Alternatives to RenderMan
Compare RenderMan alternatives for your business or organization using the curated list below. SourceForge ranks the best alternatives to RenderMan in 2025. Compare features, ratings, user reviews, pricing, and more from RenderMan competitors and alternatives in order to make an informed decision for your business.
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Blender
Blender Foundation
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now. -
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Univah Film Engine
The Stephanie Michaels Software Company
The Univah Film Engine (Univah Pro) is an advanced Real-Time 3D rendering and animation software for professional 3D animation studios. Univah Pro is dedicated to the creation of very large virtual worlds. Render entire planets with trees, oceans, rivers, roads, cars and people all in real time. Add realistic visual effects such as rain, snow, explosions all in real time. Add advanced physics to objects such as soft body physics, destruction physics, hard body and hair physics all in real time. FEATURES 1. Ease of Use - We specifically designed The Univah Film Engine to be a powerful tool for filmmakers, without being unnecessarily complicated and difficult to learn. 2. Clean User Interface - Learning a new software can be daunting. When you launch Univah Pro for the first time, we dont want you to be overwhelmed. 3. Blend Shapes, Deformers, Morphs - In Univah, we have an "Animate Anything" approach, so that this tool is attractive to professional filmmakers. -
3
appleseed
appleseed
appleseed is an open source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine primarily designed for animation and visual effects. appleseed is actively developed by a small, international team of talented volunteers from the animation and VFX industry. Its core mission is to provide individuals and small studios with a complete, reliable, fully open rendering package. Over the years appleseed has been used on several projects including TV documentaries, ads, promotional videos and an animation short. appleseed implements a modern workflow based on path tracing that enables artifact-free, single pass rendering with very little technical tuning. It is simultaneously capable of strictly unbiased rendering when total accuracy matters, and biased rendering when artistic freedom and shorter rendering time are paramount. -
4
Marmoset Toolbag
Marmoset
Toolbag provides everything needed to perfect the look, design, and presentation of your 3D assets. From previewing materials, baking texture sets ready for production, to assembling renders ready for showcasing to the world, Toolbag has a place in your workflow. Real-time physically-based rendering and image-based lighting are the core of Toolbag’s superior image quality. Realistic or stylized, your artwork will shine bright. Create more, click less. The simple things like drag-and-drop functionality and smart-loaders, to name a few, help provide a smooth and familiar 3D rendering experience in Toolbag. Capture stills of your latest character art, environment art, product designs, and more. Make use of Toolbag’s built-in Turntable tool, or set up your very own custom animation and camera sequence to proudly showcase your latest creation in motion.Starting Price: $189 per user -
5
Autodesk Arnold
Autodesk
Global illumination rendering software. Render high-quality 3D images faster with Arnold–so you can focus on the art. Arnold software is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer that helps you work more efficiently. Interactivity produces immediate results, leaving more time for iterations. The controls and UI are simple and intuitive. Switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering to suit your production needs. Arnold thrives on heavy datasets and complex scene files. Production-ready tools reliably manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Compute performance is optimized when creating elements such as hair, fur, skin. Easily integrate with all of the top 3D digital content creation (DCC) tools. Get the scalability of an open and extensible architecture. Arnold GPU allows users to switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering. High-performance ray traced subsurface scattering eliminates the need to tune point clouds.Starting Price: $27 per month -
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AMD Radeon™ ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images. Built on AMD’s high-performance Radeon™ Rays technology, Radeon™ ProRender’s complete, scalable ray tracing engine uses open industry standards to harness GPU and CPU performance for swift, impressive results. Features an extensive native physically-based material and camera system to enable true design decisions with global illumination. A powerful combination of cross-platform compatibility, rendering capabilities, and efficiency helps reduce the time required to deliver true-to-life images. Harness the power of machine learning to produce high-quality final and interactive renders in a fraction of the time traditional denoising takes. Free Radeon™ ProRender plug-ins are currently available for many popular 3D content-creation applications to create stunning, physically accurate renders.
