Best Render Engines for Blender

In today's video, we'll discuss some of the best engines to use with Blender.
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00:00 intro
00:25 Drop & Render
01:01 Cycles
01:38 Octane
02:23 Renderman
03:41 EEVEE
04:49 Vray
05:45 Redshift
06:48 D5 Render
07:45 Radeon ProRender
08:55 Luxcore
09:51 Nvidia Omniverse
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UV UNWRAPPING ►
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RETOPOLOGY ►
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SCRIPTING ►
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[@ValorCatStudiosinc]

Fact check: 3:09 - Way of water was rendered in Manuka. Everything was finalized by Weta. Weta dropped Renderman in 2014 while they were working on the Hobbit

[@ujulspins]

I keep wondering if they will ever open their render for public use like Pixar did, that would be cool.

[@WallyMahar]

I wish you had separated this into pay and Free, but very informative!🎉

[@Joshuahhs]

luxcore try it man

[@simbarashekunedzimwe1372]

Amazing work boet. You really did your homework. Much appreciation for the quality.

[@MichaelLuckhardt]

This was beautiful. Thank you!

[@sekenjonathan0]

Thanks mate. This was very informative.

[@InspirationTuts]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@ClaudioMalagrino]

In my animation, I work with Eevee and I get pretty good results tweaking with AO and shadows. I use Cycles only for volumetrics. I remember when I started with Blender in 2008, there were unbiased renders like Luxrender and Indigo. They were so slow for the pre-GPU hardware.

[@igorthelight]

Just wait until Eevee Next would come out ;-) It's already available as a preview in Blender 4.1 Alpha

[@eladbari]

Is EEVEE good to use with older GFX cards? [GTX970 here]. I understand Cycles is for RTX cards. And I don't know about Workbench. Those 3 are the default that come with Blender...

[@ClaudioMalagrino]

@@eladbari The scene needs to fit in the GPU VRAM.

[@rjwh67220]

Your videos are always so useful! Thanks for all your hard work.

[@InspirationTuts]

Glad you like them!

[@iniakoo]

Hey man. Thanks for including my video. Appreciate it!

[@InspirationTuts]

Any time!

[@XSI5]

This is probably the best channel in KZbin in terms of combining upload frequency and content quality

[@rjwh67220]

You got that right, brother!

[@AsirisC]

V-Ray is not really an option for Blender. Chaos still sells it for 2.7x Blender but it hasn't updated it in years and they never confirmed any new development to support new versions of Blender. In short, V-Ray is off the table as an option.

[@chokedboy]

v-ray looks ugly

[@Thealexcgart]

I started using Luxcore year ago...My favorite renderer

[@ujulspins]

Yes, this is a cool render. It's a pity that it has little support and development has essentially stopped.

[@kalpit3d934]

Demonstation of vray tools inside 3ds max is not fair that means all vray tools are not available for blender. But your list is fully updated with all great renders of current time.

[@pritamraya5295]

Does Drop and Render work with other render engines and addons? Addons like PBR EVO, vegetation, scatter, etc? 🤔

[@slinc_hd8552]

i tryed luxcore 4 years ago and it has become my favorit render engine! luxcore is a great and power render engine

[@ollied2025]

is it still being developed?

[@ibamarcel4577]

it is a shame there is only few luxcore ready profesional assets...on the other hand cycles has really big lybrary high quality models from many websites ,luxcore is good but i hate his denoiser...destroy my scene almost allways.if the luxcore will be more suported maybe it was favorite render engine in most blender users

[@EightNineOne]

Yeah, it's just slow@@ollied2025

[@slinc_hd8552]

@@ollied2025 it has a slow development but i am hopfull

[@flonkplonk1649]

@@ibamarcel4577i had always flickering in animation, no matter what i did! I heard temporal denoising in a video editing software will help...

[@godzoookie]

Redshift only works with 3.2-3.4 I was going to try it out today.

[@Israel2099]

Am using Octane, and its completely a banger, am really loving it, and its free

[@Shirruri]

I thought octane is paid? It seemed to say that on their website

[@scoopoutclub4677]

paid i think@@Shirruri

[@ArthurBizkit]

@@Shirruri Paid for Windows, Free for Mac, I think

[@stephanstrydom6175]

No, its free for Windows too.@@ArthurBizkit

[@stephanstrydom6175]

Only if you want to use more than one GPU. the subscription does offer A LOT though for cheap.@@Shirruri

[@ujulspins]

Omniverse is a good thing as an idea, but the software itself is incredibly slow and has a lot of nuances. For example, they claim to support MaterialX and USD, but in fact the transfer of materials does not work and the scenes are quite crooked. Not to mention that sometimes you have to log in again because it loses authorization, or for example does not support two monitors.

