which render engine a regular people should use ?

[Anonymous]

Hello

I have been learning CG at hope for a couple month and everything is going smoothly. Currently I render with Mental ray but it's slow, now i'm hesitating between Arnold and V-ray for rendering. My specs are i5 4690k and GTX970 (nothing very special) So i wouldn't want a render that needs a huge pricey render farm to have a good image.

So what you would you advice ?

[Anonymous]

I've been really happy with a renderer called Redshift.  The renders are gorgeous, and it's about 30% faster than Mental Ray and VRay.

[dgorsman]

Depends on what you are doing, and how much money you have.  For simple stuff CPU-based rendering is probably the best bet as it's cheaper and easier to substitute a hex-core or oct-core processor, or one with a higher base clock speed.  If you need decent quality and/or longer movies then a GPU render is probably a better bet - but that requires investment in a good video card (or two... or three) with an appropriate amount of VRAM for your typical work.  For longer, high-quality movies (say, anything longer than ~ 5minutes) you should be considering renting time on a render farm.  There should be a couple out there that are free/near free.  Then you can get away with cheaper hardware, enough to do a couple of test renders before sending it off.

[Anonymous]

Oh yes i should have explained my goal, my bad.

Well, what i want is to make a short film of about 5 minutes, with a decent quality, not too awesome. there will also be particles to render. But i got the feeling that i just won't be able to render anything, that it will take forever for one second of movie... So i wanted to know which render engine is suited for this kind of amateurish production. I heard that Arnold is not suited for that, like it's more for rich companies with strict standards.

In the end i just want to know if it is possible for me to render a decent short movie without a render farm anyhow.

[Anonymous]

If you don't require professional level rendering, just use the Maya software renderer, and set your particles to one of the particle types it can render.

[dgorsman]

5 minutes can be pushing it a bit - 300 seconds * 30 frames per second is about 9000 frames, give or take.  Decent quality output can take several minutes per frame without resorting to a render farm, even with using good hardware.

You wouldn't be doing that all in one go, but rather where the camera edits would be.  For most productions that's going to be several seconds (watch TV ads and shows, especially where the camera shot changes, to get a feel for where and when that should be) unless you've got long travelling shots.  You should be able to run an average ~ 5 second run comfortably overnight.

[mspeer]

Hi!

It's a good idea to get some input from people having experience with different render engines, but in the end it's dependent on your needs (personal and technical) what works best for you. Every renderer has it's pros and cons.

Don't just skip a render engine because you get high render times or someone says it's only for professional productions. Better ask if it's possible to tune the render settings for a shorter render time, or if a render engine supports the features you need, or supports the hardware you use.

I would recommend to start the project before choosing the final renderer. Build a scene (maybe just a rough version) and choose it as a test-scene and then invest some time to test and compare different render engines on your own.

If not, then use any of the renderers you mentioned, they all should be able to do the job, because they all share, more or less, the same feature-set.