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Blender 4.2: Precise Modeling Workshop
Learning Resources →

Just a few years ago we had so little options to choose when we had to use external renders in Blender to boost our visualization work. And today there are so many options that an artist could get really confused to choose only one, and with Cycles as a welcome newcomer the challenge to pick only one can get even harder. But, how many options do we have? To help with these, I`ve put together a list of all external render engines compatible with Blender 2.6 that could be used for architectural visualization. I will put a not on the side of the name for free renders.

Blender-Render-External.png

Here are the options:

Did I miss anyone?

Blender 4.3 for Complete Beginners (Workshop)
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Another comparison between Cycles, YafaRay and Blender Internal render

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How to setup artificial light for architecture with Blender internal render

12 comments

  1. And of source the new NOX fo Evermotion et Appleseed too!
    Good list isn’t it!

  2. Please for production use consider this (just from my point of view):
    Mitsuba is not a mature Renderer, useless for production use !
    Octane still is in Beta-Stage since a long time as well ! An the futur of the developement of the Blender-Plugin is unclear at the moment.
    In V-Ray there is no full feature support ! But it is a pretty good solution, because it supports proxies and the Renderer is very mature.
    Indigo Renderer Plugin is in development since years, I have not a good feeling about it. Some poeple work with it, but I had to many errors by testing it.
    Luxrender is to slow for production use.
    Pov-Ray: The quality of the renderings do not convince me.

    If I’m allowed to do a recommandation I would say:
    Cycles (GPU) for Exteriors (is supports Instancing to do large areas of grass or trees) because its very fast.
    Yafaray or V-Ray (CPU) for Interiors (both support Instancing meanwhile I guess) because it’s faster than Cycles (GPU).

    Kind regards
    Alain

  3. Luxrender is Not to slow for production use. Definitely not.
    And it really shines compared to cycles because of the volume shader and bidirectinal rendering. I hope this will get implemented into cycles soon.
    Small light sources+Gi are a nightmare to render with cycles, even though i have a rather fast gtx 460.
    And for production!! use, you probably have several computers connected.

    It depends!

    I use both, currently I render sections of my 3dmodel with blender cycles, works quite well. 🙂
    http://imageshack.us/f/38/35158006.png/
    http://imageshack.us/f/839/whatdoyouthink5.png/

    I don’t like yafaray too much, don’t get me wrong it’s not a bad renderer, but it is not progressive, you’ll waste a lot of time compared to lux. And it’s not that activly develloped compared to lux or cycles. I think it’s a dead and 🙁

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