Hello there,
For my internship I have to model and render solar farms.
The modeling part of the job is almost done but I am new to rendering and I’d like to know some things.
For instance, do you have any software recommendations?
I’ve downloaded and am currently using the free trial of V-ray. It gives me decent renderings but I am guessing it can do better if I learn how to use it properly. Any tips on that regard?
I’ve also found, in websites that offer textures and such, these things called HDRIs. If I understood correctly they give the PC all the information of lighting a and such. What I don’t know is what software these are used with. Is it for software like V-Ray or is it other softwares that can use these types of files?
Best regards,
Nicolas Eveno
For V-Ray, you can start from here:
V-Ray has a function called light-gen
That will automatically generate various lighting setups including direct sun and HDRI.
Give that a go - a nice time of day can go a long way to make an exterior rendering look good.
There are a lot of rendering engines on the market that cover different needs, V-Ray is the most known and you can achieve very realistic renders with it, personally I don’t use it, I prefer real time rendering, twinmotion and enscape are the ones I use, with enscape you can achieve great results in few minutes, twinmotion requires a bit more of work but the path tracer feature is a game changer, it is possible to make very realistic images or virtual tours, but you need a powerful gpu with ray tracing hardware and rendering times are higher. There’s another rendering engine I’ve used called Brighter 3D, it’s cheap and you get perpetual upgrades buying the software, recently it has gotten better adding ray tracing by gpu and cpu, you can give it a try as well.
Thank you for your reply!
Your comment made me doubt something else though.
You mention twinmotion uses Ray Tracing GPUs (Nvidia RTX and such I imagine), does this mean that others don’t use them (Enscape, V-Ray for instance). Also, does this mean that you get worse-looking results if you don’t have an RTX GPU or are the results the same but with far longer rendering times?
I originally wanted to use Enscape but the bast**ds removed the free licence for students. So I will only try it for 14 days. I suspect that the real time rendering is very GPU hungry, is that so?
Thank you for the information!
Thanks for the tip, I’ll try that in a bit and see how the results turn out!
Enscape needs a gpu with Ray tracing if you want yo have that option but it can render with a gpu without Ray tracing hardware as well, and the results are good. Vray and brighter 3D can do ray tracing with cpu and gpu with ray tracing capabilities, with cpu it takes a lot more time than with gpu, some people think that ray tracing with cpu rendering looks better than with gpu, for me the results are very similar, and with gpu you can do it a lot faster. Twinmotion has two methods of rendering, rasterization and path tracer, if you don’t have a gpu with ray tracing, rasterization is the only option, it’s very fast but it’s not so realistic.
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