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CentiLeo
CentiLeo
Fast and easy to use GPU path tracer. CentiLeo is a fast GPU renderer integrated with 3ds Max and Cinema 4D supporting GPU VRAM software extension and with high efficiency for scenes with complex lighting. For 3ds Max and Cinema 4DCentiLeo is an offline GPU renderer with very fast unbiased path tracing for complex lighting. It supports huge scene assets with GPU-accelerated out-of-core technology that effectively renders the polygon counts, particles and textures that may not fit entirely to GPU memory. This feature extends GPU memory limits for geometry/particles by 4x and for texture memory limits by 100x. CentiLeo supports Interactive Preview Render, node-based material & shader editing, displacement mapping, motion blur, subsurface scattering, fast noise reduction for multi-materials, glass objects and mesh lights. CentiLeo is supported by Skolkovo Foundation, some of software R&D results were supported by Skolkovo grants. -
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Avoyd
enkisoftware
Avoyd Voxel Editor and Renderer Create, import, export and render large voxel worlds. 3D art and rendering tool for voxel artists, map builders and game developers. Main Features: - Large scenes up to 256k voxels a side. - CPU and GPU path traced rendering. - Export to optimised mesh glTF and OBJ with physically-based materials parameters, and VOX. - Import MagicaVoxel VOX, Minecraft maps, heightmaps, palettes. - Orthographic projection with Isometric presets. - Up to 65k physically based materials. - Physically based light and atmosphereStarting Price: €15 one-time payment -
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Twinmotion
Unreal Engine
Easily produce high-quality images, panoramas, standard or 360° VR videos, and complete client presentations in seconds! For architecture, construction, urban planning, and landscaping professionals, Twinmotion combines an intuitive icon-driven interface with the power of unreal engine. View and edit your scene in real time at the same high quality as the final rendering. Twinmotion features realistic physically based lighting and shadowing with built-in global illumination, includes over 600 PBR materials that react to your environment, and offers effects like depth of field, lens flare, and vignetting, making it easy to get the look you need. Regardless of your project’s complexity or your previous CG experience, Twinmotion's simple and intuitive interface makes it a breeze to learn and use. Drag and drop lights, materials, and props; change the season, the weather, or the time of day by simply dragging a slider. -
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3Delight
Illumination Research
Introducing 3Delight refreshingly simple and fast. High performance production rendering software & tools with unmatched support services. Illumination Research, headquartered in Singapore, specialises in rendering solutions for the demanding environment of the VFX and animation production pipeline. 3Delight was first introduced in 2002 and has since been used in countless feature films and commercials. Our product line include 3DelightNSI, 3Delight for Maya and 3Delight for Katana. We are also in the testing phase for a rendering service through 3Delight Cloud. 3Delight for Maya is our proprietary rendering plug-in for Autodesk® Maya®. It is easy to use by the artists, while providing all the flexibility to support the most demanding rendering pipelines. The free 3Delight comes with one full license with all the features but with a restriction to use a maximum of 12 cores for rendering on your computer.Starting Price: $30 per week -
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NOX
EVERMOTION
NOX is a free stand-alone, physically-accurate state-of-an-art renderer. Its engine is based on unbiased methods. Global illumination is evaluated using Path Tracing or Bidirectional Path Tracing. Light behavior is based on laws of physics, however some simplifications occur. Many post-production actions can be done in NOX internally, so no additional software is necessary. NOX works with scenes created and imported from 3ds Max, Blender and Cinema4D. NOX is one of the most comprehensive renderers on the market and it is still under development at beta stage. It evolves and constantly gains new features. To make the best renders with NOX you need to know its philosophy of rendering. To achieve the best results read User Guide. Currently it covers features from version 0.3.39. The software made a long leap since then so we currently work on updated version of User Guide and want to release it autumn 2013. -
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Clara.io
Clara.io
Clara.io is a full-featured cloud-based 3D modeling, animation and rendering software tool that runs in your web browser. With Clara.io you can make complex 3D models, create beautiful photorealistic renderings, and share them without installing any software programs. This is the perfect Three.JS or Babylon.JS editor for creating and tweaking your web game content. Huge photorealistic material library. Easy advanced materials. Flexible lighting setups. Blazing speed. Simultaneous multi-user editing. Always on versioning. Per-user permissions. Review tools. Familiar UI. Responsive workflows. Undo/redo. Drag/drop. Context menus everywhere. Clara.io is the latest innovation from the trusted and experienced team at Exocortex. Exocortex's suite of products are trusted by hundreds of creative teams at studios around the world.Starting Price: $10 per month -
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LuxCoreRender
LuxCoreRender
LuxCoreRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine. Based on state of the art algorithms, LuxCoreRender simulates the flow of light according to physical equations, thus producing realistic images of photographic quality. LuxCoreRender is built on physically based equations that model the transportation of light. LuxCoreRender uses OpenCL to run on any number of CPUs and/or GPUs available. LuxCoreRender is and will always be free software, both for private and commercial use. LuxCoreRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine based on state of the art algorithms. A showcase of what LuxCoreRender users have been able to achieve. LuxCoreRender features a variety of material types. Apart from generic materials such as matte and glossy, physically accurate representations of metal, glass, and car paint are present. LuxCoreRender supports dynamic and interactive scene editing. -
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Maverick Studio
Maverick
Maverick Studio is a GPU-accelerated desktop app where our proprietary simulator of the physics of light is harnessed with intuitive and interactive drag-and-drop tools. Import your 3D models or CAD data files, and render amazing photo-real shots or turntable presentations with the best quality and the least effort imaginable. A bridge plug-in for Rhinoceros is also available. With our brand new Rhino plug-in you can Send (and Update) your models to Maverick Studio with a single click, preserving the materials, lights, and camera work done in Maverick. Enjoy our comfortable and user-friendly workflow to illuminate your jewelry models and achieve photo-real results thanks to our gradient lights and our physically-correct materials. Not a Rhino user? Export from your modeling software to any of the many file formats that Maverick can import natively and enjoy dressing your geometry with materials and lighting to achieve photo-real shots effortlessly.Starting Price: €3999 per month -
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Fujiyama
Fujiyama
Fujiyama is free and open source, distribution oriented ray-tracing renderer designed to handle production image rendering. Multi-threaded rendering - dynamic assignement of tile rendering per theread. Rendering preview - fbview shows rendering progress. Region rendering - accelerates distribution rendering pipeline. Tile based rendering. Volume Filling Procedure - Pyroclastic clouds procedure provided. Volume Filling Procedure - Spline wisps procedure provided. Volume Filling Procedure - Surface wisps procedure provided. On demand reading of mipmap - unlimited number of texture images. Pluggable shader DSO - shaders can be written in C/C++. Subsurface scattering - implemented in shader. Bump mapping - perturb normals based on mipmap images. Primitive groups - multiple shader assignment on triangle mesh. Gaussian and Box pixel filters - supports filter width bigger than 1 pixel. Adaptive grid pixel sampling - subdivides pixels based on color threshold. -
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Redshift
Maxon
Redshift is a powerful GPU-accelerated renderer, built to meet the specific demands of contemporary high-end production rendering. Tailored to support creative individuals and studios of every size, Redshift offers a suite of powerful features and integrates with industry standard CG applications. Redshift has the features and uncompromising quality of a CPU renderer, but at GPU rendering speeds. Unlike other GPU renderers out there, Redshift is a biased renderer that allows the user to adjust the quality of individual techniques in order to get the best performance/quality balance for their production. Redshift supports complex, advanced shading networks and texturing capabilities as required for production-quality rendering. Flexible, production-ready shader, compatible with PBR workflows of Allegorithmic Substance and Unreal Engine. Control how materials behave for certain ray types. Useful for customizing GI or double-sided polygon shading.Starting Price: $500 -
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Indigo Renderer
Indigo Renderer
Indigo Renderer is an unbiased, photorealistic GPU and CPU renderer aimed at ultimate image quality, by accurately simulating the physics of light. State-of-the-art rendering performance, materials and cameras models - it's all made simple through an interactive, photographic approach. Indigo's OpenCL-based GPU engine provides industry-leading performance on Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. With a single modern GPU, it's approximately 10x faster than before. Simply add more GPUs and get the horsepower to quickly render incredible 4K images and animations. A dark UI mode. Interactive material previews and light-layer thumbnails. RGB colour curves and snappy trackball navigation. These are just some of the new features making Indigo 4 the most streamlined and enjoyable version yet. A dark UI mode. Interactive material previews and light-layer thumbnails. RGB colour curves and snappy trackball navigation.Starting Price: $835 per license -
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AIR
SiTex Graphics
AIR is an advanced 3D graphics renderer with a unique architecture and extensive features designed for the rapid production of high-quality images. AIR is a hybrid renderer, combining the advantages of scanline rendering - fast rendering of complex scenes, motion blur, and depth of field - with the flexibility of on-demand ray tracing for accurate reflections, soft shadows, global illumination, and caustics. AIR supports a broad range of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, trimmed NURBs, subdivision meshes, curves, particles, and implicit surfaces. All primitives are supported in their natural form; no pre-meshing is required. AIR also provides true (sub-pixel) displacement and high-dynamic range (HDR) input and output. AIR offers the flexibility of fully programmable shading and procedural modeling. Users can extend the shading language by writing new functions in any programming language.Starting Price: $375 per license -
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Maxwell Render
Maxwell Render
