What are some good programs to do 3d rendering with?

3D studio Max for models, Vue D'Esprit for scenaries

3DS MAX for modeling and VRAY for rendering. VRAY is a very fast renderer.

Well there is also Amabilis Canvas 3D (http://www.amabilis.com/)which is pretty good for a program thats not as expensive as 3DS MAX (not that anyone I know has ever purchased a copy), and that utilises POV-RAY (http://www.povray.org/) for rendering.

Maya and Lightwave3d...both very expensive and both very good. Try Gmax....there is a free demo version at http://www.discreet.com/

Bryce is a cheap alternative for fairly good sceneary rendering. There is Pixar animations custom software for around $30,000 USD. Also Rendererman (used for matrix effects) but ofcourse I am being an ass because that software will probably cost you your left nut.

Whats daft is all the software is so expensive, yet to actually run the software to be able to do the greatest of rendering or animation feats. You need to precure even more expensive hardware as you desktop system just won't be up to par.

Tell me about it....Bryce 5 slows my 2.8ghz to a snail crawl rendering 1024X768 landscape....I can only imagine what Maya or Lightwave3d would with a whole scene.

Unless you can afford a mainframe be prepared to put up with long rendering times. Bryce 5, however, does have a network rendring system to distribute rendering over multiple pcs.

3DsMAX has Backburner for distributed rendering. We have about 30 PC's at work which we set up with screen savers to start up the Backburner servers on unused machines, only to discover that the user limit for W2K is about 10. So we also had to go out and buy a W2K server. Its great to start a heavy scene and come back in the morning to see all frames rendered.
We have discovered that not all machines are equal and that all animations must be checked for flickers. One machine may get a reflection map wrong for a door handle, or get the wrong colour setting for the sky, or sometimes just drop a bit of geometry. VRAY is particularly bad for these types of errors but its 10 fold speed increase over scanline makes it the one to use.

You should really read about how Final Fantasy: The spirits within was made. Interesting insights on how processing heavy that animation was. Also Disney's Dinosaur was very power hungry film....took about 45 trilobytes to store the film and over 100 custom programs were written just for the film.

A major studio usually has its own heavily moded or completely custom written animation programs.

Blindman, If your finding abnormalities between some of the computers, the likelihood is that it can be down to things like memory errors, or processes that are also running within the system or even things like Standby settings for monitors, hard-drive sizes and speed etc.

If you wanted to limit the abnomalities you would have to work out which systems are causing the problems and cross reference them with the ones that work for the answer. (Simple terms the errors occur because each system is access memory different because of the differences in hardware and settings. This can cause delays when the process is rerouted to the next address, and creates a flicker or floating point error in the sense of a vector transformation being inaccurate.)

Blender 3d (http://www.blender3d.org) is a decent free & open source alternative. Once you get past the interface it's pretty good.

Bluemoon and Redqueen,
though you've probably never heard of them.
I've found that it's not the rendering system that makes a good rendering but the lighting techniques that you use.
You can get decent renderings on deep exploration if your prepared to set the lighting up with a vrml scene.
One thing I have found in any rendering system is that the tiny triangles in a model or scene will always slow the rendering to a crawl.
If a triangle is so small it won't render to a pixel then it isn't needed.
I once tried rendering a scene which took 8 hours to get to 25%, I quit the rendering, removed a single tiny triangle and re-rendered the entire thing in 4 hours.

Keith

We suspect errors in data transmitted across the network but it does not completely cover the problems. Its not that bad, most of the time the animations come out OK, the worst was about 35 bad frames out of 1500.
<quote>If a triangle is so small it won't render to a pixel then it isn't needed. </quote>
Check your antialiasing settings.

Actually Blindman that was something else I thought of when I was away from the PC, "data collision". I think (I don't actually know) that it's fixable by using switches as it controls the flow better, however I don't expect a bunch of hardware should be bought just to deal with the few bad frames considering you get more bad frames converting VHS to DVD.

As for pixels being "so small they aren't needed", you should look at something that has mipmapping or a better form of mipmapping. Considering the system thats in use to render the scene should be able to generate a calculation to be able to deal with the situation of a surface being smaller than a pixel due to it's Y axis being located further back. [In otherwords as you stated, the pixels too small to be seen, so it isn't needed, unless of course you bring it into a position where it's shown. But it should work along the same basis of how most graphics programs don't usually write the surfaces behind the one your can see, unless of course you intend to be able to move around the object at speed and see those surfaces.]

(André LaMothe Books are worth reading for what you pick up :D)