3rd Party Renderers, what are they for exactly?

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>>532644
It's basically nothing but a dick waving contest to see who can get the fastest render times and who has more features. Then fanboyism comes to play and is just a multi-layered skub fight.

>It seems some of these renderers are designed to shorten render times
Because some people don't have the time to wait 20+ hours for a clean render.

>My real questions here is when you consider all of the slider tweaking to reduce grain, and the time it takes to learn how to use renderer specific materials and lights, and the high cost, are the advantages really worth it?
Sometimes yes. Most of the proprietary renderers have the funds to go into paying researchers that can program the latest and greatest algorithms into their program. Also 24/7 support. Whereas open source renderers take more time because most of the time they are made by people who do it in their spare time.

>I just want to cut render times down when it comes to GI, not try to drastically improve the way renders look btw.
Render times mostly come down to scene complexity (amount of GI, materials and their complexity, output resolution, texture resolution(?), amount of light sources, etc.) and your own computer's specs. If you're able to either invest in your own rendering farm or pay for a rendering farm service.

Also Luxrender > Cycles.

get vray

otherwise if you are doing heavy commercial work and your render is not fast enough do it through a render farm, some are cheap

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>>532662
>get vray

>>532690
Or how about /3/'s meme
AKA: The answer to literally every question, even shit that doesn't have anything to do with rendering.
>Get LuxRender

Yes it is worth it. Don't be a chump and start learning.
The moment you get used to always take the easy and comfortable way is when you stop getting better.
You can't cut render times drastically without using a better renderengine.

>>532709
But there's nothing wrong with Luxrender. And that response is usually reserved for people who use cycles.

Thanks to everyone for the replies. It seems the consensus is that for most jobs an expensive 3rd party renderer is not make-or-break it. Vray is the most compelling from what I can tell, but I know if I had the money for a real expensive plugin I would get X-particles or TurbulenceFD instead of a renderer!

>>532806
Just get LuxRender.

>>532806
LR looks decent, plays nice with homemade render farms, and I haven't had too many problems with it yet.

> but vray!

OK, try vray too. It's not a religion.

Does Mitsuba actually ever get updated? On the website it has been on 0.5.0 for years now.

One advantage Cycles has is that it's really fucking cheap to buy CPU (yes, CPU) render time off the cloud

The OP image comparisons are worthless, you could tweak each one to look like the other

>>532644
for industry use
vary
Arnold
render-man
mental ray


>v ray is pretty good

>arnold is great, super easy to learn and you dont have to mess with an ass load of settings.

>render-man is great but i havnt used it much to comment anything past that the industry uses it.

>MR is not used that much but ILM still uses it for extremely heavy scenes because most other renders crash on them

>>532739
cycles is better than lux for scene rendering, lux is a piece of unfinished crap

>>532981
>No MLT
>No bidirectional
>No biased rendering options
>no photon mapping
>Shit materials that need complex node setup just to work right
>Shit caustics
>Thinking cycles is better
The only thing unfinished with lux is their new API.

Andrew Price please go and stay go.

Rendermanis the best because disney use it, ihavent used anything else its literally god-tier

>>532660
>lazy, corner-cutting renderer > any other renderer
Whatever you say, bill.

>>533096
When it comes to speed biased renderers are better

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>>533096
>Luxrender
>Lazy, corner cutting renderer

>>533083
Pixar uses renderman,
Disney uses Hyperion or some shit, it's internal.

>>533111
if lux is so good how come it didn't catch on with with mainstream?

>>533923
Probably because it has it's reputation of being 2slow. But that's changing with the new API.

I think it is well known but just isn't used that much with that reason. But there is a lot of neat shit rendered with it. Just look at the gallery on the website.

>>533923
I guess it's a mix of "why bother I already have Cycles" and that it has a bit of a learning curve. Even with the latest developments in LuxBlend I think the interface is still a bit unintuitive and needs learning.

Also there are almost zero tutorials on how to use it, which is probably also a big factor.
And the documentation is a bit confusing, with many outdated bits scattered throughout.

>>533940
I was always thinking about starting a youtube channel doing Luxrender tutorials. And with other renderers here and there.

However sadly I don't have any production equipment, and I still live with my mom.

>>533945
That would be most welcome.
Do you really need production equipment? Text tutorials with images could be a good start, and for video tutorials you could go for simple screencap + text if you keep them short and concise (like 5-10 minutes, not hour-long sessions).

>>533947
>Do you really need production equipment?
I'd prefer it because it would be way easier. I never considered text based though. Good idea. I don't think I need to use screen caps since I can just use shadow play to record, right?

>like 5-10 minutes, not hour-long sessions
I think 20 minutes is good in some most cases. Because I hate it when I'm following a tutorial and that's it. I'm just learning how to make that one thing. I'm not learning what each thing does, how it works and why it needs to be there. Like Lux's 3d mapping. I have no clue why there are 3 scale coordinates instead of just two and I can't find an explanation in the wiki for it.

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>>533950
>I'm just learning how to make that one thing.
Sure, it's nice when you have a complete scene at the end of the tutorial, but usually it's better to handle only one topic per session and not mix multiple together.
But you could have multiple sessions on the same scene, like "part 1 - materials", "part 2 - lighting", "part 3 - optimizing performance" or so.

>I'm not learning what each thing does, how it works and why it needs to be there.
I agree, explaining why you do something in the way you do it is very important.

>Like Lux's 3d mapping. I have no clue why there are 3 scale coordinates instead of just two and I can't find an explanation in the wiki for it.
You mean the one in pic related? Those are the X,Y,Z axis in 3D world space (or local object space, depending on mapping type).

Just get Corona. It's in alpha on C4D at the moment so its free to download, although everything is free on the internet since you can just pirate it. also it instantly starts rendering unlike the C4D physical renderer and Vray which have to do the GI passes first. I think that it's the best and most realistic renderer for archviz, at least on C4D.

>>533951
Yeah that's the one. Thanks.

>"part 1 - materials", "part 2 - lighting", "part 3 - optimizing performance"
That's kind of how I thought about doing it. But at the same time it would seem kind of silly to do it like that for one scene each tutorial. Or maybe instead I could keep each part in different playlists relating to each topic?

Also I wasn't planning on doing too much modeling since I'm not very good at it. I always found doing materials and lighting more fun than modeling anyways.

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>>533957
Do you think having X,Y,Z labels on the left would make the UI more clear?
I looked how the Blender devs did it and they just put X,Y,Z into the value fields everywhere (e.g. in the transform panel in the 3D view), which I find redundant and too much.

>But at the same time it would seem kind of silly to do it like that for one scene each tutorial.
I don't think so at all, I remember seeing tutorial series like this.

>Also I wasn't planning on doing too much modeling since I'm not very good at it. I always found doing materials and lighting more fun than modeling anyways.
I think modeling should not be part of a tutorial about external renderers anyway. That's the domain of the 3D program in question, not the renderer.

>>533963
Maybe not labels but in the dialog box whenever you hover over it it could tell you which direction each one is for. But the way you did it in your pic looks nice too.

>>533967
Apparently the Blender API has a "subtype" attribute for this kind of thing, so I decided to stick to the standard and use that, like they do everywhere else in the interface, in Cycles nodes etc.

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>>533969
A bit redundant, but consistency is more important than saving a bit of space.

>>533970
That does look better.

>>533945
Hey, I'd watch it,

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Any renderer's stable with CUDA 8 / GTX 1070, 1080 pascal range?
CPU's decent but still taking ages to render sub-par content