Best 3D Rendering Software
View:
Compare the Top 3D Rendering Software as of October 2025
Sort By:
What is 3D Rendering Software?
3D rendering software is used to generate realistic or stylized images from 3D models by simulating lighting, textures, and materials. These tools help designers, architects, animators, and game developers create high-quality visual representations of their designs, scenes, or products. 3D rendering software typically includes features like ray tracing, shading, texture mapping, and motion blur to enhance the realism of the images. It is used in various industries such as architecture, entertainment, product design, and virtual reality to visualize and present concepts before physical production. Compare and read user reviews of the best 3D Rendering software currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
-
1
Unity
Unity Technologies
The leading platform for creating interactive, real-time content. Build 2D, 3D and VR games and apps at speed. From artist tools to live-ops, everything you need to bring your vision to life today. The complete solutions for professionals to create and operate. Create and operate amazing applications and immersive experiences with a complete solution for professionals across industries. Change up your splash screen. Or completely remove it. Gain greater insight into what’s happening in your game with real-time data on crashes, exceptions and user feedback. Minimize downtime with access to expert technical support when you encounter issues. Available as a separate purchase through a Unity sales representative. Unity Gaming Services: backend and LiveOps services trusted by world-class studios to support multiplayer and live games at any scale, with any engine or tech stack.Starting Price: $35.00/month -
2
Blender
Blender Foundation
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now. -
3
Maya
Autodesk
Create expansive worlds, complex characters, and dazzling effects. Bring believable characters to life with engaging animation tools. Shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools in Maya® software. Create realistic effects—from explosions to cloth simulation. A new visual programming environment using dynamic solvers enables you to create blockbuster-worthy effects quickly. Build custom graphs using the Bifrost Graph Editor. Create stunning effects—from snow and sand to dust storms and explosions—with ready-to-use graphs. Render your most complex projects with Arnold. Arnold is built to manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Arnold is integrated with Maya, so you can see high-quality previews and iterate changes quickly. Save time with Arnold’s artist-friendly UI and simple, intuitive controls. -
4
Animation:Master
Hash
Whether you’re looking to create whole three dimensional worlds or have a two dimensional project in mind, Hash Animation:Master is the 3D software you need to design and render amazing imagery and animation from the comfort of your kitchen table! It has been proven to be one of the most easy to use, affordable and powerful 3D programs available. A:M is as advanced as it is easy to learn. Our provided text and video tutorials will guide you through the steps to not only become an A:M professional, but to jump-start your career in the 3D industry as an animator. A:M experts from around the world are always available to help beginners with tutorials and answers on the A:M Forums. Our community is one of the most helpful, knowledgeable and responsive anywhere. And if our users can’t help you, we surely can! -
5
Avoyd
enkisoftware
Avoyd Voxel Editor and Renderer Create, import, export and render large voxel worlds. 3D art and rendering tool for voxel artists, map builders and game developers. Main Features: - Large scenes up to 256k voxels a side. - CPU and GPU path traced rendering. - Export to optimised mesh glTF and OBJ with physically-based materials parameters, and VOX. - Import MagicaVoxel VOX, Minecraft maps, heightmaps, palettes. - Orthographic projection with Isometric presets. - Up to 65k physically based materials. - Physically based light and atmosphereStarting Price: €15 one-time payment -
6
Enscape
Enscape
Enscape™ is a real-time rendering and virtual reality plugin for Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Archicad, and Vectorworks. It plugs directly into your modeling software, giving you an integrated visualization and design workflow. As an intuitive design tool, it requires no prior specialized knowledge to use. You can design, document, and visualize simultaneously from one model. It is the easiest and fastest way to turn your building models into immersive 3D experiences. Bring your designs to life and give your clients a design experience like never before. Used by 85 of the top 100 architecture firms worldwide, Enscape empowers your design workflow.Starting Price: $39.90 per month -
7
Modo
Foundry