Reality means predictable, reliable first-time results. Maxwell Render™ unleashes your creativity without having to struggle with complex computer graphics terminology and countless parameter tweaks. Maxwell Render is specifically made to help architects, designers, and artists to visualize their projects efficiently and accurately with minimum set-up time. Maxwell 5 is the best rendering software for light simulation. The rendering engine combines physically correct lighting with thousands of Maxwell materials to create accurate and extremely realistic images. It is compatible with most 3D or CAD applications. Best lighting engine for designers, architects, and artists from any industry. We constantly strive to improve the realism quality of the render and make the engine faster and easier to use. Maxwell remains unbiased with an easy transition from GPU to CPU, as well as the best cloud rendering service.Starting Price: $60 -
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KeyShot
KeyShot
KeyShot brings you real-time 3D rendering that displays results instantly and reduces the time to create realistic product visuals. KeyShot is trusted by brands around the world for its speed, ease of use, scientifically accurate materials, and advanced material editing capabilities. Communicate your ideas easier, explore concepts sooner, and deliver jaw-dropping visuals faster – Try KeyShot today. KeyShot includes native support for over 30 leading 3D file formats. Free plugins offer one-click loading, while LiveLinking keeps your design in sync across applications. Whether it’s a small gadget or a massive assembly, using KeyShot means less time loading and more time creating. KeyShot includes over 750 preset materials, with thousands more on the KeyShot Cloud, and advanced capabilities to create your own. Apply textures, labels, and variations with ease. KeyShot’s powerful lighting, studio, and image tools allow you to capture and style the perfect shot, every time. -
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Horde3D
The Horde3D Team
Horde3D is a small open source 3D rendering engine. It is written in an effort to create a graphics engine that offers the stunning visual effects expected in next-generation games while at the same time being as lightweight and conceptually clean as possible. Horde3D has a simple and intuitive interface accessible from virtually any programming language and is particularly suitable for rendering large crowds of animated characters in next-generation quality. The complete scene graph and animation systems are designed with this requirement in mind. For example, Horde3D tries to keep node hierarchies small to reduce call overhead and to use cached data for faster animations. The geometry is optimized for efficient cache usage and you can use several levels of detail for a model. Furthermore, it is possible to use vertex skinning and apply deferred shading to reduce the number of draw calls for scenes with many lights. -
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Flamingo nXt
Robert McNeel & Associates
Present your Rhino models in their best light. Next generation rendering technology. Flamingo nXt was developed for designers. You don't need to be a CG professional to quickly present your Rhino model in the best light. Results in a few clicks and a few minutes. In Rhino, just click Render to try the nXt defaults, or spend a few minutes to select a lighting scenario and add some materials before you click Render. Flamingo nXt 5 allows you to easily create stunning, life-like images in Rhino. With nXt you don't need to be a professional renderer to get realistic results quickly. You provide materials and lighting and press the Render button. nXt provides the simulation. Unlike many rendering products, there are very few settings to worry about or understand. nXt produces realistic results by simulating light transport in your model. Indirect lighting as well as complex reflection and refraction can be easily incorporated into the simulation.Starting Price: $195 -
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3ds Max
Autodesk
3ds Max offers a rich and flexible toolset to create premium designs with full artistic control. Create massive worlds in games. Visualize high-quality architectural renderings. Model finely detailed interiors and objects. Bring characters and features to life with animation and VFX. The built-in Arnold renderer provides a rich experience and can handle your more complex characters, scenes, and effects. Save time with centralized creative tools for interactive light mixing, color correction, and lens effects on the rendered image. Work faster with an artist-friendly user experience and intuitive controls. Iterate and produce high quality renders and variations faster. 3ds Max lets you scale your workflow with automation, allowing you to spend more time on creativity. Use 3ds Max as a compute engine to scale content production. Extend built-in workflows with accessible APIs.Starting Price: $215 per month -
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LightWave 3D
NewTek
NewTek LightWave 3D® is designed for independent artists who desire control of their vision from start to finish. Affordable, complete, easy to learn and use, LightWave is well established as one of the leading 3D systems on the market. With the ability to model, animate and render stunningly realistic imagery and animation, LightWave allows you to create new worlds, build your brand and shatter expectations. LightWave 2020 refined and retooled. Don’t take our word for it — try LightWave 2020, unrestricted for yourself. Download and register to unlock a full-feature trial version of LightWave 2020 for Windows & Mac today. LightWave 2020 gives you the tools you need to deliver any project on time and on budget. Add the power and efficiency of LightWave 2020 to your pipeline today. And start creating with a stable, streamlined, effective workflow. Fresh. Fast. Easy. Proven.Starting Price: $995 -
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Guerilla Render
Guerilla Render
