What Rendering software do you recommend?

oraeles77

ages ago I used to use Kerkythea cause I was learning stuff on sketchup and it actually landed me a part time job doing renderings for some interior design people who knew less than me about 3d stuff.

I've been using Blender for the last few years, but I really dislike Cycles render and I would like to start using a piece of rendering software which is widely used by game studios so it looks good on a resume/cv, which possibly is compatible with Substance Designer/painter.

I also regulary render objects in Substance Designer/Painter, but I'd prefer something I could render large scenes in,

I've played about with Octane render as well, but I found it complicated, however if its highly recommended here, I'd give it another look.

Linko

Cycles materials are compatible with the new viewport real time engine Eevee. Eevee will be a free Marmoset Toolbag directly available in your 3D software so there will be no need to use anything else, it will only be counter productive. This is rendered from viewport of Blender: https://youtu.be/nxrwx7nmS5A

Tutorial: https://youtu.be/XoyEjutFR1U

You can try Eevee with a Blender 2.8 build: https://builder.blender.org/download/

If this is a complete scene with game assets you can render in a game engine: Unreal Engine, Unity (with the realistic preset), Godot (with the Environment and GIProbes node).

oglu

I do a lot rendering and i used nearly every renderengine.
All of them have there strengths and weaknesses.
To give you a recommendation i need to know what you like to render and which hardware resources do you have.?

oraeles77

oglu said:

I do a lot rendering and i used nearly every renderengine.
All of them have there strengths and weaknesses.
To give you a recommendation i need to know what you like to render and which hardware resources do you have.?

nvidia geforce gtx 1050 ti

C drive is 150 gb sdd.

other drives are several tera bytes.

32gb ram

windows 7.  i5 cpu. 3.7ghz

oglu

so no renderfarm no fast GPU.?
in this case i wont render at all and use a realtime engine or Mormoset.

kio

not a lot of game studios use offline renderes like redshift/ocatane/cycles/arnold etc. anymore - most work is done directly for realtime use in unity/unreal these days... so they are not really interessted in whatever rendering solution you are using.

im guessing if they do rendering at all, they will just use arnold because its bundled with max&maya.

oraeles77

oglu said:

so no renderfarm no fast GPU.?
in this case i wont render at all and use a realtime engine or Mormoset.

Is it not a fast one???

oraeles77

kio said:

not a lot of game studios use offline renderes like redshift/ocatane/cycles/arnold etc. anymore - most work is done directly for realtime use in unity/unreal these days... so they are not really interessted in whatever rendering solution you are using.

im guessing if they do rendering at all, they will just use arnold because its bundled with max&maya.

so when people upload images of their amazing characters to polycount is there particular render software they do it in??

PolyHertz

oraeles77 said:

oglu said:

so no renderfarm no fast GPU.?
in this case i wont render at all and use a realtime engine or Mormoset.

Is it not a fast one???

No, the Geforce 1050ti is essentially the bare minimum by modern workstation standards.

If you want to do GPU rendering you should get something with at least twice the performance and vram (so a Geforce 1080, 1080ti, 2080, or 2080ti).

oraeles77 said:

so when people upload images of their amazing characters to polycount is there particular render software they do it in??

Marmoset Toolbag or Unreal Engine 4, mostly. Keyshot is also popular for untextured zbrush models.

Alex_J

If you're making game art, use a real time renderer. Unity, Unreal, Marmoset Toolbag. No reason for anything else. 

If you want to know what people on artstation use, just look at the page. At the bottom of the comments is a list of software used. If they don't have it posted and you want to know, just leave a comment to ask. 

Don't get trapped into thinking you need some fancy graphics card and cinema-level renderer to make badass photorealistic art. Look through the game art, 3d digital filters and you will see that using some modern shaders and careful attention to detail, there is quite a few artist creating work that you would swear is real life -- and displaying it in ue4.

RyanB

kio said:

im guessing if they do rendering at all, they will just use arnold because its bundled with max&maya.

I've used Vray for rendering lightmaps then imported them into Unity.  I use Mantra for rendering sprite sheets used as vfx elements in Unity and Unreal.  I've also used Blender Cycles to render sprite sheets.

kio

im not saying it does not exist - but its just much less common than it used to be... ?

thomasp

I don't even think it was ever really all that common. I recall a single job where I did cutscenes in V-Ray. Safe to assume that only rather few people working in realtime graphics really have a proper grasp of offline rendering for production. Who has the time to keep up with all that too?

