A renderer turns a 3D scene into a picture. They differ in how they calculate light: following rays of light like a camera does (path tracing), drawing the scene the way games do (rasterisation), or following light from both the camera and the lamps (bidirectional). That decides what each one is good at. Animux installs all seven, ready to use.
| Full name | Made by | How it calculates light | Runs on | Best at | Use it for | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cycles | Cycles Render Engine | Blender Foundation, in Blender | Path tracing, physically based | Processor or graphics card | Realistic light, soft shadows, glass, built-in denoising | Final frames of most films; also renders from Gaffer |
| EEVEE | Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine | Blender Foundation, in Blender | Rasterisation (real time) with ray-traced reflections | Graphics card | Instant feedback, stylised and cartoon looks | Previews, motion graphics, stylised films (Flow was rendered in EEVEE) |
| POV-Ray | Persistence of Vision Raytracer | POV-Ray team, since 1991 | Ray tracing from a scene written as text | Processor | Exact shapes from maths, scenes as code | Teaching, maths art, generated scenes |
| LuxCoreRender | LuxCoreRender | LuxCoreRender project | Unbiased path tracing and bidirectional path tracing | Processor (GPU with a driver) | Caustics, light through glass and water, interiors | Product shots, architecture, the most accurate light |
| appleseed | appleseed | appleseed project | Physically based path tracing, OSL shaders | Processor | Production-style scenes and shading networks | Studying a VFX production renderer |
| Mitsuba 3 | Mitsuba 3 | Realistic Graphics Lab, EPFL | Spectral and polarised path tracing; differentiable | Processor | Light by wavelength; works backwards from a picture to the scene | Research, scientific images, inverse rendering |
| pbrt-v4 | Physically Based Rendering, version 4 | Pharr, Jakob and Humphreys | Spectral path tracing, explained line by line in a book | Processor | Every line of code explained in the book | Learning how renderers work |
Which one, when?#
| You want… | Take |
|---|---|
| A finished, realistic frame from Blender | Cycles |
| To see the light while you work, or a stylised look | EEVEE |
| One light rig for many shots, studio-style | Gaffer with Cycles (Gaffer) |
| Caustics and glass that must be physically right | LuxCoreRender |
| To describe a scene in code | POV-Ray |
| To research or learn rendering | Mitsuba 3, pbrt-v4 |
Shaders: OSL#
OSL (Open Shading Language) describes materials as small programs. It was developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks and is the shader language of film rendering: Cycles, appleseed and Gaffer read OSL, so one material works in all three. Animux includes the OSL compiler oslc (Pipeline formats).
How to start each renderer, sample scenes and render times: Renderers.