As the title suggests, I have seen major improvements over the last couple of years in terms of photorealism in diamond jewelry and wanted to see what people think are the best render engines for 2019, and HDRI setups. Looking forward to the responses on peoples experiences and opinions on this matter.
From what I have been told/reading people are using Octane and Maxwell?
arion render
Look’s interesting, you have any render jobs with Jewelry you have done with it?
I would try a trial of Keyshot.
Best for who? based on what level of willing to train, skill, budget, need for iteration?
Octane is great, but extremely hard to use. Unpractical for most people.
MAxwell is also great but extremely slow. Unpractical for most people.
Be careful about what you read in forums like this. They are not very representative of the various needs of very diverse use cases.
Thank you for the reply, I was more interested in which is best for jewelry rendering, the skill cap is not as important as I rather top quality renders vs easy to make.
… and that’s fine - but there’s still personal preference that will probably override pretty much anything else. So - best advice is to test several and see what you like best.
Well I’m interested in people’s personal preferences and experiences and what they think is best.
Best you try Octane and Vray.
Vray for Rhino next will have some great GPU power and so, it could I would prefer Vray, since it is a more feature complete allrounder. VfR next isn’t released yet and I’m not sure it will be releases soon. (I hope not, since I’m a friend of matured beta testing. 
)
I would choose v-ray, but I’m biased.
I did a test on the fly, the 3D model I found on the net.
My main field is architectural visualization, I do not often deal with jewelry.
You can do much better by arranging the lights to get better caustics and arranging the framing correctly.
I seem to struggle with the diamonds on the ring with Vray! Can you help me get in pointing out what I should change? I find the diamonds don’t look real enough, as if there is to much lighting.
It’s hard to help you without seeing the file.
Can you upload it?
You can find the render here.
Test Rendering.3dm (9.8 MB)
Kind of this type
A high reflection/refraction depth could be useful and a very light refraction blur could smooth the internal effects.
I’m in the Vray camp. It takes a bit to get your head around but it is extremely powerful once you crack it. It also works very well with Rhino so you can customise buttons and macros to speed up workflow.
Too much light in your render comes from HDR map not the engine itself. try different maps for refraction, rotate them play with them.
Jewellery rendering has been on here many many times already just do a bit of digging 
No point of looking for “best engine of 2018,2019 and so on” All (most) engines can give you pretty much the same output it’s only the difference in the way you’re getting to the result.
I personally use Thea render these days…used to use Vray, Arion, Maxwell, Keyshot and few others.
Some examples here
PS. Don’t ignore importance of your light setup and hands down tool to go is HDRLightStudio
I can’t see your vray materials in the scene.
which version of vray are you using?
