Hi!
I have moved from my Mac to a new PC and struggle a tad to find my way from Cheetah 3D; but was very happy to settle on Silo 3D. Works great as a modeller. It would be a dream tool if it had a rendering engine built in; but for now: can anyone help me on finding the best plugin for Silo renderings? I am looking for a clean, easy to use and UI friendly rendering app / software. It must also support alpha channels (as all do I suppose).
Thank you!
Silo 2.x does not support plug-ins but hopefully will in a later release. For now you can use the Render External option under the Display menu.
Some programs for command line rendering:
http://appleseedhq.net/ Free and opensource. My personal favorite but the UI isn’t yet fully artist friendly but still powerful and accessible via command line.
http://yafaray.org/ command line accessible and GUI if you export directly.
https://renderman.pixar.com/store/intro Pixar Renderman. This one speaks for itself.
http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/ Suitable for command line but not artist friendly if you need a GUI but still powerful.
http://www.povray.org/ It’s been around forever. You can get artist friendly GUI’s but it has been years since I have investigated this. For command line usage it’s powerful.
There are more but those are what I can remember and have bookmarks to. Also, they are all free or open-source.
Fantastic! Thank you so much for a great post and tips. Will try them out 
Glad to see that the Silo 3D forum is active; really have fallen in love with this little modeller. Very close to my experience with Cheetah 3D, and think team Silo would do good by testing out the package of Cheetah in getting inspired about a version 3 in the future! The Cheetah render, modeller, and simple UI makes it a dream tool - but unfortunately Mac only. I do however feel that Silo are (even with some frustrating bugs) “my modeller of choice” in a record time; even better (faster) than Cheetah. Thanks!
Hi guys,
Have tested all above; but as a “GUI” man I settled actually for another option in DAZ Studio. Completely free, supports GPU based rendering (very fast), and does the work nicely (export to .obj from Silo). Try it out if you are in my situation (Earlier Mac users on Win).
Wiser by living!
Finally a renderer that does not kill my wallet and are super simple (as Silo 3D) in use: Owlet renderer! Free to use (1000x1000px limit), but I quickly saw that this is the final Cheetah 3D killer setup for me on PC: Silo 3D + Owlet Renderer. USD 200 for the full version and 1 year updates + USD 99 after that if you want to upgrade. Wonderful!!! Hope this helps someone else in my shoes that does not want to go all “Blender” on rendering. In a perfect world Silo would bundle with a product like Owlet to get the rendering “in house”. I get an error connecting the two from Silo but .obj exports are not a big deal breaker for me.
The ONLY wish I have is for Owlet to support NVIDIA GPU rendering; that would be the last missing star on a 4 out of 5 from me.