3D modeling and rendering platform designed to help businesses create 3D drawings and configure UV mapping and texturing workflows. Modo’s powerful and flexible 3D modeling, animation, texturing and rendering toolset empowers artists to explore and develop ideas without jumping through technical hoops. Modo® is your starting point for creative exploration. With fast direct modeling, flexible procedural modeling, the award-winning MeshFusion Boolean toolset and built-in sculpting tools all working together, Modo’s modeling moxie is unmatched. Free yourself from creativity-killing constraints, with Modo’s intuitive, artist-friendly toolset. From roughing out volumes to creating highly detailed forms, Modo lets you focus on creation, not construction. Build your own kit of specialized tools by combining different operations, with Modo’s flexible tool assembly system. With Modo, every job you do becomes easier, as you continually develop new efficiencies.Starting Price: $65 per month -
8
3ds Max
Autodesk
3ds Max offers a rich and flexible toolset to create premium designs with full artistic control. Create massive worlds in games. Visualize high-quality architectural renderings. Model finely detailed interiors and objects. Bring characters and features to life with animation and VFX. The built-in Arnold renderer provides a rich experience and can handle your more complex characters, scenes, and effects. Save time with centralized creative tools for interactive light mixing, color correction, and lens effects on the rendered image. Work faster with an artist-friendly user experience and intuitive controls. Iterate and produce high quality renders and variations faster. 3ds Max lets you scale your workflow with automation, allowing you to spend more time on creativity. Use 3ds Max as a compute engine to scale content production. Extend built-in workflows with accessible APIs.Starting Price: $215 per month -
9
form•Z
AutoDesSys
form•Z pro is a powerful 3D design application featuring a variety of modeling personalities and tools with an easy to use interface to express and communicate your imagination. It is based on advanced 3D solid and surface modeling methods that maintain accurate representations as you progress from design to visualization, layout, animation and fabrication. Object Symmetry creates a plane of symmtrey for an object. Subsequent operations to the object maintain symmetry by updaing the opposte sids of the model to match. The symmetry functionality has special consideration for NURBs curves, NURB surfaces and Sub-D objects. Reference Files are simply data from one project displayed inside another project. Reference files allow for complex static data to be mainteined in external files and supports coloboration where files can be shaered between team members as a design evolves. Python is a easy to use yet rich scripting language.Starting Price: $175 -
10
LightWave 3D
NewTek
NewTek LightWave 3D® is designed for independent artists who desire control of their vision from start to finish. Affordable, complete, easy to learn and use, LightWave is well established as one of the leading 3D systems on the market. With the ability to model, animate and render stunningly realistic imagery and animation, LightWave allows you to create new worlds, build your brand and shatter expectations. LightWave 2020 refined and retooled. Don’t take our word for it — try LightWave 2020, unrestricted for yourself. Download and register to unlock a full-feature trial version of LightWave 2020 for Windows & Mac today. LightWave 2020 gives you the tools you need to deliver any project on time and on budget. Add the power and efficiency of LightWave 2020 to your pipeline today. And start creating with a stable, streamlined, effective workflow. Fresh. Fast. Easy. Proven.Starting Price: $995 -
11
The industry standard for creating custom materials, Adobe Substance 3D Designer gives you complete authoring control. Design tileable textures and patterns, and edit complete texture sets. Use pre-made resources or create materials from scratch in this non-destructive, node-based environment, and take advantage of Designer’s ever-expanding scripting capabilities. Want to change something or adjust the look of a material after the fact? Make changes at any time; never lose any of your work. Edit full sets of textures in real-time and produce tileable Substance materials and MDL materials that are will be directly compatible with your renderer or game engine. Combine a large number of preset filters and tools for procedural and hybrid workflows. Access and modify the sources of any resource or filter: you have absolute editing control. Our team develops and maintains integrations with all the major 3D apps.Starting Price: $19.90 per month
-
12
V-Ray
Chaos
Chaos® V-Ray® is a 3D rendering plugin available for SketchUp, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Rhino, Revit, and more. It is widely used in architectural visualization, advertising, and visual effects for film and television. With V-Ray, artists and designers can explore and share their projects with real-time ray tracing and render high-quality visualizations. V-Ray has a large community of users and is recognized for its incredible versatility. V-Ray has been honored with a Sci-Tech Academy Award® and an Engineering Emmy Award® for bringing fully ray-traced photorealistic CGI to the film and television industries. For more information, please visit chaos.comStarting Price: $60 per month -
