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).