Rendering programs (free)?

[jms_3d]

Hey i have made a few models of cars and a few other things and i must admit some of them do loo good but some lol.


anyway after seeing some of the wips here and seeing some of the rendering i was just wondering how i can get quality like this (below) without havin to buy vray and being free program.


thanks
BTW IM ALREADY USING 3DS MAX

[XCNuse]

blender is a free modeler\rendering program
and it has all sorts of stuff

whereas zmodeler just has low poly modeling and no rendering but..

[jms_3d]

nono lol sorry i didnt quite explain my self very well sorry.

i have 3ds max 8 but i want rendering quality like the picture above without buying vray.

[XCNuse]

dont need anything, it can do it by stock, you just have to know how to work with the lighting system in 3dsmax, it may be slower.. yes, but you can get the same results

[maul]

learn mental ray that comes with max. You can get even better results with mental than vray.

[ELF]

It's actually a matter of taste, and even though vray has alot of speed advantages, it's not really that big a deal (ok it might have changed since I used it, please don't flame me) mental ray is also quite a speedking, it's just less artist-firendly, but does the same and comes with 3ds max.
AFAIK there's a metallic car paint shader in vray, making the actual material creation really easy, where you ahve to make it yourself in mental ray.
There are tutorials along with 3ds max for the mental ray system, but be prepared, it might be quite heavy to deal with at first, because of the very misguiding namings used for some settings in mental ray.

To enable mental ray, press F10, and under renderer, find your production renderer, and shift it to mental ray. It should be pretty easy to locate

The rest you will ahve to learn through the tutorials...

[DrumBoPing]

personaly i like vray. mental ray, and even maybe the extent of scanline....scanline is very fast, but if you get the settings right it is quite nice....for example, use architectural maps with about 60 shinyness and 1.2 refraction, they look pretty good as long as you have your lights and planes set right....

with mental ray i found its a lot more self explanitory than vray, yet both have their ups and downs

[ELF]

Like I said, a matter of taste
I personally prefer the scanline render, but use mental ray sometimes when scanline can't do what I want. I haven't used any 3rd part renders for quite some times though. But the quality is more or less the same for each render, it's only the speed and interface that differs