Composed of Guerilla Station and Guerilla Render, Guerilla is a Production-Proven Look Development, Assembly, Lighting and Rendering Solution designed for the Animation and VFX industries. Used on a wide range of Productions, from Full CG to Hybrid and VFX, from Feature Films to TV Series, from low budget to medium and high budget, Guerilla is the State of the Art Software, easy to use and to deploy in your pipeline and will give you all the flexibility you need for your productions with no compromise on performances. Give more power to creativity with the new procedural system which now counts 4 depth levels of instantiation. OCIO management is fully supported with looks and input LUTs, color picker and color boxes. Reduce the memory footprint of your instances composed of several objects with the Group Instance Prims options of the instances procedural. New Asynchronous OpenGL View to prevent UI freezes and to load geometries as you work.Starting Price: €280 -
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Lumion
Act-3D
A building doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The setting, its environment, the subtle details — they all matter to bring your design to life. To create atmosphere. To give spaces a sense of scale and possibility. Lumion makes it refreshingly easy to transform any CAD model into an experience you can feel. You can shape entire landscapes and add a world of context to your designs. Make spaces feel real with fine-detailed nature, detailed skies and high-quality materials. Convey atmosphere and emotion with stunning lighting, weather and animation effects. Lumion is architectural rendering software that makes it easy to convey how your projects will translate into real-life experiences and emotions. Fast, intuitive and reliable, Lumion fits seamlessly in any design workflow, making rendering a more satisfying and enjoyable experience. Atmospheric spotlights. Realism-inducing decals. A scene-building experience that’s faster than ever. -
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Clarisse iFX
Isotropix
Clarisse iFX is a powerful CG toolset trusted by internationally renowned creative studios. Built by artists for artists, it is designed to simplify today’s complex creative workflows, empowering users with interactivity, speed and power over datasets containing bazillions of polygons.Created in response to feedback from today’s front-line CG creatives, Clarisse iFX unifies powerful rendering, lighting and look development tools under a single, accessible package. Thanks to its integrated CPU based rendering engine, based on unidirectional path-tracing users can work interactively on rich, data-heavy environments, scenes and assets, with full visibility over their creative decision-making. Clarisse iFX fits seamlessly into the core of any modern production pipeline. It’s an intuitive, flexible and comprehensive toolset tailored to the needs of studios and production teams working in CG today – not ten years ago.Starting Price: $499 one-time payment -
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Radiance
Radiance
Radiance is intended to aid lighting designers and architects by predicting the light levels and appearance of a space prior to construction. The package includes programs for modeling and translating scene geometry, luminaire data and material properties, all of which are needed as input to the simulation. The lighting simulation itself uses ray tracing techniques to compute radiance values (ie. the quantity of light passing through a specific point in a specific direction), which are typically arranged to form a photographic quality image. The resulting image may be analyzed, displayed and manipulated within the package, and converted to other popular image file formats for export to other packages, facilitating the production of hard copy output. The major portion of the Radiance package, and the part that is of chief interest to users, is the lighting simulation engine that calculates light levels and renders images. -
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Maya
Autodesk
Create expansive worlds, complex characters, and dazzling effects. Bring believable characters to life with engaging animation tools. Shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools in Maya® software. Create realistic effects—from explosions to cloth simulation. A new visual programming environment using dynamic solvers enables you to create blockbuster-worthy effects quickly. Build custom graphs using the Bifrost Graph Editor. Create stunning effects—from snow and sand to dust storms and explosions—with ready-to-use graphs. Render your most complex projects with Arnold. Arnold is built to manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Arnold is integrated with Maya, so you can see high-quality previews and iterate changes quickly. Save time with Arnold’s artist-friendly UI and simple, intuitive controls. -
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Kray
Kray
Kray is a state of the art global illumination renderer that allows very fast and accurate rendering of scenes where indirect light plays important role. It includes the most advanced modern algorithms and optimizations to allow it to render full global illumination, reflections, refractions and caustics quickly on standard computers. Fast global illumination: light/photon mapping – biased, but very fast and not much dependent on number of ray recursions, path tracing – unbiased with serval sampling optimizations, irradiance caching – for fast, view independent, reusable GI solution storage, caustics. Light models: point/directional, line lights, area lights, background light, HDR image based lighting, lights pre sampling. Instancing: allows repeated re-use of the same geometry in multiply locations in the rendered scene with very low memory consumption, instanced geometry can be also instances, even self cloning is possible with user defined number of recursions.Starting Price: €70 per unit -
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Render[in]
Render[in]
Render[in] is a fully integrated, real-time radiosity engine developed for SketchUp (Free and Pro) users. Powered by Artlantis 6.5’s rendering engine, Render[in] 3 gives SketchUp users the high-definition, photorealistic renderings they’ve been looking for, in a robust, easy-to-use application. Just as in photography, the respect of color is essential in rendering. Render[in]’s new global illumination engine improves images for a better perception of colors, textures, and materials. Thanks to both the ISO and Shutter parameters, it is easier than ever to fine-tune a scene’s lighting.Starting Price: €190 per license -
