What are you using for 3D rendering in 2026

Rendering
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3rd? Time I’ve asked this. But it’s always nice to hear up-to-date opinions. I’ve added some tags relating to real time and architecture, but I like hearing everyone’s opinions. Along those lines I’ve tagged Bella - There’s a couple great interior design examples using Bella in the Gallery but it’s mostly used for product design. Regardless of what you’re rendering I’d love to hear your opinion. For me I’m 90% architecture/ID focused with the other 10% being just a hobby.

One BIG change since my last post along with lines: AI. AI has drastically changed rendering. Maybe even more so for architecture versus industrial design. Getting a scene absolutely perfect isn’t as ‘worth it’ as it was before (unless you or your client have extremely concise needs). I’m kind of curious how this will affect the industry. FWIW, individuals have previously been competing against a force equally as strong as AI: Agencies. Entire groups of people are hired to create renders. Due to organizational and communicational challenges, the results would often mimic AI results.

So what are you using?

Me: I was using D5. It worked great overall. It’s not on my HDD because it was running in the background when not in use (= bye bye!!) - but would absolutely try it again. Twinmotion got me pretty awesome results but I found it brutally unintuitive. I want to try out Enscape but have a few questions / concerns. I used it a couple years ago and found it ultra intuitive - the speed at which I achieved a ‘good’ result (keep in mind I’m a mediocre Archviz artist) is not forgotten and I want to have another go at it!! In a perfect world… If I had 5% more free time and 5% more brain power/focus: Unreal Engine.

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I personally wouldn’t bother with anything other than either Rhino Cycles, porting to Blender Cycles, Unreal, or Bella.

Rhino Cycles is very capable if you are prepared to take the time out to learn it. The downside is that like any RGB renderer, it is a little hard to manage as the numbers are made up; and no/little effort seems to be being made to fix the very serious (should be stop-ship?) bump map problem. In addition, the next version of Rhino, while has an excellent step forward for caustics and dispersion; has already rolled back away from the next version of Cycles, which seems bonkers to me. At least it now has tri-GPU support for the time being.

Unreal for me seems a little too default, and I find most of the renders somewhat glitzy, over-done, or just plain game-like. But a good engine nonetheless, and quite fast. Loads of resources out there too.

As for the others, as Chaos seems to be basically baiting and switching their user-base almost annually as they make more and more seemingly pointless products, the others seem to be left behind. I was a massive fan of Vantage when it first came out, as it was a really good integrated, and well-considered product. The entire Vray system was then ejected from perpetual, the Vantage was ejected from Vray, then Vantage was ejected seemingly entirely from Vray Premium, and now you surrender to Chaos “give us your wallet” upfront payment for Vray Collection. Total nonsense.

Keyshot, same story for me. I don’t want to subscribe; and certainly not at $1000+ per year. D5 already has the same problem.

That leaves seemingly Bella Renderer as perhaps one of the very few perpetual license renderers left. For that, I have received nothing short of exceptional support, zero AI, and a positive learning experience. The biggest problem with bella is obviously its development team size, and lack of GPU support currently (compared to the others). The upside is that the CPU optimisation is getting really great; ideal if you want to deploy on a good HEDT or a bunch of Xeons without a million-dollar GPU setup. If one can see past a TikTok attention span to learn and implement something, it is truly fantastic, and since Quick materials were introduced, it sped up the process a lot.

Now that the other renderers seemingly have to bake in the cost of AI tokens into their products, and companies like Netflix, Uber, Github, and others are seeing rocketing token costs. That’s going to be a lot more bait and switch activities to cover the cost of AI integration into products.

In addition, if you really are happy with AI; why waste money on other products, when you can just render in Rhino Cycles, and then call an API directly to make almost infinite modifications to the output using Rhino Banana? Why pay for another render mortgage monthly, at all?

So yeah, maybe I am narrow minded. But I would always encourage a user:

  • Stay as much as possible in Rhino Cycles, certainly in V8 onwards…
  • PERHAPS consider Blender Cycles
  • THEN consider Bella…
  • THEN consider Unreal (<$1 million turnover)…
  • THEN consider something like Rhino Banana…
  • Put the other renderers in the bin. They seem to be increasingly subscription-based nightmare hellscapes.
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When I was first getting into rendering, I’d see people using Blender and Cycles and wonder why it was seemingly working so much better than in Rhino.

I noticed exactly this when browsing their site. There are so many products that you actually have to spend time figuring out what does what. This makes what they offer so much less competitive. Add to that the fact that there was some compatibility issues with R8 and the Enscape plugin causing issues for many users.

The alure to a ‘Real Time’ render engine is the speed. This is really what many clients want. A really nice render is really nice but for what I do people just want a good render and to be able to see many different options. And possibly a walk-through / fly-through.

D5 allowed me to achieve good results quite quickly. The main hurdle for me was lack of an asset library. It’s also hard to transfer stuff around (very ‘protected’).

Twinmotion has TONS of assets. It’s just… Twinmotion is Twinmotion (if you know you know) - but it’s hard to argue on the price point!!

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vizcom or Runchat

I find the Ai render stuff is getting really good and in the case of vizcom better than many “real” render engines.

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Unreal is amazing for cinematic videos in locations, crazy fast, and free.

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It really makes me question spending thousands per year on software when I could just spend $2,000 - 3,000 on hardware and use Unreal for free. I do need a laptop for work (and couldn’t afford a good laptop AND desktop). I think I’m going to start keeping my ear to the group for a good deal on a desktop. Or maybe even see if I can run older versions of UE?