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Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2020 2:16 pm
by MetinSeven
Hi,

I've written an article for BlenderNation about the available free renderers for Blender, and of course included LuxCoreRender.

Here it is:

https://www.blendernation.com/2020/08/0 ... renderers/

I hope it will attract many new LuxCoreRender users (and donators).

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2020 4:12 pm
by Sharlybg
just finished to read it is very fair and awesome !
thanks mate ;)

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2020 8:10 pm
by Theo_Gottwald
The picture with Sharly's Glas-Swans is just amazing!
About the article, i must say that i have also tested all of these Renderers and had a bit of a different Impression.

The Radeon Pro Render has also a lot of Pro-Features, but its strenght is that its very user-friendly and responsive for beginners.
On some complex scenes it will not produce usable results, for example try it with 3D-Scanned Objects.
Such Objects it often fails. Wether the objects are behind a plane or just invisible.
Where it works, it uses less memory and was faster then other renderers.
The included Material library is very user-friendly and makes it easy for Beginners.
Because they have immediate Access to all materials they need for the start.
Its a bit like "Cinema 4D" with the materials.
Besides that it also has a lot of nodes and you can make more complex materials.
Another advantage of the R-Pro Render is, that if youi use "Tiled Rendering" (which you may want to do because otherwise it often just crashes :-) ) then it will render always just 1 TILE. Thats interesting, because ALL CPU's and the GPU's they all render just 1 TILE.
The advantage of this is, that - of course - the caches are better used - and you never have the situation that there are only few tiles left, which are taken by the CPU's and the GPU is in idle. As a result in the same Scene it was often the fastest renderer (even though i do not have a AMD Graphics card but 2x1080 NVIDIA).

The appleseed Render i could not do anything useful with it, while theoretically it should have been a "Specialist for caustics". And while they say that its a spectral render, in real world it can not even render a dispersion.
So what is it really good for? Only for SIngle Colour Caustics?
I think it needs a good while before it can compete with what is already there.

Behind this one i would set the Yaf(a)ray. I could not find any feature or use where it is above what we already have.
But i expect it to have much less features then for example LuxcoreRender. So why use it?

Another topic is POV-Ray which is already included with Blender as AddOn. But maybe you will need to install the Executable on the system. This Renderer is many years old, developed from DKB-Trace and is very Memory efficient for large renders.
It does not produce any Noise as its not an unbiased Renderer.
Yet it can produce very good results, can even do Spectral Rendering (if you beat it a bit) , see (only using only the CPU butwith zero Noise).
However I am not sure how good the Blender Plugins are, most people use it from its own Surface.
It still has an active Community and you can download it here: POV-Ray

Let me add that people with a special brain (that i don't have) can beat amazing stuff out of POV-Ray. See here Jaimie.
Currently he is working with the Unreal Engine he told me, and he makes also Interior renderings for customer. Suggested him to also try Blender with Luxcore Render.

POV Ray is good for special cases. For Interior Rendering it will never produce such amazing Results like Luxcore-Render.

But there are other cases where the results are amazing.
During the years most of the stock pictures that i have sold, have been rendered with POV-Ray,

During Corona, the situation changed a bit direction Cycles because i sold quite some Viruses.
For them i needed a Microscope like Material, did not know how this can be done in Luxcore.
Just for fun here are the last pictures I sold. I think the Corona thing is nearly dead.
Because since a few days the Virus sales have stopped ... :-)

Here my last sales in Dreamstime (link in the footer).
2020-08-03 21_43_01-Stock Fotos_ Hochauflösende Stockfotografie Und Lizenzfreie Bilder Herunterladen.png

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 8:34 am
by MetinSeven
Charles: Thanks! My pleasure. LuxCoreRender deserves it.

Theo: Thanks for your info, I will process some of it into the article if you don't mind.

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 9:35 am
by kintuX
+

A couple are still out there for free - one is Corona for 2.79 (development slowed down to a halt w/ 2.8+ mostly 'cuz the bridge is a volunteer work of a single developer and a new standalone version is being worked on) and other, if 1MBpix size limit doesn't bother you, for GPU/CPU spectral, predictive rendering is Indigo w/ Blendigo exporter.

Also, a note about appleseed for Blender 2.8+ plugin: viewport render is bugged - not in a working state & JonD (main plugin developer) has been too occupied to work on it.

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 11:25 am
by MetinSeven
Thanks Kintux.

Blendigo exports to Indigo I assume? Indigo is not a free renderer, and neither is Corona as far as I know. Please correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll add the renderers. Thanks.

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 12:34 pm
by kintuX
Yes, Blendigo is Blender exporter for Indigo which is "free to use" with a resolution limit 1M pixels per render.
About Corona, it's v3 that is still freely available for commercial use.
I admit these are shortcomings*, but are feature-full and not preventing any kind of free use.
*For ingenious, inventive ones quite easy to overcome. Like w/ Blender, one still has to think a bit outside of the box. ;)

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 1:32 pm
by MetinSeven
Thanks for the additional info. I've processed some of your remarks in the article.

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 4:02 pm
by Theo_Gottwald
Hallo Metin,
you are free to use all things that i post in any way you like.
Of course it is also an hint that you take a closer look yourself on these topics.
Because .. two people two opinions. So go and check it out yourself.
I told you some of the the points that i found.

Today had quite a lot of crashes with Luxcore. Also when using 3D-Scanned Models with high polygon (Its pure Quads) count. Maybe its also because i always use the beta-version?
Rendering at 8350x8350 with Luxcore is not easy /not using tiled rendering). Did you try?
Have to say that it may even fail with "workbench" also.

Re: Article about free renderers, featuring LuxCoreRender

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 6:15 pm
by MetinSeven
Thanks Theo! I will more thoroughly check out the other renderers as well, although I'm quite content with Lux.