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RenderDotC
Dot C Software
Dot C Software's flagship product, RenderDotC, is a world class photorealistic renderer designed to meet the demands of special effects for film. The primary reason people give for choosing RenderDotC is its favorable price per performance ratio. Moreover, RenderDotC scores high marks on everything that matters for a production renderer. Images produced with RenderDotC possess that indescribable yet beautiful quality that some people refer to as "the RenderMan look". All phenomena that are prone to aliasing artifacts are effectively anti-aliased and noise is kept to a minimum. RenderDotC was designed in the 1990's to take advantage of the current hardware and software technologies. Its CPU and memory performance is unsurpassed by all renderers in its class. There are hundreds of details to get right when developing a renderer and that only comes with maturity. RenderDotC is priced competitively for both the film and broadcast markets.Starting Price: $500 -
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Kerkythea
Kerkythea
Kerkythea is a freeware software that can produce high quality renders without spending a cent on software licensing. Kerkythea is using physically accurate materials and lights, aiming for the best quality rendering in the most efficient timeframe, with target to simplify the task of quality rendering by providing the necessary tools to automate scene setup, such as staging using the GL real-time viewer, material editor, general/render settings, editors, etc., under a common interface. Kerkythea is a full staging application for rendering your models. And now it’s available for all major platforms Windows, Linux and MacOSX! It accepts .3ds or .obj models, as well as having powerfully developed free exporter for SketchUp. -
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NVIDIA Iray
NVIDIA
NVIDIA® Iray® is an intuitive physically based rendering technology that generates photorealistic imagery for interactive and batch rendering workflows. Leveraging AI denoising, CUDA®, NVIDIA OptiX™, and Material Definition Language (MDL), Iray delivers world-class performance and impeccable visuals—in record time—when paired with the newest NVIDIA RTX™-based hardware. The latest version of Iray adds support for RTX, which includes dedicated ray-tracing-acceleration hardware support (RT Cores) and an advanced acceleration structure to enable real-time ray tracing in your graphics applications. In the 2019 release of the Iray SDK, all render modes utilize NVIDIA RTX technology. In combination with AI denoising, this enables you to create photorealistic rendering in seconds instead of minutes. Using Tensor Cores on the newest NVIDIA hardware brings the power of deep learning to both final-frame and interactive photorealistic renderings. -
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EQUINOX-3D
EQUINOX-3D
The 3D modeler with the fastest, fully integrated ray-tracer. Because "rasterization is so 20th century™" 3D modeling, animation, photorealistic rendering, photorealistic VR content creation, CAD/CAM, 3D printing, laser-cutting and much more! Why is EQUINOX-3D better? As our artist said: "all engineers should be forced to use the software they write". I use EQX many hours a day and there is no need to force me! Super-fast photorealistic renderer, the first fully integrated interactive ray-tracer in a modeler. You can do full editing/modeling on ray-traced windows! Powerful subdivision surface modeling. Powerful CAD/CAM features, 3D printing and laser-cutting support. Universal rendering API that allows full modeling on any renderer and fully integrated Cg renderer with a quality that closely matches the ray-tracer. HDR texture support and HDR rendering output. Super fast importance-sampled HDR environment light support. -
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Shade/Shape
RE:Vision Effects
Shade/Shape automatically turns your 2D artwork into 3D rendered imagery! Automatically 3D shades your 2D text, logos and pictures by using the outline and features of the artwork to give it volume and depth. Animated 2D characters really stand out when Shade/Shape is applied! Develop cool effects and abstract transitions. Add natural 3D shading effect to your existing image sequences. Shade/Shape automatically generates 3D shading for your 2D graphical and picture elements using our shading-from-shape technology. Add depth, shading and metallic luster to your titles and logos! Create glassy objects by reflecting the background sequence through your object! Shade/Shape also comes with a plugin, that uses the shading techniques in Shade/Shape to shade the normals produced by a 3D system or even Shade/Shape itself. Add further detailing by applying reflection and bump maps. Stable and smooth-over-time shading produced for moving imagery. -
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V-Ray
Chaos
Chaos® V-Ray® is a 3D rendering plugin available for SketchUp, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Rhino, Revit, and more. It is widely used in architectural visualization, advertising, and visual effects for film and television. With V-Ray, artists and designers can explore and share their projects with real-time ray tracing and render high-quality visualizations. V-Ray has a large community of users and is recognized for its incredible versatility. V-Ray has been honored with a Sci-Tech Academy Award® and an Engineering Emmy Award® for bringing fully ray-traced photorealistic CGI to the film and television industries. For more information, please visit chaos.comStarting Price: $60 per month -
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Mitsuba
Mitsuba
