Need help choosing a render engine? Part three of our guide to the subject asks whether the tools in your 3D app will do the job
In issue 126 of 3D World, we look at the range of rendering software currently on the market.
In the magazine itself, you can find a guide to ten key renderers: Brazil r/s, finalRender, FPrime, HyperShot, mental ray, MachStudioPro, Maxwell Render, RenderMan, Turtle and V-Ray.
But do you need a third-party render engine at all? For modo and Cinema 4D users, the answer is probably ‘no’. Artists we spoke to commented that Cinema’s base engine is adequate for many jobs, although most professionals also use Maxon’s Advanced Render 3 module.
“Of all the modules that Maxon sells, it is the most popular by a pretty comfy margin, but that said, most of my paying jobs could actually be done with just the base engine,” comments former Maxon staffer and 3D Fluff founder Matthew ‘Mash’ O’Neill.
”Global illumination, ambient occlusion, caustics… these are all nice things, but I’ve yet to find a paying client that wasn’t happy with some quicker-to-render manually added fakes. Strategic fill lights and pre-rendered shimmering caustic shadow masks go a long way.”
Freelance artist Adam Benton uses the third-party render engine V-Ray for some jobs, and notes that this powerful system has made inroads into the Cinema 4D community, particularly for architectural work.
However, he adds: “[Version 3 of the Advanced Render module] has gone a long way to close the gap between itself and V-Ray. For me, AR3 still remains the quickest, and easiest choice for most work.”
THE LIGHTWAVE MARKET
Over in the LightWave community, the situation is slightly different. Although NewTek evangelist William Vaughan estimates that “90 per cent of LightWave users work with the built-in renderer”, most studios also run a copy of FPrime.
First released in 2004, this ultra-fast interactive renderer quickly established itself as a standard both for preview and final-quality work.
While LightWave’s own built-in engine has caught up to some extent, with some interviewees reporting that they now use FPrime mainly for setting up lights and surfacing, FPrime still continues to dominate many people’s workflows.
MAX AND MAYA
In the 3ds Max and Maya communities, things are rather different, with most medium-to-large VFX houses opting for a RenderMan-compliant system such as RenderMan, 3Delight or AIR.
You can find a fuller discussion of the issue here.
Most visualisation studios opt for one of the ‘big three’ 3ds Max renderers (Brazil r/s, finalRender and V-Ray: all discussed in detail in the printed article) for their GI capabilities and high raytracing speed.
However, several interviewees noted that visualisation professionals are increasingly turning back to the mental ray render engine built into 3ds Max.
“More and more people are switching back to mental ray because it comes with the main package and now has a much better workflow within Max,” says Alex Morris, former director of Hayes Davidson. “It‘s also a lot faster if you know what you are doing.”
HOUDINI's MANTRA: A THIRD WAY?
For Abdelkareem Abonamous, associate and film director of Black Mountain VFX, the distinction between modern raytracing engines and RenderMan-compliant systems forms a key dividing line in 3D graphics.
“There‘s a classic split between the RenderMan/3Delight/AIR type of renderers, and the V-Ray/Brazil/finalRender breed,” he says. “Each class has its inherent advantages and disadvantages, and to most smaller shops, the advantages of the latter class (easy GI, high raytracing speed) are extremely important.”
However, there is a third way. Houdini’s built-in Mantra engine offers a hybrid of the two approaches. “In my experience, it tends to go unnoticed since most smaller shops don‘t get what it means: you get motion blur and displacement for free, while still having a straightforward approach to GI, reflections and so on,” says Abonamous.
Developer Side Effects software, which makes unlimited Mantra tokens available to users, estimates that two thirds of its clients run the renderer in production.
Among larger VFX studios, Mantra’s Volume rendering is popular for its high-quality self-shadowing and for the ease in which volumes can be managed using Houdini’s node-based workflow; while medium-sized shops benefit from the balance of speed and flexibility it offers.
“TDs don‘t expect the two approaches to be married so effortlessly,” says Abonamous. “Rendering a scene with full GI and full motion blur at the same speed it takes to render that scene without motion blur is pretty impressive to a lot of people used to the pure raytracing renderers.
