The Pigeon: Impossible Blog

First off, I’m no expert on the high level tech/math stuff so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on anything, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts on the different renderers out there. Hopefully it’ll help point you in the right direction if you’re trying to make a decision whether to invest in a 3rd party renderer or use a built in engine.

Mental Ray – This is the one I used for PI. Chances are you’ve all run across it because it comes standard with XSI, Maya and Max. The plus side is that its one of the widest range of feature sets you’ll see in a renderer: radiosity, area lights, accurate reflections and refractions and that’s not even scratching the surface. The downside is that its slow and you’ve got to really break down large scenes to get them to render.

Renderman – This is a bit confusing because Renderman isn’t actually a renderer, its a standard. Think of it like a file format except instead of describing what the data is, it’s describing how to pass data in and out of a renderman compliant renderer. The most well known Renderman compliant renderer is…

PhotoRealistic Renderman (aka PRMan or Pixar’s Renderman) – This is Pixar’s internal rendering solution based on the Renderman standard which they also developed. While the standard is open source and fully-documented, the renderer itself is most definitely not. In fact, the only drawback to PRMan seems to be the price. It’s widely viewed as the most robust and stable renderer out there, but does require a fair bit of technical know-how to put that power to good use. As a result PRMan is found mostly in larger facilities needing to push an insane amount of data through the pipeline as fast as possible.

3Delight – This is kind of like PRMan’s close cousin. Its a renderman compliant renderer so uses the same architecture to describe its input and shader language, and its also a REYES renderer just like PRMan. REYES stands for “Renders Everything You Ever Saw” and its big advantage seems to be that its essentially a scanline technique, but the scanline works by dividing the mesh into micropolygons at rendertime. Basically, it splits the mesh to give an appropriate amount of detail for every pixel so subdivision surfaces are completely smooth to the eye, no matter how close they get to camera. Another big advantage is that REYES renderers are designed for motion blur and depth of field, so you get real 3D blur for free (more or less.) There’s a more in depth article on REYES here.

Brazil – I honestly don’t know too much about it other than its fast, cheap, and a lot of people use it for specific types of shots. As far as I know it only works with 3dsmax?

Arnold – This is another one that I don’t know too much about, other than I’ve heard that it gets a lot of use on big projects when they need to do global illumination.

POSTED BY JAVIER BRAVO
Vray – It’s often used in architectural visualizations but you can use it in all aspects as well. It’s fast and produces a very realistic render. It’s compatible with 3dsmax, Cinema and I guess the XSI version is in Beta.

As you can see, I’m trying to do this a bit like wikipedia. If you’ve got something to add, post it in the comments section and I’ll add it to the main post. Please refrain from any sort of flame wars over preferences. I’m most interested in what something does well, and what its weaknesses are as that will help people make informed decisions on what fits their needs.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 1:07 am and is filed under Lighting & Compositing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.