Spectral GPU renderer

As the new generation of RTX graphics cards are coming out soon and I’ve decided to upgrade, I’m considering trying some sort of spectral GPU renderer for Rhino. Does anyone here have experience with spectral rendering on the GPU directly in Rhino?

I’ve personally tried the new Thea renderer in version 4, the Maxwell render (which the new GPUs certainly won’t support), and the Maverick/Arion render (which doesn’t have a direct plugin for Rhino). I know there is still an Octane render, but its implementation for Rhino seems outdated and I don’t think many Rhino users use it?

If you can think of any other quality unbiased spectral renderer that allows calculation via GPU, I would be very happy for some advice.

I think there is only LuxCoreRender that I can think of. But the only integration I am aware of is for 3DSMax, and even that seems a beta release?

The rest seem rather standalone.

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Did you had a look to Bella render?
Not sure it match your specs but for sure is really integrated in Rhino and It, should, have spectral rendering.

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There aren’t many standalone applications either. There aren’t many spectral renderers. Most rendering software, according to my research, is RGB only. Luxcore is not integrated for Rhino. I’m a little annoyed that the Octane renderer only has old integrations with terrible controls. It’s actively developed and uses the GPU very well.

I love the Bella renderer. It’s my main renderer. It’s spectral and unbiased with excellent output quality and reasonable render times. Unfortunately it’s CPU only. The GPU has been in development for a few years and probably will be for a few more years, who knows. As I wrote above, I’m upgrading to the RTX 5000 and it would be a shame not to try GPU rendering on this card.

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Octane comes across as being developed in that they have started running out of ideas and so switched it to subscription only and just sit on the promise of revenue.

It’s probably very unfair to say, but that’s where I am at with it. And from what I saw from a good friend with 2 x 4090s, it wasn’t so fast that it was mind-boggling. Both Vray and Octane were my shortlist in 2022/23, and they both went to “own nothing and be happy”, so got dropped immediately.

@skysurfer Indeed, both Martin and I primarily use bella renderer. :slight_smile:

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I haven’t tried Octane in a few years and now have Octane X on my iPad just for fun. :smiley: still better v-ray subscription than next limit’s promises about Maxwell renderer development a few years ago. If I were doing animations or architectural visualizations, I would use v-ray for its features (such as scattering) and I probably wouldn’t mind the subscription. Of course, I would prefer Corona render for architectural visualizations, but it will probably always be limited to CPU and Max or Cinema. But I don’t want to set up the Gi itself in 2025, we are not in 2010/15. I was surprised how few rendering engines there are on the market, which are concerned with photorealistic quality first and speed second. And as we know, higher photorealism equals heavier implementation of GPU calculations.

Why not buy some cheap PCs instead of RTX 5xxx and use Bella’s render farm features to speed up the CPU render process?

I’m considering buying only the RTX 5080 or 5070 Ti. According to reviews and benchmarks in RT. I would never buy an RTX 5090 with amazing rendering performance for that price. I don’t want to support Nvidia at this price point. For 999 dollars (realistically 1100-1200 euros in Europe for an RTX 5080) I will not build a powerful enough PC with enough CPU power for rendering.

I bought myself Rhino Nature and forgot about Vray Scattering. Works lovely.

@jeremy5 Bella has only a combination render mode in the older Atlas based solver. The newer Saturn solver does not yet have such capability to farm renders. One must brute force it with many cores just for the moment.

That said, it seems still very fast on my 13700K. But I see Martin’s appeal for GPU. Sometimes it is nice to see how fast Cycles works on Rhino… even if sometimes it spews nonsense. But that is the nature of RGB (biased) rendering I guess.

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I tried Rhino Nature as a demo, unfortunately I wouldn’t use this plugin for my product visualizations, but I quite liked it. Cycles on the GPU is super fast and I enjoy that, but the quality cannot be compared to the Bella renderer, as well as the number of features. Thea 4 with Nitro mode is perhaps even faster and definitely better quality (caustic for example) than Cycles, but I don’t think it’s finished. I’m curious to see how Cycles will be improved in Rhino 9.

I also on the Bella side here :wink:
actually the team is active developing GPU rendering maybe @jdhill is able to give us some information about the state of the art.
For me the Bella implementation in Rhino is for example much better as the maxwell integration.

Here is a benchy: :wink: (The Polymodel isn’t the best for rendering) Model by Daniel Norée

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Yes, GPU mode is actively being developed, but the question is how long it will actually take to reach the market. Integration into Rhino is definitely much better than Maxwell. However, it is important to say that Maxwell is a 20-year-old software that has apparently not been developed at all in recent years, which is why its current integration is significantly worse than Bella and will probably remain so. Nice render, Bella can beautifully and realistically render semi-transparent plastics, I personally use it very often www.martinsefl.com

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