Quality / speed, Octane render lost.
I decided to do this last test, after what Kelley said, about 10 seconds of render time being slow to render animations. and it really is, so I stopped a little the work I'm doing animation for my youtube channel (actually it's a little rest from my animated feature film project, and also a way to test all the solutions I know and know how to use well , without letting the passion for my project influence my decision)
first of all, I must say. this animation is not ready. is barely blocked for motion time marking and cameras. the facial animation is also just marking expression. the pos production was bad as I wanted to finish this test soon I played the effects that I use but did not finetunning. so I apologize for this.
The toolbag 3 was left out this time because lost in render time, the VXGI inside the toolbag 3 is not solved very well. flickers are very present when using 25x supersampling. (with that supersampling the toolbag3 reaches 4 to 6 seconds per frame)
forcing the user to go to 100x supersampling which doubles render time
ok let's go
the problem of octane render is that when you render a still image everything looks ok. but when you render the animation the noise becomes more apparent than you imagined it would be. what I can say is that it is not possible to render animations with 100 samples now. however optimized the scene is (I tested a lot until that time of 3 seconds per frame). maybe at 4 with AI denoiser this is possible.
but I will cite the advantages
cinematic appearance and amazing finish that only a raytrace renderer can give despite the direct light does not have GI.
disadvantages. it is necessary to render with at least 300 samples per frame which will go easy for 20 to 30 seconds per frame which makes it impossible to produce a feature without a render farm. the ideial would be Path tracing kernel with the minimum of 1k samples to really get high level in quality and visual resources
Iclone render.
has everything to be a game changer, but it puts everything to lose by not paying attention to things that are very important when talking about commercial results where you intend to actually sell your product to a distributor or display on a high VOD system quality like netflix or amazon (much more quality than youtube)
I think I can finally speak without saying bullshit.
Iclone render advantages
HBAO + I say again is the best realtime AO solution available today.
IBL + PBR + VXGI is a champion combo and the VXGI inside the iclone is very well resolved.
the popcorn inside an animation engine with VXGI features is revolutionary. is what makes me sad not to use iclone render.
Iclone Render disadvantages.
the absence of good supersampling is very damaging. it harms all the excellent work done in joining PBR + VXGI.
the current system of light and shadows of the iclone is very bad and harms the artist, making the artist need to be very careful with each light that adds the scene because the chance of it ruining everything is very large. this mixture of spot light, spot shadows, gi emissive. is a real mess and spoils the lightwork a lot.
in short, everything inside the iclone is wonderful minus the system of light and shadows, but when this will turn into frames and animation is destroyed by the weak rendering system.
c4d R19 realtime viewport render.
I have to say that I've been studying this for a while, so I decided to take a test and I was literally impressed.
Advantages:
the c4d pbr lights. work as Area lights for professional renderers. and the realtime result looks much like you can get with them. the PBR material system is the most complete I've seen since I started studying PBR deeply in early 2017. The quality of the texture sample is amazing, bringing impressive results with textures in 2k, with 4k looks great, I'm wondering how it should be in 8k.
The dof .. my god! the quality comes very close to the octane render and really works as physically correct DOF where you adjust F-stop. no blur masks like the other DOF realtime. (unity, toolbag, iclone etc)
the render is a show apart, you can add 16x supersampling already in the viewport and at the time of rendering put what the maxxon calls "brute force supersampling" and is cumulative generating smooth and impressive images. the best? fully realtime 1 second per frame.
disadvantages.
the reflection screenspace is too bad, I really do not even consider using it in my projects.
C4d SSAO can handle it, but when you know the HBAO + of the iclone you miss it
absence of any type of GI. but with a good job done with the arealights it is possible to mimic similar results.
poor realtime shadows makeing the artist double the attention with light and shadows you can see it in the shadow on the character nose
winner? for me c4d viewport render. what maxxon calls "preview render to show customers how the final work will be"
check the test