13
3DCoat
3DCoat
3DCoat is the one application that has all the tools you need to take your 3D idea from a block of digital clay all the way to a production ready, fully textured organic or hard surface model. Today 3DCoat is available to learn at 300+ Universities, colleges and schools worldwide. 3DCoat is one of the most advanced software applications for creating detailed 3D models. Where other applications in this market segment tend to specialize in one specific task, such as Digital Sculpting or Texture Painting, 3DCoat provides High-End capability across multiple tasks in an asset creation pipeline. These include Sculpting, Retopology, UV Editing , PBR Texture Painting and Rendering. So it can be called a 3D texturing software and 3D texture painting software and 3D sculpting program and Retopology software and UV mapping software and 3D rendering software all combined. In short, 3DCoat removes the need to purchase (and learn) multiple specialty software titles.Starting Price: $49 one-time payment -
14
iClone
Reallusion
iClone is the fastest real-time 3D animation software in the industry, helping you easily produce professional animations for films, previz, animation, video games, content development, education and art. Integrated with the latest real-time technologies, iClone simplifies the world of 3D Animation in a user-friendly production environment that blends character animation, scene design and cinematic storytelling; quickly turning your vision into a reality. Animate any character instantly with intuitive tools for face and body animation. Create facial animations with accurate lip-sync, puppet emotive expressions, muscle-based face key editing, and an unparalleled iPhone facial capture. Create realistic or stylized, animation-ready humanoid 3D characters in a short time. Powerful animation features get scenes moving thanks to ultimate creative control.Starting Price: $599 per license -
15
Marmoset Toolbag
Marmoset
Toolbag provides everything needed to perfect the look, design, and presentation of your 3D assets. From previewing materials, baking texture sets ready for production, to assembling renders ready for showcasing to the world, Toolbag has a place in your workflow. Real-time physically-based rendering and image-based lighting are the core of Toolbag’s superior image quality. Realistic or stylized, your artwork will shine bright. Create more, click less. The simple things like drag-and-drop functionality and smart-loaders, to name a few, help provide a smooth and familiar 3D rendering experience in Toolbag. Capture stills of your latest character art, environment art, product designs, and more. Make use of Toolbag’s built-in Turntable tool, or set up your very own custom animation and camera sequence to proudly showcase your latest creation in motion.Starting Price: $189 per user -
16
Autodesk Arnold
Autodesk
Global illumination rendering software. Render high-quality 3D images faster with Arnold–so you can focus on the art. Arnold software is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer that helps you work more efficiently. Interactivity produces immediate results, leaving more time for iterations. The controls and UI are simple and intuitive. Switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering to suit your production needs. Arnold thrives on heavy datasets and complex scene files. Production-ready tools reliably manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Compute performance is optimized when creating elements such as hair, fur, skin. Easily integrate with all of the top 3D digital content creation (DCC) tools. Get the scalability of an open and extensible architecture. Arnold GPU allows users to switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering. High-performance ray traced subsurface scattering eliminates the need to tune point clouds.Starting Price: $27 per month -
17
Cinema 4D
Maxon
3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software. Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24 (S24) includes functionality to easily browse and obtain models, materials and other assets, and to intuitively place them within the scene. The release also includes key workflow enhancements and a sneak peek at the continued progress on the Scene Nodes and Scene Manager interfaces to the new core. Cinema 4D is a professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software solution. Its fast, powerful, flexible and stable toolset make 3D workflows more accessible and efficient for design, motion graphics, VFX, AR/MR/VR, game development and all types of visualization professionals. Cinema 4D produces stunning results, whether working on your own or in a team. Cinema 4D is widely recognized as one of the easiest and most accessible 3D packages to learn and use. To soften that learning curve Maxon offers thousands of tutorials on Cineversity and hundreds of Quick Tips.Starting Price: $16.58 per month -
18
Geomagic Freeform
Oqton
