This is mostly directed at the people who did some starship models for various mods for Sins. I suppose, if you know your stuff around 3Dsmax, XSI, Modo, Sketchup (add your fav modeling soft here), you probably work as some kind of 3D artists, graphics, designers, architects (my case) etc... therefore you probably not only do models, but final visualisations as well... or at least you know how to do it...
So i wonder if you already found out the new Octane Render? I switched to it from VRay and baby!!! its great! The main difference is, its fully physically unbiased render (as they say), so the light in the renders is pathtraced using brutforce. If you know Maxwell or Fry render, its like them, thought these are CPU renders, meaning unless you do have render farm, theyre very slow (useless when Vray can do stuff faster and while not as good, still for most customers at least in my profession good enough.
Compared to this, Octane is computed by your GPU. It uses the Nvidias CUDA thing, so you need Nvidia GPU, best choice is indeed Quadro/Tesla with lot of VRAM, cause the whole scene (geometry and textures) needs to be fitted (fit?) into it. But you can do fine with GTX470, which now costs 220 EUROs here. The results and the speed is stunning, not to mention whole interface and workflow. The way you create materials in real time is orgasmic as well. Just look at the gallery at official site if you are interested.
The best part, it costs 99 EUROs, cause it it still in the beta, but once you purchase it, you are guaranteed to get all updates up to version 2.0 for free. The beta is going to be replaced in a few months by full 1.0 version, then the price might rise somewhat, i am not sure.
Personally i can only recommend it, though it still lacks lot of features (like those related to animation, geometry instancing, SSS, displacement etc), so maybe somebody can find not suiting his needs for now.
