What's the Best Rendering Package?

[SamSnively]

I’m looking for opinions on favorite rendering packages. Things I am taking into account for my benchmark are: ease of use, realistic images, and required skill level.

I’m considering the Bunkspeed package but I’ve heard wildfire 5.0 has pretty good rendering capabilities. I ordered 5.0 with the advanced rendering package for a 90 trial but I haven’t had time to take a look at it.

Thanks in advance for your input,
Sam

[lwh]

A powerful (and expensive, alas) package is IPA professional by Immersive Design (http://www.immdesign.com/products.html). Afaik it uses PovRay (www.povray.org) as rendering engine.

It is also possible to transfer a slp file from ProE to PovRay directly. It is powerful, but not very intuitive.

[bfrandsen]

A powerfull and free tool is Blender from www.blender.org. It has a unique UI, which takes some effort to learn, but seems to be very effecient after a while. And there are loads of free tutorials for Blender and material libraries.

Blender defaults to .slp import when importing Pro/ENGINEER models, but can also import Wavefront (.obj) which is my prefered format as it contains the appearances declared to the models in Pro/ENGINEER.

Bjarne Frandsen

(Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 M092andWindchill 9.0M050 on Windows)