Mitsuba 2 is a research-oriented retargetable rendering system, written in portable C++17 on top of the Enoki library. It is developed by the Realistic Graphics Lab at EPFL. It can be compiled into many variants which include color handling (RGB, spectral, monochrome), vectorization (scalar, SIMD, CUDA) and differentiable rendering. Mitsuba 2 consists of a small set of core libraries and a wide variety of plugins that implement functionality ranging from materials and light sources to complete rendering algorithms. It strives to retain scene compatibility with its predecessor Mitsuba 0.6. The renderer includes a large automated test suite written in Python, and its development relies on several continuous integration servers that compile and test new commits on different operating systems using various compilation settings (e.g. debug/release builds, single/double precision, etc). -
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Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D is a powerful and easy to learn 3D modeling, rendering and animation software which was developed from the ground up for Mac. So jump right into the world of computer generated imaging, create 3D artwork for your next iPhone game or make your first animated character. With a full set of polygon, subdivision surface and spline modeling tools the artists can focus on creating, safe in the knowledge that Cheetah3D has a breadth of features for the task. Cheetah3D makes modeling in 3D a breeze for new and experienced users alike. Character rigging is part of the seamless animation system of Cheetah3D where just about every property of an object can be animated. Breathe life into a character for your next iPhone game or animate an architectural fly-through by the powerful animation system built into Cheetah3D. Cheetah3D smoothly integrates the industrial strength Bullet physics engine to simulate rigid body and soft body dynamics.Starting Price: $99 -
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iClone
Reallusion
iClone is the fastest real-time 3D animation software in the industry, helping you easily produce professional animations for films, previz, animation, video games, content development, education and art. Integrated with the latest real-time technologies, iClone simplifies the world of 3D Animation in a user-friendly production environment that blends character animation, scene design and cinematic storytelling; quickly turning your vision into a reality. Animate any character instantly with intuitive tools for face and body animation. Create facial animations with accurate lip-sync, puppet emotive expressions, muscle-based face key editing, and an unparalleled iPhone facial capture. Create realistic or stylized, animation-ready humanoid 3D characters in a short time. Powerful animation features get scenes moving thanks to ultimate creative control.Starting Price: $599 per license -
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Art of Illusion
Art of Illusion
Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs. Highlights include subdivision surface based modelling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials. The current version is 3.2.0, released January 13, 2021. This version is both stable and powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work. We now have an extensive documentation section. This includes the user manual, as well as a number of tutorials covering different aspects of the program. The interface is designed to be clean, easy to learn, and simple to use. Art of Illusion provides subdivision surface based modelling tools for creating smooth surfaces from control meshes of arbitrary shape and structure. A powerful set of deformation tools allow you to "sculpt" objects in a natural, intuitive way. -
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Massive Prime
Massive Software
Academy Award winning Massive Prime™ is the complete solution for authoring, directing and rendering custom autonomous agents for animation and visual effects. Massive is the world’s most sophisticated crowd simulation software for rapidly creating realistic crowd scenes. In many cases, our Ready To Run Agents™ together with Massive for Maya or Massive for Max is the ideal solution for creating crowds. But when a shot calls for agents to perform custom motion or behaviors, then choose Massive Prime. Massive Prime's intuitive node based interface allows artists to interactively create AI enabled agents without any programming. Whether your custom agents number in the few to thousands, professional artists rely on Massive Prime to deliver realistic and natural crowd performances that are without equal. Each agent can have any number of actions. Actions can be motion captured clips or keyframe animations. -
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Miarmy
Basefount
Miarmy (read My Army) is a human logic engine-based Maya plugin for crowd simulation, AI & behavioral animation, creature physical simulation, and rendering. Miarmy simulator is free forever. You can download the full software package, along with tons of tutorials, samples, demo files, and documents. We also provide some official samples and ready-to-run presets. And the most amazing part is, they are totally free. Create stunning crowd VFX using Maya particles, field, fluid, and transform. Support standard production pipeline, reference, and motion builder. Build a human fuzzy logic network without any programming or node connecting.Starting Price: $1,350 per year -
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SimLab Composer
SimLab Soft
A revolutionary visualization and VR creation software. Since its foundation Simlab Soft mission has been clearly defined as developing state of the art 3D software that is affordable, fun and easy to use. This led to the development of SimLab Composer (SLC) with the vision of enabling Interactive VR! SimLab Composer is not a design application, it is a 3D scene composition application, which allows the user to import 3D files in difference formats, to arrange them, adjust their materials, and add options, animations, simulation and interactivity behaviors. After that the user can use composed scene in many different ways, it can used to create photo realistic rendered images, or shared as a 3D PDF, WebGL, or a VR experience. SimLab Composer interface is organized into workbenches. Upon selecting a workbench the allocated tools in that workbench will appear, and the interface will be changed to display the defaults of that selected workbench.Starting Price: $79 per year -