Mostly I've witnessed creation of marketing material in whatever default renderer was at hand. 3ds max scanline and the like.

oraeles77

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

If you're making game art, use a real time renderer. Unity, Unreal, Marmoset Toolbag. No reason for anything else. 

If you want to know what people on artstation use, just look at the page. At the bottom of the comments is a list of software used. If they don't have it posted and you want to know, just leave a comment to ask. 

Don't get trapped into thinking you need some fancy graphics card and cinema-level renderer to make badass photorealistic art. Look through the game art, 3d digital filters and you will see that using some modern shaders and careful attention to detail, there is quite a few artist creating work that you would swear is real life -- and displaying it in ue4.

im not worried about 'photo realistic' art, I just wanted to know exactly what people were using to make their stuff look presentable in a way which is industry standard.

oraeles77

PolyHertz said:

oraeles77 said:

oglu said:

so no renderfarm no fast GPU.?
in this case i wont render at all and use a realtime engine or Mormoset.

Is it not a fast one???

No, the Geforce 1050ti is essentially the bare minimum by modern workstation standards.

If you want to do GPU rendering you should get something with at least twice the performance and vram (so a Geforce 1080, 1080ti, 2080, or 2080ti).

oraeles77 said:

so when people upload images of their amazing characters to polycount is there particular render software they do it in??

Marmoset Toolbag or Unreal Engine 4, mostly. Keyshot is also popular for untextured zbrush models.

so if I wanted to make a nice render of a scene, I should just start using Unreal 4 instead of Unity then?

EarthQuake

If you're looking to create some nice renders of real-time assets for your portfolio, Unity and Unreal are overkill. Marmoset Toolbag is generally the go-to for game artists. If you browse ArtStation, you'll see that a lot of people render their game art in Toolbag. I work for Marmoset though, so I may be a little biased.

Toolbag has a free 30 day trial, and you can find introductory tutorials here: https://marmoset.co/posts/getting-to-know-toolbag-3/

We publish a lot of workflow breakdown articles written by artists in the community too: https://marmoset.co/category/toolbag-tutorials/

If you're doing something more involved like setting up an entire level, then Unity or Unreal are very good choices. I haven't played with the latest real-time stuff in Blender but that looks very capable as well.

Neox

do you possibly have an example of wat you would like to achieve?

FourtyNights

@EarthQuake

I have to say that I agree 110% with EQ here, that Unity and UE4 are overkill for porftolio shots, since they are slow, heavy, complex and time-consuming to set up for just for few real-time porftolio shots. I use UE4 at work, and IMO it's painful to get things done fast, because it's not fast, haha.

So yes, definitely render your porftolio stuff in Marmoset Toolbag 3, which is lightweight, ultra fast, simple and results are simply amazing, equally as pretty as in UE4.

Alex_J

FourtyNights said:

So yes, definitely render your porftolio stuff in Marmoset Toolbag 3, which is lightweight, ultra fast, simple and results are simply amazing, equally as pretty as in UE4.

I hope this isn't too far off topic or a hijacking of the thread -- though I think original question is well answered by now -- but this advice strikes me as somewhat counter to the general opinion I had regarding portfolio redners for game artist. 

Should I not display my work in game engine to prove, more or less, that I am capable of getting my work into engine and making it work there? Of course I agree that rendering in Toolbag is much easier, but I thought competency in game engines was important to show in a portfolio? If you have a published game under your belt, could that excuse you using Toolbag?

sprunghunt

if you're just showing off individual models  I'd use something like sketchfab or marmoset. I like that in sketchfab you can change the viewport to isolate different parts of the textures (eg 'roughness only' view).

