4 ms·

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html

fizixer 10y ago
- I've never heard of Tungsten. - Mitsuba is a mainly-academic renderer by Wenzel Jakob (I say mainly because I haven't seen its widespread use in non-academic setting). The two important open source renderers that are missing in comparison: - Cycles (comes with Blender; produces great results although it is said that it only recently has started doing a "PBR workflow") - Luxrender (very popular with artists on deviantart; has very good OpenCL support)
- erichocean 10y ago
  That's because the point of the comparison is not to compare with other renderers, it's to check feature correctness. Mitsuba is widely used for that purpose. Almost no one uses LuxRender or Cycles commercially to the best of my knowledge (or appleseed for that matter). Hobbyists use them, which is cool. I'm in Los Angeles and work in the industry. Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. I don't think Renderman and Arnold are used much outside of VFX. Arnold in particular is pricey, but works amazingly well.
  - horse3d 10y ago
    Few people use Blender professionally, but those that do almost certainly will use Cycles. It's very capable now, quite similar to Arnold, but not as fast.
    - sdwisely 10y ago
      It's still desirable enough that it's getting commercial plugins (cycles4d).
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    > Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. Disney has Hyperion and Weta has Manuka, although I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops.
    - erichocean 10y ago
      > I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops Not that I know of. Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids.
      - santaclaus 10y ago
        > Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids Hella cool! Who is rolling their own outside of Weta? DD? Animal Logic? Double Negative? Blue Sky is super proprietary, I'm curious what they are up to...
        berkut 10y ago
        A lot of studios used to have their own fluid / volume renderers, but it's less common these days as the main renderers can do volumes/implicits fairly well these days. But more studios have their own full renderers these days: Weta has Manuka Disney has Hyperion Animal Logic has Glimpse Framestore has Van Damme Sony has their fork of Arnold
        santaclaus 10y ago
        Sick! Any idea what ILM is up to, or are they all Renderman all the time now?
        berkut 10y ago
        Mostly Renderman RIS now from what I've heard, although there's still a bit of Arnold being used, and the VRay stuff DMP were using is mostly Clarisse now.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  Tungsten is from one of Wenzel Jakob's former students, I think. He maintains a pretty cool set of models: https://benedikt-bitterli.me/resources/ https://benedikt-bitterli.me/resources/
nickpsecurity 10y ago
How am I supposed to compare these three on the top as a non-expert in this area? The middle one looks noisier than the other two. I notice the one on the left has darker color in dresser which may be an advantage of correct, color handing but might be incorrect with one on right being brighter due to the correct handing of window's light on it. And what's up with the graininess of all of them? Just a few things that popped into my mind looking at them. Wouldn't mind learning a little more in objectively evaluating the renderers.
- erichocean 10y ago
  The color differences are from different "tone mapping" implementations after the render is stopped and can be ignored. The point of that page is to evaluate renderer correctness (think of them as visual unit tests), not to really compare "which one looks better". For example, some of the images show appleseed with hard shadows, when they should be soft. If you want to know which one is "right", Mitsuba is the one to look at as it's generally the most correct. The graininess comes from not letting the machine renderer longer—the longer it goes, the less grainy it will be. That said, all of these renderers employ "tricks" to reduce the graininess that can make it practically impossible to remove whatever graininess slips through.
  - horse3d 10y ago
    You can't say any of these is "more correct" from looking at the renders. Those hard shadows stem from a difference in light size, which is almost certainly a problem with the scene parameters being treated differently. The light size may have been "lost in translation", turned to 0, creating a perfectly sharp shadow.
    - franzb 10y ago
      One limitation of appleseed today is that our physically-based sun model is a purely directional light, not a far away disk with a finite radius. This explains the hard shadows on some of the scenes.
- 10y ago

Here are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html

fizixer 10y ago

- I've never heard of Tungsten. - Mitsuba is a mainly-academic renderer by Wenzel Jakob (I say mainly because I haven't seen its widespread use in non-academic setting). The two important open source renderers that are missing in comparison: - Cycles (comes with Blender; produces great results although it is said that it only recently has started doing a "PBR workflow") - Luxrender (very popular with artists on deviantart; has very good OpenCL support)

erichocean 10y ago
That's because the point of the comparison is not to compare with other renderers, it's to check feature correctness. Mitsuba is widely used for that purpose. Almost no one uses LuxRender or Cycles commercially to the best of my knowledge (or appleseed for that matter). Hobbyists use them, which is cool. I'm in Los Angeles and work in the industry. Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. I don't think Renderman and Arnold are used much outside of VFX. Arnold in particular is pricey, but works amazingly well.
- horse3d 10y ago
  Few people use Blender professionally, but those that do almost certainly will use Cycles. It's very capable now, quite similar to Arnold, but not as fast.
  - sdwisely 10y ago
    It's still desirable enough that it's getting commercial plugins (cycles4d).
- santaclaus 10y ago
  > Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. Disney has Hyperion and Weta has Manuka, although I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops.
  - erichocean 10y ago
    > I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops Not that I know of. Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids.
    - santaclaus 10y ago
      > Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids Hella cool! Who is rolling their own outside of Weta? DD? Animal Logic? Double Negative? Blue Sky is super proprietary, I'm curious what they are up to...
      - berkut 10y ago
        A lot of studios used to have their own fluid / volume renderers, but it's less common these days as the main renderers can do volumes/implicits fairly well these days. But more studios have their own full renderers these days: Weta has Manuka Disney has Hyperion Animal Logic has Glimpse Framestore has Van Damme Sony has their fork of Arnold
        santaclaus 10y ago
        Sick! Any idea what ILM is up to, or are they all Renderman all the time now?
        berkut 10y ago
        Mostly Renderman RIS now from what I've heard, although there's still a bit of Arnold being used, and the VRay stuff DMP were using is mostly Clarisse now.
santaclaus 10y ago
Tungsten is from one of Wenzel Jakob's former students, I think. He maintains a pretty cool set of models: https://benedikt-bitterli.me/resources/ https://benedikt-bitterli.me/resources/

nickpsecurity 10y ago

How am I supposed to compare these three on the top as a non-expert in this area? The middle one looks noisier than the other two. I notice the one on the left has darker color in dresser which may be an advantage of correct, color handing but might be incorrect with one on right being brighter due to the correct handing of window's light on it. And what's up with the graininess of all of them? Just a few things that popped into my mind looking at them. Wouldn't mind learning a little more in objectively evaluating the renderers.

erichocean 10y ago
The color differences are from different "tone mapping" implementations after the render is stopped and can be ignored. The point of that page is to evaluate renderer correctness (think of them as visual unit tests), not to really compare "which one looks better". For example, some of the images show appleseed with hard shadows, when they should be soft. If you want to know which one is "right", Mitsuba is the one to look at as it's generally the most correct. The graininess comes from not letting the machine renderer longer—the longer it goes, the less grainy it will be. That said, all of these renderers employ "tricks" to reduce the graininess that can make it practically impossible to remove whatever graininess slips through.
- horse3d 10y ago
  You can't say any of these is "more correct" from looking at the renders. Those hard shadows stem from a difference in light size, which is almost certainly a problem with the scene parameters being treated differently. The light size may have been "lost in translation", turned to 0, creating a perfectly sharp shadow.
  - franzb 10y ago
    One limitation of appleseed today is that our physically-based sun model is a purely directional light, not a far away disk with a finite radius. This explains the hard shadows on some of the scenes.
10y ago