Rendering?

[Nate Owens]

(Sorry - this was posted in the Amapi thread, but it should probably be here since it is sort of generic.)

It's true...
I can use Shade to render
I can use Carrara to render
I can use Poser to render
I can use Blender to render
I can use Flamingo (in Rhino) to render....
yadda... yadda.... yadda...

Is there a stand-alone renderer that does not require these complex programs to import a file and do renders?

Recommendations?

[Pete Exxtreme]

i've deleted the entry you've made in the amapi thread

Otherwise, i would say - as usual - it depends on what you want to achieve. For interior scene with seroius photorealism, maybe MaxwellRender could be interesting, but i think that you will need some work (at least) anyhow in Maxwell Studio. In your list, Carrara is probably the less complex for rendering

As they says, just my 2 cents....

[juanmanuel]

But I doubt there will be a program where you won't have to interact with to get good results. Each program interprets objects and surfaces differently, not to say lighting, reflections, refractions...

IMO not tinkering at least a bit with this sort of things will make renders look dull. You don't have to spend a week tweaking the render. And if you commonly do one type of render, you can save presets in any program and work on that.
As to easier to understand render engines, it really depends on how deep you want to go. All you mentioned can render out of the box and produce equally dull results. And all of them with a little bit of work can produce impressive results.

[jbshorty]

It's true. You really can't avoid doing some "work". But at least you should be able to create template files, which you can use for similar types of objects. This can work perfectly in the case of product design, where you build a virtual studio (or a small lightbox in the case of jewelry). And then you only need to drop those objects into the template, set your materials, and render...

shorty

[Nate Owens]

Thanks...

The point, which I didn't clarify, is that there must be some sort of "stand-alone" program... meaning that I shouldn't have to have open modeling, rigging, animating, and a gazillion other unnecessary and un-needed modules (or whatever they are called) just to bring in a model, do the lighting, apply maps, displacements etc. - -

in other words I am looking for a clean, lean, made for rendering application without all the other goop.

I'm thinking modular = Kind of like Mudbox is about surface displacement, and Hexagon is all about modeling and thankfully does not have all the extra baggage of apps like Modo, Carrara, Lightwave, etc. all of which want to include everything plus the kitchen sink.

Definately not looking for a "make model" button. Of course said app would be able to let me work with lights, cameras, all of that. Setting up lighting, atmosphere, shaders is all an enjoyable part of the creative illustration process... I am basically an illustrator in search of ways to do my work expediently... not for a free lunch.

My favorite for most rendering at the moment is Carrara. Whatever I build in other apps usually ends up in Carrara for the setup and rendering... the handiest feature is that "show production frame" it is adjustable and allows positioning (composition) and accurate cropping... essential for print illustration work. Carrara witout the animation, vertex modeler, spline modeler and all of that would be about right. So, for now, I guess I will stick with Carrara until a better mousetrap comes along.

[mayito7777]

Nate I don't know if this is what you are looking for

http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php

[jbshorty]

Most 3rd party render engines are in fact stand-alone engines, with no tools other than basic object positioning and rendering ability. Just a few, but of course there are many more out there:

Kerkythea
Indigo
Maxwell
AIR
3Delight
POV-Ray (This one is freeware!!!)
FryRender
Renderman
Axiom

Usually you will find a plug-in available for the most popular modeling software. But the basic render engine has it's own UI and can run by itself. However, for many of these they don't have very user-friendly UI's as Carrara. Some of them have no UI, and must be executed through some minor scripting. I think really if you are happy in the Carrara interface, then why change? It is very capable, with cheap and powerful plug-ins...

jb

[WillBellJr]

Don't forget HyperShot: http://www.bunkspeed.com/hypershot/products.html

This package is also supposedly good for getting your renders out hella quick - if time is monae on your side of town then being able to churn out gorgeous renders really quick is a good thing.

The pricing vs frame size is a bit wonky but again if you're making money from your work, the $1K price should pay for itself pretty quickly - now if you need larger than HD frames then there's gonna be a problem!

This is definitely what you want though; load your object, set your environment HDR and just render away...


-Will

[jbshorty]

I think Nate and Hypershot is not an ideal partnership. Nate is an illustartor, after all! Hypershot is really geared towards product design...

[Nate Owens]

Thanks good people.
I'll take a look.
Playing with Kerkythea a bit - so far it looks promising.
JB is right... at least for now - until I get familiar with something else - I'll stay with Carrara because of familiarity it is fast and pretty capable for my needs.
I appreciate the great tips - Polyloop is the place to get good stuff.

