Well before R11 AR was just laughable. AR speed and mighty at all (artifacts) increased a lot since R11 but is still no match for VRay for example. Things with VRay could never be achieved. VRay renders prettier and faster than AR does. Sure for not so realistic stuff AR is nice but who pays for AR if you can get VRay?

AR renderings are often like handmade GI fake. So I think the quality of AR is definitely not the best in the industry. Not even close to the best. I’d say it’s still one of the worst even though it got very good since the newest update – but dont forget other renderengines also get updated. (If you don’t count open source/free renderengines)

Before I’d buy a AR license I’d rather take a gun and shoot myself. Maybe AR can head up in the future but not yet. I think/guess/hope it’s not the end of the story. You see the AR update was huge. Before the update AR was just laughable but I think now that they did such a new redevelopment to the renderer future updates might bring good things for AR. I’d wish for them to bring good new stuff. Nobody knows what happens. Let’s just hope the best for Maxon and all C4D users out there.

The normal render time of C4D without GI/AO is ok but things are heading up. Modo has INCREDIBLE performance increasements for realtime rendering and rendering itself. Google Summer of Code just released it’s proposals for this year. There are six proposals for Blender there is one for better 3D viewport performance for nice sculpting performance + better raytracing performance. You see other applications head up at lot. There’ll be a hard fight in the industry and I guess people will change from one to another app time after time considering that COLLADA is getting better and better (BTW another blender proposal is better COLLADA import/export).

What I wanted to say is: AR is good for normal/semi professional use but sucks for very professional use in my opinion.

@phareon:

Nope I didn’t check out but I was reading some stuff about it.
I just know Silo is a fully NURBS based modeller so I guess Mudbox is, too.

Good taff btw