I've heard a lot of good things about Keyshot if you want to do offline rendering. https://www.keyshot.com For real-time rendering, you can't go wrong with Marmoset Toolbag 2. http://www.marmoset.co/ Modo has a fantastic renderer. Maya's out of the box implementation of Mental Ray is crap, don't bother.
ya mostly photorealistic characters with some simple props and backdrops. what do you mean by some rendering engines not supporting hair though? as in, it doesn't render hair well? so, given my needs and the type of stuff i work on, would you say softimage is better? modo? arnold? only using it for lighting and rendering,…
What kind of characters you want to render? Photoreal? Cartoony? It's important coz some render engines like Octane/Keyshot don't support hair at all, Modo's hair is a joke and so on. For realtime or cartoony characters Modo should be great. Don't bother with Houdini, it's not artist friendly. Softimage has best rendering…
Depending on how you create hair, you may need render engine to support hair system in DCC app. Of course, if you create hair as image planes or render it as polygons you can use any render. Softimage is indeed top notch software with intuitive workflow, but I'm not sure it will suit your needs. Also, it's hair tools are…
Try unbiased renders like Octane and Arion or Maxwell, too. GPU renders have a lot of advantages over old renders like Vray and Mental Ray. Maya is great software, but a lot of artists prefer Modo for its interface and abilites. I prefer Maya, even though it is nice to support an underdog! Toolbag is kinda the solution for…