Best VFX Application – Part Two

You can buy a node-locked or floating license for 2032$. You can also rent the application for 585$ for a quarter of a year. The rent changes accordingly for increased quarterly duration. You can try the application for 15 days for free here.

Photoshop:

Photoshop is probably the most famous image editing application ever. There is no one in the whole world who doesn’t know about it. Developed by Adobe, it boasts powerful features like artboards, layering, combining multiple images, remove objects, retouch photos, make 2D compositions with 3D models, and tons more, no wonder it is the world’s best imaging and design application and is at the core of almost every creative project. You can even work across desktop and mobile devices to create and enhance your photographs, website and mobile application designs, 3D artwork, videos and more.

You can buy the photography bundle of Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC for only 119$ annually. Be sure to try the product first by clicking here.

GIMP:

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program is a freely distributed application for retouching photos, image composition and image authoring. You can use it as a simple paint application,  as an expert quality photo retouching application, as an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

The application is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. It also has advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl) and an awesome community to back it up. There are over 100 plug-ins already available here. It is a freely available software and can be downloaded from  here.

Silhouette:

Invaluable in post-production, Silhouette continues to bring best-of-class tools to the visual effects industry. It has powerful features like rotoscoping, non-destructive paint, keying, matting, warping, morphing, and 2D-3D conversion tools. It runs like a well oiled machine.

The standard nodelocked or floating Silhouette v5 is up for purchase at 1495$. The S3D option (for 2D-3D conversion) is an add-on that requires a Silhouette license to run and is available for 3995$.

Additionally, you can rent the application for 250$ only for a floating license. The S3D option is also available at 650$ rent. There is a 15 day trial version included in the base software itself. Checkout the download page  here.

Renderers-

Mentalray:

You can use mental ray standalone 3D rendering software to produce high-quality, high-volume renderings for complex film, television, and design visualization projects in less time. It works with Maya, 3ds Max, providing flexibility and simplicity for studios with mixed-application pipelines. It is a industry-standard 3D rendering software. Some of its features are physically accurate lighting, robust shading language, single sampling mechanism, etc.

As with every Autodesk product, you can buy the software on subscription basis from here

V-Ray:

V-Ray offers state-of-the-art rendering technology for your most demanding projects. Production proven, cutting edge features and lightning fast, V-Ray is ready to take your renders to the next level. With extremely powerful features like ray traced rounded corners, triplanar mapping, stochastic flakes, Hosek sky and Aerial perspective, V-Ray is here to stay.

You can buy V-Ray 3.3 for Maya for 995$. Also check out all the other applications that V-Ray works with here

Renderman:

Renderman has been Pixar’s core rendering technology for over 25 years, and has been developed to meet the ever increasing challenges of 3D animation and visual effects. Today, RenderMan has been completely modernized, with a state-of-the-art ray tracing architecture that’s setting new standards for speed and memory efficiency. With powerful features such as Denoiser, Visualizer Integrator, Marschner Hai, Physical Camera, etc. It is a force to be reckoned with. Since, it is owned and developed by Pixar, there are tons of movies where Renderman has been used. You need to check this list here for the complete works.

You can buy Renderman single license for 495$. The license can be used either for batch rendering or for rendering with an artist seat. It can also be floated across a network. Check out the purchase page here. You can get Renderman for free for non-commercial usage too. What does that entail? It includes anything such as evaluations, personal learning, experimentation, research, and the development of tools and plug-ins for RenderMan. You can check it out here.

Arnold:

Arnold is an advanced ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. It is used at over 300 studios worldwide and was the primary renderer on dozens of films such as the 2006 Academy Award Nominee Monster House, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Pacific Rim, Gravity, etc. It is available as a standalone renderer for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, with plug-ins for Maya, Houdini, Cinema 4D, etc.

A permanent node-locked version of Arnold is available for 790$. It is limited to 2 licenses per company/freelancer. A permanent floating license of Arnold is available for 1220$ which must be hosted using an RLM license server and can be distributed to multiple clients. A temporary floating license for Arnold can also be purchased for 7.5$/day but there is a minimum order value of 390$ for this rental. Check out the purchase page here

You can also get a 15 day trial version of Arnold and use it to it’s full capabilities to render without a watermark but the use of the watermarked output for commercial use is strictly prohibited. You can get it  here

This is Part Two of the most widely used VFX applications. Continue reading the next part 

Written by: Tanmay Datta

Last updated: 15-03-2024

Tanmay Datta has over 5 years of experience in the 3D Animation & VFX industry. He graduated from George Brown College, Toronto, in Game development, specializing in Character Animation. Tanmay is passionate about Animation and Teaching.