10 Best Free 3D Rendering Software: Why I Tried These?

Best free 3D rendering software is very important to the 3D designer who needs to do their renderings after 3D modeling. This 3D rendering software is totally free and is open source. As a beginner, you can use these for your usage. Here you can check how much people like to use it.

After you create a 3D model by using 3D modeling software as well as download the 3D model online, you are ready to render it. And also take some images or videos of your design. Before that, you may think about what is the best one before you choose.

How to Select a Free 3D Rendering Software?

You should pay your attention below facts

Cost of the rendering software

Cost is the main thing that we consider to select 3D rendering software or plugin for our work. There is much software that provides free versions. If you need to use it continuously you have to select the premium version.

So there are many things. I don’t think you should not spend money on that. After you are well expert with the software you can use its premium version.

Hardware requirements of the rendering software

Hardware requirements we should consider. Let me select that kind of software here. So you had better consider your hardware requirements before you select an option.

Supported 3D modeling software

There is some software work as separate software as well as a plugin. Each software has specific material and it will not work for others.

Some rendering software is like a plugin that is supported by the 3d modeling software. You just need to install it as a plugin.

Imported file type of rendering software

The imported file type is the main thing that we should consider. Some software  support some file types so you had better know what file is well work with rendering software

.obj, .stl, .fbx, .dae are compatible file type with many.

User experience of rendering software

Sometimes you are a newbie to the 3D rendering or 3D modeling you should know how the light is working and how the other effects affect the design You should have a better understanding of the environmental situation.

After you consider all factors you should start a rendering.  If you neglect this fact the rendering will not be physical.

It comes with your User experience. Sometimes you have many experiences with working 3D Modelling and rendering software.

So you can easily cope with rendering software. Because naming and guidance for getting effect are the same. So if you know something relevant to one software you know how it is working.

Is it Worthy to Use Free 3D Rendering Software?

It is a bit economical but considering paid tools importantly there is no such facilities. Those are open-source and users can develop them.

But unfortunately, many users don’t have that ability. So it has developed to a certain extent.

I could see many of these software projects are not updated frequently. (but few run well). Therefore please use high rating software in the above table.

Software research is based on the above factors you had better select what you should need.

Most Used Free 3D Rendering Software

01. Blender

This is a 3d modeling software and 3d rendering software. It is a free and open-source 3D creation suite.

It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline, modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing, and 2D animation pipeline.

Here is everything that you need if you use the software for your 3D rendering purpose.

• Cycles Render Engine
• Story Art, Drawing 2D in 3D
• Animation & Rigging
• VFX
• Modeling, Sculpt, UV

Check the free tutorial here – https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/

02. Kerkythea

Getting started – http://www.kerkythea.net/cms/documentation/Getting-Started_KT2008_1-01.pdf

Another freeware similarly can be used for your rendering purpose. This software is a standalone rendering system that supports Raytracing and metropolis light transport,  uses physically accurate material and lighting,  and is distributed as freeware,  current this software can export files in 4 file formats.

• 3DS format
• OBJ format
• XML (internal) format
• SIA (Silo) format (partially supported)

There are 5 official exporters for Kerkythea.

• 3D Studio Max
• Maya
• GMax
• SketchUp

03. LuxcoRender

Download – https://luxcorerender.org/download

Free and open-sourced, physically based rendering software.
The LuxCoreRender software runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
It has a dark interface as usual in other software.

A 3D renderer; it relies on other programs(3D modeling programs) to create the scenes to render, including the models, materials, lights, and cameras.

This content can be exported from the application for rendering.

Fully functional exporters are available for Daz Studio; partially functional ones are available for Cinema 4D, Maya, SketchUp, and XSI and fully supported to 3DS Max For LuxCoreRender, is supported through the BlendLuxCore plugin.

There are 3 versions currently developed by the users

• LuxRender 0.8, 1.0, 2.0+

04. POV-ray

Download – http://www.povray.org/download/

This is another free software during started in 1994. Considering that period that was good. But considering the current situation, this is not too good for the users. The current official version of POV-Ray is 3.7. This version introduces.

The POV-Ray program itself does not include a modeling feature; it is essentially a pure renderer with a sophisticated model description language.

05. Pixie

Download – https://sourceforge.net/projects/pixie/files/latest/download

Pixie is a free rendering software developed by Okan Arikan in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas At Austin.

It is RenderMan-compliant that means it reads conformant RIB, and supports full SL shading language shaders, and is based on the Reyes rendering architecture, but also supports raytracing for hidden surface determination.

It compiles for Windows (using Visual Studio 2005), Linux, and on Mac OS X (using Xcode or Unix-style configure script).

06. Radiance

Radiance is a suite of tools for performing lighting simulations originally written by Greg Ward. It includes a renderer as well as many other tools for measuring the simulated light levels.

It uses ray tracing to perform all lighting calculations, accelerated by the use of an octree data structure.

07. Yafaray

YafaRay is a free open-source physically based Montecarlo raytracing engine released
under the LGPL 2.1+ license.

Raytracing is a rendering technique for generating
realistic images by tracing the path of light through a 3D scene.

A render engine consists of a specialized computer program that interacts with a host 3D application to provide specific raytracing capabilities “on-demand”.

The YafaRay engine can be used in the following 3D applications: Edificius, pCon-planner, Wings 3D, and Sweet Home 3D.