so many rendering engines

[tom182]

wow, have been busy with Vray for the past 6 yrs and for me its my renderer of choice, had a look on the web today at what the industry is doing, there just seems to be so many render engines out there thesedays. Saw some nice images created with keyshot and bunkspeed, does anyone here have experience,
whats the scoop on any of the other max renderers, unbiased still big render times?? anything new in the pipeline?
regards

[mike_kennedy]

Never played with Bunkspeed or the others but since we work in Max it's nice to have a proper plugin to play with. I tend to stick to Vray and Mental Ray for the most part because there is no export work flow issues. Was playing with Machstudio (They are giving it away.) When ever I tried to export from Max I got crashes very often..can't see myself going though hops just to get slightly better speed then VRAY and less quality to be honest. Vray 2 looks to be the GPU CPU killer app from what I have seen.

[lukx]

one word : SUPPORT this is what counts nowadays , where you can get better support for rendering engine than here ?!

[tammo]

keyshot and bunkspeed are standalone "turntable" renderers for CAD models.
You import a model, apply a material, position your camera, choose a HDR lighting setup and get a quick render.
But thats it, you cant do much more than that.
I dont think that we will see real competition to mental ray and vray.
Think about how many years of programming, research and bug fixing you have to do to get there.
Even if you eventually reach that level of stability and features they just use that time to pull further ahead.

The only thing that could happen is that some big company steps in and buys chaos group.