Best quality rendering tool

[Jmickledesign]

So I've been reading around and have seen that almost all packages seem to have there own rendering tools. I currently use Revit, but I, none the less my employer is not impressed with AccuRender. I have viz experience of I think version 2004 but I'm not sure if that is the best thing for us. I've seen that 3d studio might be a way to go, and I thought they were merging the two products at one time. Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

[de-co1]

Depends on what you're attempting to do... as far as character animation goes 3DS Max is way better.. but if you're using it for engineering or architectural renderings, then 3DS MAX and 3DS VIZ use the same rendering engines (VIZ is a smaller version of MAX, both by the same company, like ACAD LT is to ACAD)

Many professional 3D modelling packages have really good rendering engines, and there are plenty of third party plugins that you can buy to add on for more realism. For the nature of my architectural modelling and rendering, these plugins are too expensive and not worth considering.

I do have a colleague who runs one of the top three professional visualisation companies in Scotland purely on VIZ (not even using mental ray)... he does however have a couple of really nice, and really expensive bits of hardware to help him out though.

If you learn how to use VIZ properly, then it can produce outstanding results... for me though, it just lacks the modelling capabilities of MAX, and I find it a lot more unstable - but that's probably got something to do with my work!