i would want real time interactivity with it. Like Newteks VPR and Fprime. You change something, automatically you see it in your preview renderer at the full quality the image will be, with the ablity to reduce or increase the performance of this real time renderer.

Interface is of the most important. It has to be extremely user friendly, and tutorials have to be widely availble to pick it up and get using it within minutes. Ive tried some 3rd party renderers that were so good, yet overwhelming it put me off buying the final product. Quality is always a top priority, with a render engine, we want it to be flexible, to be able to render like Modo, where realism can be achieved however stylistic artistic interpretation can be achieved too. These are the important variety of factors which will make it appealing. Community is probably on the bottom of my list, i dont care if there is a huge following for a software, it doesnt matter to me, if it performs it's task for an array of top notch applications Maya, Max, Lightwave, etc with ease of implementation within the pipeline.

Not that I ask for much. :P

[clopez007]

Peter & Gog,

Thank you very much for your feedback. It is valuable to know what the community is working on.

How about shader libraries? I heard this is a key resource if the renderer will be successful or not?

-C

[Peter Satera]

Yeah. I think in the ideal world shader Libraries are important and they should be able to be created and manipulated. Default advanced shaders could be available to download free as well as a self efficient community library which allows users to upload shaders so the community can use them themselves.

Always easier said than done, huh.