However when you're making a whole scene I'd use Unreal. I agree with @BIGTIMEMASTER that you should show that you can make your work look good in Unreal or Unity. Especially if you want to become an environment artist. 

oraeles77

Neox said:

do you possibly have an example of wat you would like to achieve?

yeah, a conversation with my bank manager in-which he doesnt start laughing at me, then he calls in the rest of the bank staff and he asks me to repeat what I just said, then they all start laughing at me, then he goes "ok, so you gonna be serious, or you gonna get out!" and then I sort of have to leave.. so yeah a conversation where he actually listens to me and gives me a loan would be an achievement... oh wait... cg stuff...  yeah, I sort of lost, every 2 or 3 days I upload something new to artstation, like a generic object, using blender and substance designer/painter, maybe with some shots of it in a unity scene too, but I feel like im wasting time, I wil download marmoset tonight.

sprunghunt

oraeles77 said:

Neox said:

do you possibly have an example of wat you would like to achieve?

yeah, a conversation with my bank manager in-which he doesnt start laughing at me, then he calls in the rest of the bank staff and he asks me to repeat what I just said, then they all start laughing at me, then he goes "ok, so you gonna be serious, or you gonna get out!" and then I sort of have to leave.. so yeah a conversation where he actually listens to me and gives me a loan would be an achievement... oh wait... cg stuff...  yeah, I sort of lost, every 2 or 3 days I upload something new to artstation, like a generic object, using blender and substance designer/painter, maybe with some shots of it in a unity scene too, but I feel like im wasting time, I wil download marmoset tonight.

@oraeles77
If you have substance painter you can directly export from substance to Sketchfab. Sketchfab is supported by artstation. No extra download required.

https://sketchfab.com/exporters/substance

https://www.allegorithmic.com/blog/substance-sketchfab

FourtyNights

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

FourtyNights said:

So yes, definitely render your porftolio stuff in Marmoset Toolbag 3, which is lightweight, ultra fast, simple and results are simply amazing, equally as pretty as in UE4.

I hope this isn't too far off topic or a hijacking of the thread -- though I think original question is well answered by now -- but this advice strikes me as somewhat counter to the general opinion I had regarding portfolio redners for game artist. 

Should I not display my work in game engine to prove, more or less, that I am capable of getting my work into engine and making it work there? Of course I agree that rendering in Toolbag is much easier, but I thought competency in game engines was important to show in a portfolio? If you have a published game under your belt, could that excuse you using Toolbag?

Short answer:

For character artists, and prop artists, you don't need to use anything else than Marmoset Toolbag 3... but for environment artists, it's important to know a fully featured game engine such as Unity or UE4, because of tiling materials, modular meshes with precise snapping (pivots) and lighting + lightmap baking, to see how they work together as a whole environment, and maybe seeing how it would work even with some interaction, such as opening doors, for example.

So yes, character and prop artists really get it easy.

Even our notable member almighty_gir mentions same reasons in this thread:

https://polycount.com/discussion/134901/using-marmoset-vs-ue4-for-portfolio-work

But at the end even as a character artist (or prop artist), once you're comfortable with your pipeline/workflow with the choice of your modeling & texturing softwares and rendering your final assets in Marmoset every time... it's not hard to step out of that and bring your work to UE4 or Unity after that, since you already know how to create good-looking game assets.

A a character artist myself, I've found UE4 useful for a little bit more complex custom tiling textures and masking capabilities. Like, for example, you can tile only one normal map with a mask in MT3, but in UE4 the sky is the limit. You can tile all of your maps, blend them, use multiple masks, etc. etc. Of course it's possible in MT3 too, but only with custom plugins at the moment.

...but then again it's not necessarily character artist's job to create super complex materials in UE4 in a studio environment (usually those are done by separate [technical] material/shader artists), but to use a simpler packaged material instance with lots or texture slots, switches, parameters to play with.

Think about how much more fun it is for a character artist to use a simple material instance based on a very complex parent material made by the talented material/shader artist. And things just work out, since it's optimized and polished material. You come in, and just play with it to fit it to the needs of your character, until you're satisfied. ;D

...but STILL then again, lol. If you're just using only baked textures, with the basic albedo, normal, roughness and metalness maps, a parent material can be very simple.

Linko

Purshasing Marmoset Toolbag while Blender 2.8 is close to Beta with a built-in (so more productive) free alternative isn't the best idea. It is already usable, you can model in Blender 2.79, you create a group then you append it in Blender 2.8 to render it. It will keep your Cycles materials and textures plugged, they are compatible and look almost the same. It has a PBR uber shader, built-in look dev mode with HDRI presets combined with Filmic tone mapping and volumetrics, post-processing, OpenGL snapshots with AA then the compositing is automatically applied on top of the snapshot. It also has a Principled Hair shader that doesn't exist in Marmoset.

