Keyshot? It's pretty much industry standard for this sort of thing Also you can use triplanar mapping in Painter if you don't want to make UVs I It'll limit you but it'll work and it's a lot cheaper than a commercial license for Keyshot
I bought Keyshot pro for Zbrush couple years ago and spent some time with it. Then shrugged and never tried since. Getting a scene from Zbrush took forever. It was pretty slow comparing to GPU renderers, even not that speedy Cycles one. Not especially convenient lighting , limited material setup, glitchy passes , I…
Foliage isn't really a fair test - you need special shaders etc. Keyshot is popular because it eliminates 90% of the setup you'd have to do in something like mental ray. For the most part it's a highly effective way of getting concept/key art rendered with minimal faff - which seems like what OP is after. For my money…
Tried UV unwrapping a little bit last night, couldn't get it to work but admittedly I didn't work at it for very long. Still don't really understand the point within my personal context. Keyshot is too expensive. Corona looks interesting. @poopipe When you say even if you "live substances," What are those exactly? And also…