[@Kremost]

Tried Redshift for Blender 2 years ago, and the documentation and ease of use was horrible. Has this improved? Or is there better doc for Octane or Renderman?

[@stephanstrydom6175]

No. Its still terrible. Octane is pretty good though.

[@Trollmaggedon]

To this day I haven’t been able to get renderman to work in blender. Some error comes up every time after I install it

[@alexvith]

I'm quite sad Luxcore is being worked by a small team with little to no economic incentive, it could be one of the best and most photorealistic render engines for Blender, besides being free and having an active Discord community. I love it, but at the moment it is an exercise in frustration to work with it (many limitations compared to Cycles and quite a few bugs), even though they improved it a lot in recent years. I just hope the guys don't abandon the project.

[@ajtatosmano2]

afaik it’s basically abandoned. I’ve used it as a Corona alternative (which is also availible for blender, pnly 3.0 tho). Since then I gave up and use cycles with custom energy conserving shaders and Agx colors. This way it’s pretty darn close to Corona in quality and much faster and easier to work with.

[@alexvith]

@@ajtatosmano2 Oh not it's not abandoned, the community is still pretty active, the issue is that there's a very small group of people working on it for free, so updates come out very spaced apart. Didn't know about the custom shaders and Agx colors, mind sharing some sources for that? I'd like to test it out as well, if there's a possibility to get cycles close to Corona I would really like to hop on it :)

[@flonkplonk1649]

in terms of photorealism it's probably the best renderer available for Blender

[@ajtatosmano2]

@@alexvith seems like I haven't replied, (I remembered otherwise). I've done the custom shaders myself more or less based on the videos of Christopher3D. I faked a lot of things with them, so it's not physically accurate, but looks better nevertheless. However Cycles in Blender 4.0 has the AgX and energy conservation built in, I would try it out for sure. Out of the box it still won't be as good as Corona but I do post-production in every engine anyway. I think you can tweak it in photoshop under 2 minutes to reach a stage where you can't really tell what engine made the render.

[@HUNTERISLIT]

Can you make video about how to use render engines with blender?

[@Hate94Neu]

The thing with Cycles is that I don't have a very powerful computer, GTX 1060 and i7. and it always crashes the vram memory. Something that doesn't happen to me with other renders like Iray in Daz3D, or even other renders from other software, is that cycles is an unjustified memory drainer. And in the case of Eeve, although I have managed to render up to 6k with Cycles, with Eevee despite its advantage, it only crashes in 4k! even worse than Cycles... I mean, I'll have to look for a better optimized alternative renderer, since I tweak cycles without a good result, when without doing anything extra I can render with better optimized engines

[@paradigm010]

Hmm, I had similar specs and didn’t have many problems. Are you only making what in camera view or entire 360 scenes

[@moominjuice2]

I found switching off 3DView from full render to basic shading before rendering frees up GPU Video ram as in it's trying to double up. Mind you, the file I was working on had 4k textures in several shader slots. Not one of my scenes, I'd like to add!

[@arturs.beberins3467]

radeom pro render works with nvidia too, even better than amd. Also i use radeon pro for maya specificly, because arnold is not compatible with AMD cards. my card is amd 6800Xt

[@elbubsio4947]

So if I have 2 similary powerful GPUs, say a 6700xt and a 3070 and all other components being the same would the 6700xt using prorender be as fast as the 3070 using cycles? I prefer AMD cards but find myself stuck with Nvidia because their cards are usually faster for rendering. Also, would the render quality be comparable. Thanks 😃

[@leecaste]

Why do you prefer AMD if NVIDIA cards are faster?

[@elbubsio4947]

@@leecaste Because they're only faster in blender. In games (ignoring RT), the 2 would be pretty much trading blows and I much prefer the adrenaline interface over the Nvidia one. With AMD, I could overclock my GPU, see the temps and loads more, all in one package. Now I have to have GPU drivers and MSI afterburner for the same functions and afterburner pops up a stupid error msg every time my PC boots. Plus (in UK) - 6700xt - £330 3070 - £460

[@leecaste]

@@elbubsio4947 oh, I see, I didn’t understand because I only use the PC for 3D and work, not gaming 👍🏻

[@leucome]

@@elbubsio4947 The answer is not really... Pro render was faster when compared to the older version of Cycles. But Cycles-x HIP is usually a bit faster than Pro-Render. If you want to render faster with a 6700xt then noise threshold with OIDN is a good option. Also activate HIP RT if the option is available. With all that together it is usually possible to render relatively fast.