3D design software combined with touch-based haptic devices that transforms traditional handcraftsmanship into organic, digital design for custom manufacturing. Create sculpted shapes, especially products that precisely fit the human body. Add aesthetic and functional details that are difficult or impossible in CAD. Ensure designs are ready for additive, subtractive, or formative manufacturing. Transition from handcrafting to digital design with an intuitive haptic interface. Geomagic® Freeform®—the industry’s most comprehensive, organic, hybrid design software on the market—enables you to solve complex, precision design and manufacturing challenges and easily address challenging tasks within existing scan-to-print or CAD-to manufacturing workflows. Geomagic Sculpt™ offers simple, fast organic design-to-3D print tools. Geomagic Freeform provides more tools for advanced design including a comprehensive design and sculpting toolset for sculpting. -
19
Realsoft 3D
Realsoft Graphics
Open design combined with a rich set of features has been the main strength of Realsoft 3D. Feature wise, Realsoft 3D challenges the most famous competitors and offers a better price/performance ratio. In some areas (e.g. SDS modelling, ray tracing), the product is the best on the market. Another major advantage is that the intelligent, context sensitive user interface is suitable for both novice users and skilled professionals. The program grows with and adapts to the skill level of the user. The program is used in different applications, for example by artists working in the advertising industry, architects, product designers, educational institutions, game industry and hobby users. As a versatile yet affordable product ($700), Realsoft 3D has quite a large group of potential users. Realsoft 3D is a powerful tool for making best quality photorealistic images, and there is a huge number of people who need images every day.Starting Price: $700 -
20
Daz 3D
Daz Productions
Founded in 2000, Daz 3D is a 3D modeling software and content company specializing in morphable, posable human models, two of which are the most widely used 3D figures worldwide (Victoria and Michael). Used by top brands and illustrators, Daz Studio gives amateurs and professional graphic artists a free, time saving tool to create and customize their creations. Daz is used in film, TV, animation, video games, web design, print illustrations and more. Download Daz Studio and explore our huge library of free and premium 3D content. Start building custom scenes and characters in seconds with our smart content library. Export beautiful photo-realistic images and animations with studio-class processing. Explore our huge library of free and premium 3D content, like characters, hair, creatures, vehicles, environments, and more. Build your own universe with Daz Studio, the free 3D software. Export beautiful photo-realistic images and animations with studio-class processing. -
21
Art of Illusion
Art of Illusion
Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs. Highlights include subdivision surface based modelling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials. The current version is 3.2.0, released January 13, 2021. This version is both stable and powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work. We now have an extensive documentation section. This includes the user manual, as well as a number of tutorials covering different aspects of the program. The interface is designed to be clean, easy to learn, and simple to use. Art of Illusion provides subdivision surface based modelling tools for creating smooth surfaces from control meshes of arbitrary shape and structure. A powerful set of deformation tools allow you to "sculpt" objects in a natural, intuitive way. -
22
Clara.io
Clara.io
Clara.io is a full-featured cloud-based 3D modeling, animation and rendering software tool that runs in your web browser. With Clara.io you can make complex 3D models, create beautiful photorealistic renderings, and share them without installing any software programs. This is the perfect Three.JS or Babylon.JS editor for creating and tweaking your web game content. Huge photorealistic material library. Easy advanced materials. Flexible lighting setups. Blazing speed. Simultaneous multi-user editing. Always on versioning. Per-user permissions. Review tools. Familiar UI. Responsive workflows. Undo/redo. Drag/drop. Context menus everywhere. Clara.io is the latest innovation from the trusted and experienced team at Exocortex. Exocortex's suite of products are trusted by hundreds of creative teams at studios around the world.Starting Price: $10 per month -
23
SOLIDWORKS Visualize
SOLIDWORKS
Turn your 3D CAD data into photo-quality images, animations, and interactive 3D content that bring your products to life. Quickly and easily create professional, photo-quality images, animations, and other interactive 3D content to get your products to market faster. SOLIDWORKS® Visualize allows you to leverage your 3D CAD data to create photo-quality content in the fastest and easiest way you can–from images to animations, interactive web content, and immersive Virtual Reality. Bring your products to life. SOLIDWORKS Visualize is the “camera” for your CAD data! SOLIDWORKS® products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost efficiently. A seat of SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard is included with each seat of SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium on active Subscription. SOLIDWORKS Visualization solutions enable you and your team to quickly transform new ideas into great products, beating your competition to the market. -