[WillBellJr]

Nate had requested:
"...The point, which I didn't clarify, is that there must be some sort of "stand-alone" program... meaning that I shouldn't have to have open modeling, rigging, animating, and a gazillion other unnecessary and un-needed modules (or whatever they are called) just to bring in a model, do the lighting, apply maps, displacements etc..."


That's exactly what HyperShot claims to do, that's why I made that recommendation...

Now if displacements and other advanced stuff isn't supported then yes, he needs a bit more...

-Will

[tonytrout]

If Carrara is giving you good results then it may be a case of the devil you know. Are you thinking that another renderer will give you better results? I think Juan Manual is right in that out of the box the result might be OK but some work will be required to give an excellent result. I cant talk about the other renderers here but I can give you some perspective on Mental Ray. I have spent $300 on training videos and 8 months so far testing Mental Ray for Maya and so far only just getting comfortable with it now. How deep is the rabbit hole? The complexity and depth of the rendering and shader options alone means that you could spend years mastering the programme so it is no task lightly undertaken. There may be easier ones out there, but I think that professional level tools are offering a solution that is extremely flexible to cover a huge range of potential rendering situations, and that is their power. You can tweak just about anything, which means you can spend days tweaking all the possibilities. Also they have scripting capabilities which can expand their rendering solutions which might be all right for studios with their own techies on site, but this power is unlikely to be exploited to the limit by artists here. However, correctly set up MR is capable of some impresive results and I havent been tempted to go back to carrarra so far. Just my 10 cents worth. I suspect the other standalones like maxwell, renderman etc will offer much the same experience. Btw love your work Nate.

[rickei]

Nate,

I've been playing around with Electric Image, and though I have not had time to really explore all of the options, it does have an excellent rendering engine. Most of my renders have averaged about 12 seconds... Yes I said seconds. you hit the render button and there it is. It's so flippin fast that I am now considering learning how to animate. it is actually several different stand alone applications (Animator, Camera, Renderama, and Radiosity) It also handles over 10 million polygons, in a scene! this helps me with zbrush... I don't need to create a low rez cage and then output an displacement map. I can just save the high rez mesh and get to rendering.

it's big downside is the OLD interface. the text in the buttons is not even antialiased...it's all jaggey, my vision is fairly good, but it's a little hard on my astigmatism.

[Nate Owens]

A lot of great info here...

My reason for looking beyond Carrara wasn't dissatisfaction with the quality, but rather the idea that a stand-alone rendering program without animation, rigging, modeling, etc. may be a better option. The last thing I want is to get a more complicated (ie: bloated) software.

It may be that Carrara is the better option afterall, If for no other reason than having "a bird in the hand." - that is also financially feasible

[tonytrout]

Yeah , spend the money on a render farm

[Locki]

As regard Renderman, like PoVRay, it's a standalone renderer. There are free implementations, the most famous one was Larry Gritz's BMRT (Larry undertook his PhD at Pixar) before he was sued by Pixar for copying algorithms used in Renderman. IMHO, at that period BMRT was the only Renderman compatible free development; it was then spinned of as a cheap commercial product through Larry's new society exLuna, and some societies started to use it to develop commercial products (some sequences from the film " the new invisible Man" were made with it), which irritated Pixar. ExLuna and its technology were then bought by NVidia.

Since that time a completely new free Renderman implementation is being developped starting right from the RIB format specifications publicly published by Pixar (https://renderman.pixar.com/products/rispec/) : AQSIS. You can find it here : http://www.aqsis.org/.

[Dann-O]

I use messiah which is rendering and animation. Quite a good renderer with a few quirks. Messiah is quite fast too so that is a plus. It is geared twoards animation so keep that in mind.

[tonytrout]

3Delight renderman compliant. I downloaded this today, it has a standalone and a maya plugin.

http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php/home

Make like Pixar

And the best thing...... The first license is FREE

[transient]

That's also Daz Studio's renderer.

[Nate Owens]

I'm going to take a look at these... thanks for the info.

Firstly, I'm a dunce when it comes to coding, etc.
The Renderman things I've seen seem to have no windows-style gui and require scripting/coding, etc.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Is this what 3d delight is offering?
Any info on this or a source for info about getting Renderman to run in a partially user-friendly gui?
Thanks