[@Orion-101]

Which is for low end graphics card and give good even realistic results

[@EightNineOne]

Most renderers are capable of good results nowadays, cycles is pretty fast as GPU renderers go, so if you want something free, probably best to stick with it.

[@xeyblade]

Anyone know on which one we doesn't have to convert each shader ??

[@flonkplonk1649]

Luxcore! Can use Cycles shaders and their own

[@EightNineOne]

Luxcore translates cycles materials, as does Octane

[@sherkhan_5050]

If I don't have gpu, which render engine should I use on my laptop? intel i3 8th gen

[@SandeepKumar-km9op]

evee

[@xeyblade]

Also tried to install Render but it was really confusing

[@zacksterxenres8589]

Avatar Was Rendered In House Render Engine Manuka Of Weta

[@revertfpv2928]

Does this render farm support addons?

[@nafiz2755]

Great video but would be better if u separated free from paid

[@bself1111]

So do you have any recommendations or favorite renderers from the list?

[@stephanstrydom6175]

I can recommend Octane. Its awesome.

[@gameplayontamil2879]

​@@stephanstrydom6175is that work for rx580?

[@EightNineOne]

Octane, it's probably the best allrounder - fast, intuitive and pretty easy to make things beautiful IMO

[@Contactbps]

@@EightNineOne paid and costly. not costly than redshift though

[@EightNineOne]

@@Contactbps there’s a free tier for Blender. Also it’s actually really good value for the paid version. Like £20 a month plus you get access to embergen, cascadeur, moi and a ton of free resources. Redshift is too expensive though agreed. Everything Maxon do is overpriced now IMO

[@Dave102693]

Would these work for Unreal?

[@dainjah]

I'm an archviz guy, I prefer octane.

[@flonkplonk1649]

I think for stills, especially interiors, Luxcore is much better (photorealism)..

[@imakegreateggs]

Can someone tell Blender Devs to let Alembic import support for attribute reading and particles? It's not production friendly at all.

[@dessybalandrano7136]

Which of those render engines are free??

[@cr4723]

Luxcore and ProRender.

[@graphicsaw2657]

I believe that while ProRender is AMD's answer to Nvidia Iray, it is hardware agnostic

[@jagjb6372]

Could there be a comparison between these engines? So far it's just a list of videos and doesn't really help :/

[@simbarashekunedzimwe1372]

The title, "Best Render Engines for Blender" is enough to tell you what to expect. If you require a comparisons video, how about asking politely?

[@abraxops]

watch?v=myg-VbapLno

[@adhidwipa6027]

Please make a video about Mitsuba Render. Not as accurate as LuxCore but render much much faster.

[@eobet]

What prevents me from switching and experimenting is that no materials are compatible between rendering engines, and I don’t want to have to learn a whole bunch of new things which only applies to that specific proprietary flavor…

[@danielterrazas]

What about Arnold? There is not a version of Arnold for Blender?

[@fingfufar9878]

I don't think there is an official Arnold version of Blender, I think there was an unofficial bridge at some point, but I'm not sure what happened to it

[@daufpat8055]

Please. For Jewelerie ? Diamond, caustique ...luxcore or other?

[@EightNineOne]

Anything with proper caustics - Octane, Luxcore or Vray from this list

[@richardconway6425]

Corona render is supposed to be very good, especially with caustics. But, I don't think there's a blender plugin, it's standalone, and it's probably not cheap either. It's definitely paid for. Blender Guru (Andrew Price) rates it very highly.

[@EightNineOne]

@@richardconway6425 I’ve never used it personally but only ever heard good things about it

[@flonkplonk1649]

Luxcore all the way

[@Madsterforever]

my new love "MoonRay" is also missing which is open source.

[@cr4723]

Knobody knows how MoonRay can started or use ih blender.

[@EdenHamilton]

Could anyone recommend a render engine for me? Speed isn't an issue as I have good hardware, I'm purely looking to get the most photorealistic results for VFX. I've been using Cycles for a long time now, and I can very realistic results, I'm just wondering if any render engines out there are actually better for realism or not?

[@EightNineOne]

For Blender? Go with Octane. Transparency and lighting quality out of the box are FANTASTIC with octane. In general, Cycles is like a mid tier renderer. Amazing for something that is free and plenty fast, but you'll get better results with Renderman, Octane, vray, Arnold etc etc Only exception is probably redshift, it's really capable but you have to coax realism out of it. Octane and vray are probably my faves

[@chokedboy]

corona used to be insane. i think you still can use it its chaos corona now. personally it feels a bit complicated for a noob to use so i will stick to cycles. but have seen renders with corona and damn the lights and colors was top notch.

