The best rendering engine?

[Lal-O]

Hmmm....I am a user of Indigo,Vray, Thea ,Artlantis and now i'am trying Arion from RandomControl ( 3ds max and Rhinoceros versions, - the rest of the render engines with Sketchup - ). And i must say that Indigo is the best by far !!! I've tried the other render engines only to see if they are as fast and powerfull as their website "promises".



Here are my conclusions so far:

VRAY: Is really fast, but not realistic as Indigo (IMO).Also it is not "easy" to set to get realistic or good results.

THEA: Is very good and stable ,Easy to learn , but the light...don't know...most of works i've done with Thea seem a bit "flat".Is slower than Indigo even is a hybrid renderer.

ARION: It gives nice and realistic results (almost like Indigo) but it is slower ( even is hybrid renderer and their developers are proud of their product ,like the Thea ones).

ARTLANTIS : Is insanely fast , fut it takes a looooooooooootttts of work to achieve realistic or good results.

To be honest, all supposed HYBRID renderers are the ones which gives me some curious to give a try due to the promise of the use of all computer resources to get very short rendering times and amazing render quality. Im not sure if Indigo is fully or truly hybrid renderer, but it is faster than all other products sold as fully hybrids.....

Cheers.

[agentwd40]

Which engine is the best? Doesn't matter. It come down to number of light bounces and materials. The image below is from 3 renders. The choice is: modo, renderman, luxrender, vray, or indigo. Can you tell which is Indigo?
(On a side rant: Can you tell me why Indigo still uses Phong? Shouldn't Indigo upgrade to the Alshader? )

[fused]

Hi agentwd40,

Indigo doesn't really use Phong, it's just the name of the material.

[Polinalkrimizei]

Hi, this is not really possible to tell, as the material's properties (especially the blue thing) and textures a quite different!
Material-wise, these are three completely different renders.

But just for the fun of it: I'd go for the middle one. Is has the nicest overall lighting (see the area under the blue thing), subtle color bleeding on the white ball in the middle, and the chrome-thingie looks "heavy" and not blown out.
Not sure if it's Indigo, but I like it best.

[zeitmeister]

The noise pattern on the floor texture indicates indigo for me... the very last one.


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[agentwd40]

"The noise pattern on the floor texture indicates indigo for me... the very last one."

Nice guess.
A Renderman
B modo
C Luxrender
Other rendering engines are "getting gud." A import part of a rendering engine is the materials. I would love to see the alshader in Indigo 4.

This is Indigo:

[Oscar J]

You would like to see a discontinued shader system that exists almost exclusively in Arnold?

I'm sure it's great, but maybe it's rather some of the features in the shading system that could be relevant for Indigo?

[zeitmeister]

"The noise pattern on the floor texture indicates indigo for me... the very last one."

Nice guess.
A Renderman
B modo
C Luxrender

Hell on earth!!


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[agentwd40]

You would like to see a discontinued shader system that exists almost exclusively in Arnold?

I'm sure it's great, but maybe it's rather some of the features in the shading system that could be relevant for Indigo?

I guess your right... Someone should tell Vray, Redshift, and Appleseed they are using a discontinued shader.

[Zom-B]

Hey agentwd40,

its kind of strange to compare different results from different people based on different source data.
Like comparing some Rembrandt painting to a painting of a collage student and explaining that the one of them Rembrandt is better because it used superior paint, a fancy brush on a exquisite canvas

Same as your strange comparison renderings before, where the different materials and light of the Render engines haven't even been tried to match the same target output

And about usage in Arnold, please read the first sentence on that alShaders website:

Arnold 5's new standard library replaces most of the functionality of alShaders. As such alShaders (at least in its current form) will not be updated for Arnold 5.

[lycium]

Engine comparisons come up all the time, and are always interesting. However, they are usually done a little more fair and systematically: share the test scene, and try to get it to match up to a reference render as well as possible before comparing.

Even in that case, there are details like which render mode is used, which CPU/GPUs used... you know, basic scientific method

Indigo 4 GPU mode would absolutely monster that first scene, and as fused mentioned, Phong is just an old label for what is now a state of the art microfacet model.

Edit: one more thing... the JPEG compression is really extreme, and the resolution is extremely low... let's get some big, high quality images please

[Oscar J]

Hmm, Redshift probably doesn't actually use the alShader, but converts parameters from existing alShader materials to its own shading system.

"In fact, Redshift will currently detect alSurface nodes and will automatically translate them without the user having to do anything. It doesn’t look 100% the same (there are some extra SSS modes in alSurface which Redshift doesn’t translate) but its pretty close."

V-Ray only supports the alSurface material (the one that's specialised on skin) out of all the alShaders, probably by popular request rather than the lack of an own, powerful material system that I use daily at work.

And as Zom-B showed, alShader is being replaced in Arnold 5. I think my point stands.

To be clear, I support every attempt to improve Indigo's material system. I'm just sceptical about the idea of replacing the one we have now, with one that's clearly written for a fundamentally different, biased rendering system.

[thesquirell]

↑↑ this

+

You should really consider, Indigo team, about renaming the Phong model to something super scientific and fancy, with lost of capital letters, something like, SSSAMFM (SuperSexyStateoftheartMicrofacetModel).

[Oscar J]

Heh, I'd rather see it being called "Glossy" or something.

[agentwd40]

Zom-B… I was asked why Indigo should use the alshader. I brought up the rendering engines that use it. Your response is it’s discontinued. When I show examples of the skin shader vs indigo skin shader you scream “NOT FAIR!”

…. okay.

To Oscar, Is Vray going to drop the alshader because it’s not being updated? So what if it’s not being updated. Is Indigo’s Phong being updated with the GGX refection model? No? What about the Ashikhmin-Shirley model? Is the alshader better than Indigo's Phong? Yes or No. Don't tell me Phong is good enough. So no, your point does not stand.

Why the hate-on for anything Arnold. You want something new? How about the “MaterialX” from ILM?

Let’s try this again. Does Indigo have anything close to the alshader skin material? I took the best of Indigo and put it up against the alshader. Show me something better from Indigo.