Other rendering applications

The long running thread called OctaneRener or V-Ray is an interesting and informative thread - well worth scrolling through.

In this thread I’d like to solicit the opinions of anyone who uses other programs - Keyshot, Thea, Maxwell, Brazil or any others. I lost a weekend of billable hours when I installed V-Ray SketchUp 2.0 due to dongle problems and now I’m facing another weekend without work after installing V-Ray Rhino (note to self: do not do anything with V-Ray’s dongle on a Friday!) so I need to start thinking about a back up program. Obviously something that’s not tied to a USB stick.

Price is an issue of course as I’ve already spent a lot on the two V-Ray licenses.

So, in general:
Are there any Keyshot users here? Can it handle interiors? I remember when it started it seemed more suited to product rendering. It’s real expensive, is it worth it?
Thea users? The price is right, is the quality?
Maxwell - is it as time consuming as it’s reputation suggests? My work doesn’t justify hours and hours of render time for one image.
Brazil - the advantage of course is that Brazil is part of McNeel’s line up but it’s also a bit pricey. I see that it’s a recent product, is it ready for showtime?

Thanks in advance for any input you got

For me the big problem with Rhino is texturing. So, I stopped searching for an integrated render and trying to import Rhino’s geometry into an external application for texturing and rendering. So far Cinema 4D is the best at importing .obj from Rhino - there is a very handy option to import normals from .obj files. Though Cinema is expensive - but the Prime version is around 1000 euro, almost like some rendering applications.

Thea is like the reinvention of rendering. No headache.

Thanks for the replies.

I am going to download a trial of Thea and see if I can get up to speed with the simplest of rendering tasks by Monday.

Re: Cinema 4D. Definitely too pricey for me right now. I have a license for modo which offers similar advantages for texture creation and UV mapping but I’m moving away from sub d work because of it’s lack of real data generation. I need a program like Rhino where I can send pretty pictures off in one direction to the client and drawings with dimensional information in the other direction to the fabricators. Not something I can realistically do in modo. Maybe Cinema 4D is different but having just spent about a $1000 for Rhino (SketchUp upgrade and new license for Rhino), $1500 for Cinema is way beyond my means.

I’ll see what Thea can offer me.

Can we get some kind of world wide advocacy group to pressure Chaos to dump this whole dongle nonsense?

Yes, I know what You are after! I hope some day Rhino can do this:
http://www.formz.com/Video/bonZai3DApp/bonzai3d_ENU/videos_html/Texture_Mapping.html
http://www.formz.com/Video/bonZai3DApp/bonzai3d_ENU/videos_html/Texture_Mapping2.html