[@EdenHamilton]

@@chokedboy Yeah just checked out some images from it and it does look really good, I'll probably give it a try, thanks!

[@EdenHamilton]

@@EightNineOne Cheers for the response, I'll give Octane a go. Is it easy to work with?

[@EightNineOne]

@@EdenHamilton you’ll still need to learn a few bits. But it’s no harder to use than cycles IMO

[@4KI75E4NN]

I think Indigo Renderer should be on the list.

[@cr4723]

The Blender exporter does not work.

[@4KI75E4NN]

@@cr4723 but it already worked I think ? I thought I could remember I used it with Blender some years ago 🤔

[@cr4723]

@@4KI75E4NN OK, that's interesting. But how did you get it to work?

[@enkiimuto1041]

I wish you separated what is free and what is not

[@vector_unit]

4:49 Does V-ray for Blender 3.x really exist? AFAIK it only works with blender 2.79

[@igorthelight]

Yep! Only for old versions

[@ektorthebigbro]

cycles is already good

[@joshuabautch8936]

Yeah but try rendering huge scenes in cycles in less than 10 minutes

[@stephanstrydom6175]

It will be much better when they drop the Filmic colorspace in 4.0.

[@ektorthebigbro]

@@misanthrope_01 cycles is not horrible it just seems like you don't know how to properly use it

[@ektorthebigbro]

@@stephanstrydom6175 wasnt there already a filmic log option in the color management settings?

[@nelson3d867]

​@@misanthrope_01cycles is good, but extremly long render times makes it unusable for me. Eevee is going very well and, with good settings, do the job well. Blender is great!!!! Thank you all.

[@LordLuigi_Rigs]

[@Turgineer]

Radeon ProRender looks great for AMD users.

[@quartzHUN]

The SSGI is no longer supported and developed. It only works on Blender 3.1.2 release or previous versions.

[@B1tchAssDog]

It has been updated after your comment

[@quartzHUN]

Thank you @@B1tchAssDog

[@igorthelight]

SSGI will be available in Eevee Next that will come out in Blender 4.1 ;-)

[@jbdh6510]

⁠@@igorthelightoh really? 😍

[@Crimsin19937]

Unreal is just about the best on the market, for the price and ability! It just has a substantial learning curve cause you have to know how to use UE to get a good result.

[@SeanChen5487]

Actually D5 render engine is based on Unreal Engine with better integration and easier learning curve.

[@Crimsin19937]

@SeanChen5487 really? I didn't know that! Only used it for aboit 15 mins before work one day. Will have to give it another go some day soon!

[@prosperngana6896]

@@SeanChen5487 D5? What do you mean?

[@imperador_do_YouTube]

vray for blender ???

[@dsgndev]

for 2.79 pretty much useless for 2.8x or 3.0x

[@stephanstrydom6175]

Its garbage.

[@abhilashh3904]

Ingines. Or Ngines ?

[@igorthelight]

Engines ;-)

[@ZephrusPrime]

RedShift for ZBrush CPU is worthless unfortunately.

[@TimV777]

Blender can't handle high displacement for me. Just crashes. Maya handles it fine.

[@TAREEBITHETERRIBLE]

IT HAS DIFFERENT RENDER ENGINES?? *IM SO F*CKING GLAD I SWITCHED TO BLENDER.*

[@ektorthebigbro]

just use cycles not worth to change

[@TAREEBITHETERRIBLE]

@@ektorthebigbro no one: me: **STARTS BICYCLE KICKING THE AIR LIKE LIU KANG FROM MORTAL KOMBAT** *WUOOOOHUHH **_WUTAAA-YUH!!_*

[@efeozturk5253]

dude vray for blender is a myth. it doesn't exist, it's using an ancient blender version...

[@pxrposewithnopurpose5801]

D5 IS SO SHT

[@normanequator7185]

The headphone was rendered 💀 First I thought it was random scene off the topic.

[@theslicefactor4590]

I tried using Octane but it's janky af and there is barely any support for it. My advice is stay away.

[@EightNineOne]

In Blender it is a tad janky, awesome renderer elsewhere

[@thequestioner277]

And you need to convert all the textures.

[@EightNineOne]

@@thequestioner277 that’s true of all renderers. Octane actually does a slightly better job than most by inferring a similar material automatically, it works occasionally.

[@oldnecron]

Cycles is evil

[@sam_lazy]

Ohh tired of Blender addons, please make something about 3Ds Max