I was busy creating some glass backgrounds for one of our channels at e.tv and I thought I would experiment with different render engines. I use Cinema 4D as a daily driver, but as Blender is now part of our tool chain, I wanted to try out the Blender Internal and Blender Cycles engines.
So I knew that different renderers see things differently, but I could not believe how differently they saw the same scene. When you look at the renders all the reflections and refractions are completely different. The lighting set up was a little different between C4D and blender, but not dramatically so. So which one do I like the best?
Well I have always been a Cinema 4D fan for many years. Not only for its speed, but it has a very flexible renderer. However, I have to hand it to the Cycles renderer, it came up with the most pure and organic image of the lot.
Blender Internal Render – This a quicker to render, but I felt I still needed to mess with the glass material to get a better look out.
Cinema 4D Render – This image benefitted the greatly from using the render passes during composting in After Effects.
Blender Cycles Render – It took an age to render, but boy did it look good. No render passes used here.
