It's the artist that makes it look all pretty, not the software. I've seen incredible renderings done with scanline lighting and horrible lighting done with each of the plugins.

I use Final Render. I believe KDLab used Mental Ray (someone correct me if I am wrong). dbox uses Brazil (to the best of my knowledge). Vray is the most popular.

Pick one, they are all good (with teh exception of mental ray that just ain't worth learning).

I used Mental Ray at work. it works fine. Since 3.4 version its speed improve substantially. Besides you don't have to pay extra for rendering plugin. Mental Ray shaders are more than great. it can be quite simple and fast to get a decent result with mental ray but really time consuming and difficult to get super high quality rendering (but high end quality of mental ray render is the second to none)

Yeah, good luck emulating KDLAB. Those guys were good for a reason.

I'd start off with Final Render Stage 1 - to cover the basics of GI. Then move to Brazil - which is a little more advanced. Mental Ray is good as well, but it's harder to get rid of artifacts and such.

Yeah, GI will give you those life-like shadows , but it looks like the rendering above has seen a good bit of post processing.

Looks like that haziness is just Gaussian blurred (we love it!) image overlaid over image.

Depends on the artist. This image has seen a lot of post processing. You would be surprised with the initial rendering and the final piece. Vray is becoming standard, Brazil is used by many, Mental Ray is free, and Vray free is free.

my sample by mental ray 3.3

too bad, it cropped my image, so bad,
please let me know what is the maximum pixel allowed on this forum.

full image version on the link
http://img272.imageshack.us/img272/5729/cam13gw.jpg

Final Render for me... seems to be a good balance between the ease of v-ray and the complexity and versatility of Mental Ray or Brazil

auvn, add a space then width=400 befor the [/img]

That haziness is called physical sky - no post-process required.

jp, that looks like maxwell which has the tendancy of creating overly blue shadows and overly yellow direct light. i think maxwell is okay but it's lack of customization which many find comforting i actually find very troublesome.

FR has a "skylight" option in which you can tune to whatever color you need.

~ does Maxwell not have a similar feature?

It's FR - not Crapwell.

oh, go on please... !

for some reason i found brazil easier than final render. i love the GI in brazil. just put a white background on your model and play with the GI and skylight options, something looking like those will come out.

Yup, it's all subjective. They are all great. Mental Ray's shaders are, without question, incredible, but they are far too complex for arch viz and slow renders down.

Maxwell is unproven in production and looks like it's a long way off before they can increase the speed (if at al), so while it's a great idea, isn't fast enough for the real world.

Final Render, reported by many, is the fastest and most customizable. But it's also got bad presets (hopefully with SP3 that will be addressed, we are at SP2d now - nice service packs) and is a little tricky to learn.

Vray has got decent presets and is reported by many to be easy to learn (again, I didn't think so), it's fast too. Great user base.

Brazil I don't personally know a lot about, but I do know it costs more(was important when I was buying) than the others (last I checked about 50% more), but I've seen plenty of great results. No news makes me skeptical they are even still working on it.


That's about it. Any one will be superb in the right hands.