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Raylectron
Raylectron
Raylectron took many years of research and testing. Creating such software is not an easy task. While Raytracing exist already for many years prior to Raylectron, they are not photorealistic. To achieve photorealism, tracing the light path to illuminate the objects in a scene requires the understanding of the law of physics, such as photons and how they interact with the surface of the object they hit. In real life, photons travel at the speed of light, hence everything is illuminated almost instantly (to our perception). But as a computer program, this can not be done so easily. First, speed is a big issue. Computers do not calculate anywhere near the speed of light. Furthermore, the mathematics involved is extremely complex. All of the features combined into one single software. Select from a wide range of illumination and a combination of them. Texturing your model has never been so easy, in real-time!Starting Price: $99.95 per license -
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FluidRay
Fluid Interactive
All the tweaking of materials, lights or any other scene properties are immediately visible as real-time feedback in the viewport, making your workflow faster and much more pleasurable. FluidRay is the only interactive renderer that doesn’t suffer from GPU limitations. GPU based renderers work well only on specific tasks while FluidRay does it all easily and quickly. Working with FluidRay is effortless. The interactive workflow is extremely intuitive and anyone can get up to speed in just a few minutes. FluidRay allows you to quickly make visually stunning previews of your architectural projects, interior designs, jewelry projects, and more. Interactive rendering makes designing products and environments an easy and fun process. FluidRay makes it easy to quickly prototype your designs and generate super high quality preview images. FluidRay’s compatibility with Rhino enables designers to create 3D models in Rhino and easily import into FluidRay.Starting Price: $14.99 per month -
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Daz 3D
Daz Productions
Founded in 2000, Daz 3D is a 3D modeling software and content company specializing in morphable, posable human models, two of which are the most widely used 3D figures worldwide (Victoria and Michael). Used by top brands and illustrators, Daz Studio gives amateurs and professional graphic artists a free, time saving tool to create and customize their creations. Daz is used in film, TV, animation, video games, web design, print illustrations and more. Download Daz Studio and explore our huge library of free and premium 3D content. Start building custom scenes and characters in seconds with our smart content library. Export beautiful photo-realistic images and animations with studio-class processing. Explore our huge library of free and premium 3D content, like characters, hair, creatures, vehicles, environments, and more. Build your own universe with Daz Studio, the free 3D software. Export beautiful photo-realistic images and animations with studio-class processing. -
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X-Particles
INSYDIUM
Create outstanding ParticleFX from Solar Systems, FUI, Holograms and medical visualizations to abstract artwork. Multiple options to combine Emitters and Modifiers, gives you a range of possibilities. Realistic smoke, fire and explosive simulations. You can export ExplosiaFX as a VDB volume, and any render engine that can read the VDB data can then render the volume data. Our Liquid and Grain Solvers enable you to create stunning large and small-scale fluid simulations. From gorgeous beaches, with waves and ocean spray, to beautiful product shot splashes. Drive Cloth simulations with any Modifier, then rip it apart with the advanced tearing options. ClothFX adds a whole new dimension to motion design effects and destruction VFX shots. -
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Renderpeople
Renderpeople
Posed People are static scanned 3D People. Each of them portrays a specific natural pose that has been scanned in our state-of-the-art 3D scanner. The geometry and high-resolution textures of all Posed 3D People have been manually refined to match the vividness and authenticity of real humans. Posed People include pre-built materials and are ready to render. The free models match the same level of quality and functionality as the 3D Posed People in our online shop. Rigged People are movable and posable scanned 3D People. Each of them includes a skeleton that has already been bound to the geometry (also known as skinning). Our 3D Rigged People can be easily posed or animated in any way you like, making them versatile for use in many fields of application. Motion capturing data can also be applied to quickly create realistic movement. The free models match the same level of quality and functionality as the 3D Rigged People in our online shop. -
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Ansys VRXPERIENCE Perceived Quality offers a physics-based, real-time solution for design evaluation involving lighting, colors and materials variations. Test and validate your product design in context. VRXPERIENCE Perceived Quality can instantly compare multiple design intents for materials and lighting. The process allows you to validate choices against design specifications and select lighting and material combinations in lifelike conditions. Create a virtual prototype from a 3D format and easily prepare a virtual model, helping you make choices early in the design process, in real-time optical simulation. With the live preview of Ansys VRXPERIENCE Perceived Quality immersive virtual reality visualizations, bring in physics-based lighting conditions to explore how your lighting and material choices will look in reality.