Use a game engine if you do level design, otherwise there is no point of spending your money on a tool that does exactly the same thing and slower.

RN

@ Toolbag vs Unity \ Unreal: Toolbag is a real time renderer that uses PBR materials, so game assets rendered with it for your ArtStation should be as valid as when rendered w/ those game engines.

The same can be said for Blender's Eevee. If the engine is real time (rather than offline, when you can use path tracing etc. for ultra realism) and follows the PBR guidelines, and if the render looks great obviously, then it should make no difference unless you're a puritan.

Alex_J

@FourtyNights, 

thanks for the detailed answer and the link. I think that was enough varied opinions to help me answer a question that's been bugging me for a bit now. Been looking for an excuse to just do my character portfolio work in Toolbag, rather than digging deeper into UE4 to more or less do the same thing. 

gnoop

Octane is probably less complicated and most easy to set up render. Newly added AI denoiser  makes it super quick to render very complex scenes.        I always shrug when I hear that Arnold or Vray is for makeing artists life easier.  In what universe? 
 
The only drawback it takes more time to transfer something  to Octane than the rendering itself  and  texture bakinfg is rudementary.   Still  I would be super happy to see it in Zbrush insted of Keyshot  which I bought, tried for a week  and never used since.

sprunghunt

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

@FourtyNights, 

thanks for the detailed answer and the link. I think that was enough varied opinions to help me answer a question that's been bugging me for a bit now. Been looking for an excuse to just do my character portfolio work in Toolbag, rather than digging deeper into UE4 to more or less do the same thing. 

If you get a job you're going to have to use UE4 or Unity anyway so why not learn now? 

Alex_J

sprunghunt said:

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

@FourtyNights, 

thanks for the detailed answer and the link. I think that was enough varied opinions to help me answer a question that's been bugging me for a bit now. Been looking for an excuse to just do my character portfolio work in Toolbag, rather than digging deeper into UE4 to more or less do the same thing. 

If you get a job you're going to have to use UE4 or Unity anyway so why not learn now? 

I am familiar with both. A Unity game I developed a ton of modular characters for is about to be published, so I'd hope that would be enough to show I understand how models work in a game engine. It's just a matter of taking a week to do some studying and messing around in UE4 to get the same quality I'd get in Toolbag. I'm totally up for that -- I like working in the game engines -- but if a lot of people are saying, "meh, character artist is fine working in toolbag," why not save the week of work?

sprunghunt

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

sprunghunt said:

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

@FourtyNights, 

thanks for the detailed answer and the link. I think that was enough varied opinions to help me answer a question that's been bugging me for a bit now. Been looking for an excuse to just do my character portfolio work in Toolbag, rather than digging deeper into UE4 to more or less do the same thing. 

If you get a job you're going to have to use UE4 or Unity anyway so why not learn now? 

I am familiar with both. A Unity game I developed a ton of modular characters for is about to be published, so I'd hope that would be enough to show I understand how models work in a game engine. It's just a matter of taking a week to do some studying and messing around in UE4 to get the same quality I'd get in Toolbag. I'm totally up for that -- I like working in the game engines -- but if a lot of people are saying, "meh, character artist is fine working in toolbag," why not save the week of work?

90% of the render quality of marmoset is because they have custom reflection maps. Here are some instructions to save a week - https://youtu.be/nZ7wj3aoyQs

Alex_J

sprunghunt said:

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

90% of the render quality of marmoset is because they have custom reflection maps. Here are some instructions to save a week

Very cool. Thanks a lot. I'll bookmark that. I did something similar in Unity and had pretty nice results. Actually I just used some of the HDRI skyboxes from Substance Painter and piped that in and it made things look a lot nicer, particularly shiny metal materlals. I'll give this a try then, when it comes to presentation time. I suppose it certainly doesn't hurt at all to present in a game engine, assuming I can achieve the right quality, and if I do, that's one more check in the box for a recruiter.

RS7

I recommend Vray, Arnold and Renderman

Vray for for fair speed/quality ratio

Arnold for 2x quality

Renderman for going nuts

CreativeSheep

I agree with @gnoop Octane is an all around render and perfect for your pieces to show case and you'll get excellent results and more; all for around $500-$600. The reason for Unity is because it's free; but to install a game development tool just to render seems really dumb.  You should plan out your workflow and software it will make learning and life easier as you learn/use your tools.