Industry Surveys

By Jeff Mottle

2016 Architectural Visualization Rendering Engine Survey - RESULTS

As there have been a number of changes in the popularity of new rendering engines in the architectural visualization space, CGarchitect surveyed our audience about their rendering engine usage.  

The survey was conducted over October and November 2016 for just over 30 days.  There were a total of 1,995 participants in the survey, all of whom are involved in arch. viz. production.

EDIT (Dec 1, 2016):  So there is no misunderstanding of these results, this survey obviously represents the views of CGarchitect users, who are predomentantly mid to high end visualization specialists in architectural firms and dedicated visualization studios. To better understand the makeup of this audience and our site, we invite interested parties to review our current industry surveys here for more details: http://www.cgarchitect.com/features/category/industry-surveys

Based on our understanding of the industry this equates to a Margin of Error of 3%,  99 percent of the time.

Upon filtering the data we were also able to determine some interesting trends as well:

 - 55% of V-Ray users are experimenting with another renndering engine: Corona (44.7%), Unreal (31.9%), FStorm (23.6%), Octane (15.2%), V-Ray RT (14.5%), Arnold (9.7%), Lumion (8.8%), Maxwell Render (5.9%), Redshift (5.9%). Of these users, 26% plan to replace V-Ray as their primary rendering engine, the reminder (64%) will supplement V-Ray.

-  Of V-Ray users currently experimenting with Corona,  26% intend to replace their existing production renderer, 63% intend to supplement their existing rendering engine.

-  Of V-Ray users currently experimenting with FStorm,  29% intend to replace their existing production renderer, 65% intend to supplement their existing rendering engine. 

- 58% of mental ray users are experimenting with another renndering engine: Corona (32.8%), Unreal (27.6%), V-Ray Adv (24.1%), V-Ray RT (24.1%), Iray (15.5%), Arnold (13.8%), Octane (12.1%), FStorm (12.1%), Lumion (10.3%)

 - 52% of Corona users are experimenting with another renndering engine: FStorm (42.9%), Unreal (29.4%), Octane (20.6%), V-Ray (10.6%) Arnold (8.8%), V-Ray RT (8.2%), Lumion (7.6%), Redshift (7.1%), Iray (6.5%)







 

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Thank you Jeff for the kind response. Much appreciated.
Whoops! I see it twice now! And here me causing such a stink for nothing! Sorry about that.
No worries. We spent a lot of time crowd sourcing every rendering engine we could find to ensure we got the most complete picture possible.
Whoops! I see it twice now! And here me causing such a stink for nothing! Sorry about that.
What would be the reason that Thea Render would be excluded from this survey, thus excluding Thea Render users from participating in this survey?
Once again, it was not omitted. It says 7.4% in production and 2.3% experimenting.
This information is very interesting in deed, it is incredible how much the rendering ecosystem has changed in such little time. Mental Ray a big player here it is complete out of the game.......
There might be more to it than I am about to suggest, but AutoDesk do seem to have a knack of putting to bed anything they are closely involved with.....
This information is very interesting in deed, it is incredible how much the rendering ecosystem has changed in such little time. Mental Ray a big player here it is complete out of the game, V-Ray as we all know is the To-Go tool but not absolute King. Corona history just amaze me. I been following them for a wile already but seeing how fast it became the 'next' solution for rendering is very inspiring. It won't be silly to think that in the close future Corona render will be a even big player. I know Arnold is trying to get in the Viz game too, but honestly the easy use and speed of Corona will make a really hard competition. Game engines are a game changer for sure, pun intended or not. yes they are not grammatically correct a render engine, but thinking to do something in Unreal instead of using VRay just a couple years a go was just out of the table, now it is a valid option, you can get nice still output and animation for about a decent development. I am pretty sure with the explosion of Virtual reality, these 'game engines' will take an even bigger slice of the visualization field. Fun time a head for sure.
It is not correct to catalog Unity or Unreal as rendering engines, in fact using the same "Enlighten" graphic engine. In any case they are platforms considered as "Game Engine" of recent adoption in the area of Architecture, Engineering and Construction.
Yes, I'm aware there is a difference and "rendering engine" might not be the most appropriate term with regards to the gaming engines or some of the real-time engines, but I think everyone understands and understood the intent of this survey. It's also interesting to see how these other engines compare in usage when compared to CPU/GPU rendering engines.
Hi Jeff, thanks for your reply; I'm sure that the next survey will be a great way to introduce these new platforms to the public for ArchViz. I would like to thank you for your work and valuable information you share, and I will be looking forward to read more CG news soon. Regards!
It is not correct to catalog Unity or Unreal as rendering engines, in fact using the same "Enlighten" graphic engine. In any case they are platforms considered as "Game Engine" of recent adoption in the area of Architecture, Engineering and Construction. +Info: http://www.geomerics.com/enlighten/
Yes, I'm aware there is a difference and "rendering engine" might not be the most appropriate term with regards to the gaming engines or some of the real-time engines, but I think everyone understands and understood the intent of this survey. It's also interesting to see how these other engines compare in usage when compared to CPU/GPU rendering engines.
It is not correct to catalog Unity or Unreal as rendering engines, in fact using the same "Enlighten" graphic engine. In any case they are platforms considered as "Game Engine" of recent adoption in the area of Architecture, Engineering and Construction. +Info: http://www.geomerics.com/enlighten/
With this data I could not determine that as we only asked about which rendering engine was used, not the 3d/modelling app.
A colleague asks about a data combination: "Id love to have seen what the combos were though, eg. c4d+vray, max+vray". Can you filter for that?

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2016 Architectural Visualization Rendering Engine Survey - RESULTS

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Jeff Mottle

Founder at CGarchitect

placeCalgary, CA