Rendering models

XiaoAbe · Aug 2014

Hi!

When it comes to rendering your models from Zbrush or Mudbox for you showreel, which renderer is best to use and what materials?

Thanks for the replies in advance!

EarthQuake · Aug 2014

There is no answer to this question, best will come down to personal preference and all sorts of other factors. Without further information its difficult to give a suggestion let alone tell you what would be best.

XiaoAbe · Aug 2014

I am sorry for the vague question. Maybe I should not have said best, but I was just curious for which renderer is commonly used when it comes to rendering your model for your showreel.
I am not so fond of the Zbrush rendering, except for when it comes to WIP, and I am considering using Vray or Mental Ray for rendering my showreel, but I was not sure of the material used.

Thanks for the reply EarthQuake!

EarthQuake · Aug 2014

There are many renderers that are common, again you'll need to be more specific. What exactly are your goals? Which software do you currently have? Is there a certain render style you want to emulate? Highpoly meshes or textured lowpoly ingame meshes?

Mental ray, vray, arnold, keyshot, etc are all common offline renderers, Marmoset Toolbag and Octane are GPU based renderers, Toolbag more for realtime/game stuff and Octane more on the offline rendering side. Then you have game engines like Unity, UE4, Cryengine etc if you want to present your work in a game environment.

Which renderers have you tried? What do you like/dislike about them?

Again, the more information you can provide the better.

rube · Aug 2014

If you're using zbrush you can get great results just using a few passes with the BPR rendered and doing some compositing in photoshop (or after effects if you render a sequence)

Opps just noticed you said you're not fond of the zbrush renderer but I'll still leave that here since it does work pretty well if you work with it.

Also pixar is releasing a free version of renderman studio that can be used for non-commercial purposes if that's what you're doing. It will work out of the box with maya.

XiaoAbe · Aug 2014

The main purpose was to render a turntable for my model, which is high poly and not textured.
At the moment I have Mental Ray, Keyshot, Vray and Zbrush BPR render.

My main issue with the Zbrush BPR was that even though it does some decent turntable renders, I did not like the whole look of the turntable renders, so I was just curious on other artists approach on their method of representing their model. I tried using Best under render settings, and the render looked better, but the shadows had a lot of graininess, which I could not fix.

The problem with Mental Ray, and Vray was the setup for the multi tiled Normal Maps, which I fixed now, but I saw that Mental Ray and Vray has bigger potential in terms of lighting setup, Final Gather, GI and materials, which could Improve the whole look of the turntable render.

Keyshot gave some good renders, but my main issue was that due to the way Keyshot renders, I could not get a proper wireframe render. It was triangulated.

I haven't tried Arnold yet, but I heard it is really good.

Again thanks for the reply EarthQuake
and thanks rube

rube · Aug 2014

You really don't need to use every renderer out there for a turntable. If that's all you're rendering just pick one you have access to and use that, they're all more that capable. Even just loading up in blender and using cycles would probably give a good enough result.

FelixL · Aug 2014

XiaoAbe wrote: »

Keyshot gave some good renders, but my main issue was that due to the way Keyshot renders, I could not get a proper wireframe render. It was triangulated.

If this is your only problem with keyshot, you could just render out a UV template in 3dsMax and apply it as a texture, you'll have your wireframe then. Unless you want it to be see-through which isn't very readable anyways.

Rendering models

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