Why Do My Renders S-U-C-K?

[Per-Anders]

Your metals would look more or less the same i'm afraid.

Making metal look good is just down to what your'e reflecting on it's surface. If your metal looks flat and drag then it's likely because you have too much diffuce color and wide specular and aren't depending on reflections enough to do their job. If you need anisotrophic reflections then you'll have to dip into the old SLA or "Volumetric" materials as they used to be know, Danel etc, for some reason anisotrophy for reflection didnt' make it out of those, though you can easily make anisotrophic speculars using the lumas shader in a normal material. Apart from that there's not a lot else to it, apart from skill from practice.

Don't forget to read the "Bad renders" thread here : http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=95&t=404342

[spirozero]

Thanks Per! I wasn't aware of that thread. A lot of valuable tips in there. I'm going to print it off and read it over some more tonight.

So why then do people get all excited about FR2, VRay, and Maxwell? What makes them better? Better motion blur ... DOF ... GI?

[Per-Anders]

All those, in fR it's faster and stable GI, decent raytraced motion blur and DOF, in fR there's also a visual node based texture tree that allows a bit more flexibility and power on material control. Maxwell, well certainly not faster, but allegedly simpler and easier to use and potentially able to get more photorealistic illumination results than any other GI method, although i've not seen anything looking any more photorealistic than what comes out of PRMan, MR and the others. VRay again the GI thing, it's able to produce smooth and stable gi with fairly low settings.

To be fair on that there's a can of worms attached in that the same poeple calling for VRay to be their saviour were those that were calling for fR to be their saviour too. I tend to be of the opinion after having used a fair few render engines that only you can be your own saviour, but in fairness it's nigh on impossible to get blotch free stable in animation GI out of AR in most complex scenes without using stochastic GI, which brings you down to maxwell like render speeds.

[spirozero]

Interesting. Thanks again Per.

Just printed off your "Bad Renders" thread. Will read it tonight. I'll probably have more questions tomorrow! :D

[Ernest Burden]

To be fair on that there's a can of worms attached in that the same poeple calling for VRay to be their saviour were those that were calling for fR to be their saviour too.

I find I must agree with all you said about the engines, AR's GI, etc.

Ah, but vray will be my saviour! Sure fr2 was going to be, but it isn't.

FR2 is actually quite good. It does faster and nicer GI, but is slower than AR in some images, too. It is still in a state of near-readiness. I like what Cebas is doing, I'm just frustrated by their pace.

Vray may end up being the perfect engine for me (arch-vis work), it just isn't here yet. So time will tell on that one.

Oh, and when fr2 is doing its thing like its suppoed to, you render with AR, then switch to fr2 and re-render and they look pretty much the same, sometimes almost identical. That's the idea.

[LemonNado]

Vray renders look the same as MR and FR2 and AR. Till you apply the rules regarding environment, image based lighting, etc. And once you apply the tricky settings, you can have the results in all of the above. Just the amount of fiddling with the detail and the time associated is where they differ IMHO.

If one cannot achieve great results in one, then another render engine will not help. Believe me.... I am a living sample for that principle 8). And I am sure that it is the driving force behind the renderer market 8)))) 'Hey come over here, we have an EASY BUTTON for instant render goodness' ;). I only stopped short of buying Maxwell because of the hate mail in the forums. Once that settles... who knows...

I am still looking for the EASY BUTTON. The Holy Grail of render engines... Which of course is BS as the root of all progress are the available research papers and the algorithms published. And according to that material there is no easy solution. We are caught between fast rendering times which require a lot of thought and experience to set up and achieve, and the preposterous rendertimes of the Maxwells and alike which supposedly are yielding the results with less setup time. Maybe the new 16 Core 4GHz Processor Workstation will add enough brute force to enable us to cut corners 8).
Rainer

[lllab]

well, a few points from my side.

every renderengine looks different. i havent found any same looking until now, and i own almost every engine out there beside Renderman.
But i agree very much with Per that also to a great extend the user makes the image good or bad.
Also every image of each Artist normaly have similarities, regardless which engine he/she used. evrybody brings in his style and skills.

FR was a good addition to cinema, in fact if it wasent there i would work on max now. it is a good tool. Vray for me brings a bit more quality in direction like maxwell, but speedier. it is a good balance between speed/quality. for me it is a next good step for cinema.

but one thing must be clear, no renderengine will bring quality only by itself! nobody will render suddenly like a god just because using a new/ better engine. also each engine has to be learned first...

cheers
stefan

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