Best Renderer IYO

[Shinobi]

since I'm sure there's some people here who have worked with more than one render solution, what are your favourites? and why?

until recently, all I every heard of was mental ray, a few people have told me mental ray is the best,, but recently I've heard of Brazil, Renderman, and a few others whose names I can't remember...

I didn't put up a poll since I don't know of many render solutions and people might have different reasons for liking one the best (best image quality, best render time, special features etc...)

 

[Mr.Reak]

Mental Ray eh... well for that you need to have licensed Maya, if you do, you can just download it from Alias website. I don't have any of them, well, because I don't have money for real Maya, so yeah... I am too, having problems with Maya's rendering thing, default one is total crap. I can't even get my animation to look good, which is very frustrating. Our college has mental ray, but Jesus, there is no way I am going to wait there until network (very slow one) will render my 5 mins animation.

Yeah, I am with Shinobi, is there any good FREE rendering plug-in for Maya?

 

[softmonkey]

The best renderer depends on the shot. Its really as simple as that.

mental ray - as integrated in XSI and available as a plugin for Maya and Max (no its not integrated!). This is the best production proven all-round renderer. It does everything to the highest quaility. Shaders are written in C.

Renderman - written by Pixar this has had a long tradition in film work, but with licenses costing 20x a mental ray per CPU its expensive. Also, the spped imporvements in mental ray have allowed to really catch up in traditional renderman areas like motion blur and displacement mapping. Shaders are written in shader language - similar to Cg/HLSL for real time stuff in syntax.

Brazil - available as a plugin for MAX is a good renderer. But it is young and not proven in large productions as a standard renderer. It does radiosity well, but needs more development and shaders to be useful for a wide range of jobs.

lightwave - a good rendering engine included in the package. Free network licenses but with confusion surrounding the company, i'm not sure on future development.

Free renderers - there are a few, like pov-ray. These will require a lot more work to get the same results.

 

[SidewinderX]

Well, from the max side of the table...

Default Scanline: This render is so much better than everyone realizes, I love it to death.
VRay: Exellent renderer, extreamly quick, though not as option heavy as Brazil
Brazil: Exellent render, includes a great set of materials as well. If you ask around you cna find the latest public test version
FinalRender: Everyhting i've heard says this is good, haven't persoanlly used it myself though....