Every Render Engine for Blender

Malt is a non-physical base engine, which means, it’s specifically made for unrealistic/stylized renderings with a special shading model and advanced outline options, it is possible, to create Anime or Cartoon like Images and Videos.

The only downside, at least for me is, that it is only available for Windows and Linux.

Cycles is not only the default Render Engine of Blender, it is also my favorite engine. It is by far the most versatile engine on the list. It is also one of the quicker ones. Especially with the new Denoiser.

One thing I am noticing currently while I am switching to Octane render for the Media Production Company in which I am currently working is, that Cycles has a lot of different Nodes which allows, to create extremely complex materials like in these examples at #Nodevember.

I have the feeling that Cycles allows you to work more freely and creatively because of the many options.
The only problems with Cycles are caustics, volumetric, and more complex scenes.

This is the fastest Algorithm and delivers the lowest quality. It has what I would call Octane to look to it which some people tend to like but in my opinion, it is something bad. But it seems to be used more as an algorithm, to create previews.

It is comparable to Cycles. It doesn’t have a certain look to it but isn’t noticeably faster than Cycles. Except for things like volumetric or subsurface scattering (SSS). In which Octane is way faster.

The Radeon Pro Render is a Render Engine developed by AMD , to create a platform on which AMD GPUs can perform very well. Therefor, it is compatible with every major 3D application and every operating System. And even it is made to run as good as possible with AMD Products, it also works with Nvidia GPUs and CPUs. But in those cases, the performance tends to be really bad.

Overall, I think, that the Radeon Pro Render is really close to Cycles. And since the Performance of Cycles even with AMD GPUs is better, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, to work with the Radeon Pro Render.

What i Really like about this Engine is, that it is OCIO Compatible and comes with a Material library.
But I don’t think that’s enough of a reason to switch or even try out Radon Pro Render.
Especially not since these two features are retrofit table in Cycles and Eevee with Add-ons like BlenderKit and by installing a Custom Color space like ACES.

And even do Redshift doesn’t come with Blender for that, it is extremely well integrated and relatively easy to use. Almost as easy as cycles.
But therefor it is less customizable and less flexible as a comparable but way more complex Render Engines such as V-Ray.

If you are currently working on a more complex project, I would say definitely try out the free 14-day test version.

Renderman is a very special Engine, it is developed and used by Pixar.
It has been used in every Disney Movie including Star Wars, Lion King, Cars, Batman and many more.
It is relatively quick in complex scenes like indoor scenes or scenes with many polygons.
But slower than Cycles or Octane in smaller Scenes, even do it supports the use of CPU and GPU simultaneously.
What separates Renderman from the other Engines is, that it is highly flexible. It can be used for stylized renders as well as for photorealistic renders.
It is also the most feature packed render engine currently available for Blender.

For non-commercial use it is free, but registration is required for commercial use Renderman cost $595.

Before OTOY released the first version of Octane renders back in 2008 V-Ray was “The Render Engine”.
Today, there are much more options. Especially one who promises better performance, but still the most VFX in Hollywood feature movies are made with V-Ray.
It is not a Ray tracing Engine, and it is not unbiased. But this different architecture allows V-Ray, to render big scenes much faster.

Originally it was a CPU base Render Engine. But meanwhile, there is also a Version that works on the GPU, but it is not as elaborated and far developed as the CPU Version.
For architects or VFX Artists who want to render complex scenes it is the way to go, but for everyone else other Engines are probably better suited since they are faster and easier to set up.

Since V-Ray get rarely used in combination with Blender, there isn’t much information about it out there. Which makes it hard to learn.

The Workbench Engine is already integrated into Blender, but I think it rarely gets used and doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

The Workbench Engine was actually created, For Modeling and Sculpting as a viewport. But it can also be helpful for other things like exporting something completely shadeless and unbiased like a screen in a Mock-up for example.

I am sure, that there are a lot of different ways, to make use out of it. I used it for example in a 2D explainer for a teeth cleaning product that was made in a flat style in After Effects, but the Client said, that it is too hard to understand what the object is, so he wanted, to make it rotate in instead or being completely flat. And to match the flat style, I exported it with the Workbench Engine.

When looking at similar Articles, you will find Software like Nvidia Omniverse or D5 Render or the Unreal Engine presented as Render Engines for Blender

Which they are not. Those are separate pieces of Software and don’t work seamless with Blender.

There are also Render Engines such as LuxCoreRender which are not compatible with the current Blender Version anymore and were therefor removed from this list since they are not relevant anymore.