24
ZBrush
Pixologic
ZBrush is a digital sculpting and painting program that has revolutionized the 3D industry with its powerful features and intuitive workflows. Built within an elegant interface, ZBrush offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. With an arsenal of features that have been developed with usability in mind, ZBrush creates a user experience that feels incredibly natural while simultaneously inspiring the artist within. With the ability to sculpt up to a billion polygons, ZBrush allows you to create limited only by your imagination. Designed around a principle of circularity, the menus in ZBrush work together in a non-linear and mode-free method. This facilitates the interaction of 3D models, 2D images and 2.5D Pixols in new and unique ways. ZBrush gives you all of the tools needed to quickly sketch out a 2D or 3D concept and then take that idea all the way to completion. You can create realistic renders directly in ZBrush with lighting and atmospheric effects.Starting Price: $39.95 per month -
25
Shade 3D
Shade 3D
Shade 3D has been sold to more than 500,000 active users around the world and is used in many different sectors of the 3D industry. A new method of Subdivision is now supported. As a extended version of the famous Catmull- Clark subdivision system, OpenSubdiv allows you to control your edges sharpness and apply subdivision exactly on the targeted spots. This tool will reduce the polygon number of any objects and at the same time will preserve the original shape. Perfect for games and models acquired from 3D scanners. The Wrapping Mesh tool will create a single watertight shape out of several complicated objects. It is perfect for 3D printing. A brand new 3D Printing Assistant will help you to check and repair your model and get it ready for 3D Printing ( STL and OBJ formats). -
26
Bforartists
Bforartists
Bforartists is a complete, free and open source 3D suite to create 3D content. It offers you the full 3D art pipeline to create game graphics, prerendered movies and stills. From modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, up to post processing. Bforartists stands for Be For Artists. A reminder to develop for the user, not the programmer. Bforartists is a fork of the popluar open source 3D software Blender. Developed by some 3D enthusiasts to make Blender even better. The primary goal of the Bforartists fork is to deliver a better graphical UI and a better usability. This means a complete switch in the usage philosophy. Away from the hotkey and speed centered usage. Towards a user friendly and intuitive graphical UI. Bforartists is fully compatible with the Blender files and addons. Every feature that works in Blender should also work in Bforartists. And we are always up to date with the newest Blender version. The toolset is the same. -
27
Houdini
SideFX
Houdini is built from the ground up to be a procedural system that empowers artists to work freely, create multiple iterations and rapidly share workflows with colleagues. In Houdini, every action is stored in a node. These nodes are then “wired” into networks which define a “recipe” that can be tweaked to refine the outcome then repeated to create similar yet unique results. The ability for nodes to be saved and to pass information, in the form of attributes, down the chain is what gives Houdini its procedural nature. While the nodes are what makes Houdini unique and give it power, there are lots of viewport and shelf tools that allow for artist-friendly viewport interactions. Behind the scenes, Houdini builds up the nodes and networks for you. Houdini lets artists explore different creative paths because it is easy to branch off a new node to explore alternative solutions. -
28
Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D is a powerful and easy to learn 3D modeling, rendering and animation software which was developed from the ground up for Mac. So jump right into the world of computer generated imaging, create 3D artwork for your next iPhone game or make your first animated character. With a full set of polygon, subdivision surface and spline modeling tools the artists can focus on creating, safe in the knowledge that Cheetah3D has a breadth of features for the task. Cheetah3D makes modeling in 3D a breeze for new and experienced users alike. Character rigging is part of the seamless animation system of Cheetah3D where just about every property of an object can be animated. Breathe life into a character for your next iPhone game or animate an architectural fly-through by the powerful animation system built into Cheetah3D. Cheetah3D smoothly integrates the industrial strength Bullet physics engine to simulate rigid body and soft body dynamics.Starting Price: $99 -
29
EQUINOX-3D
EQUINOX-3D
The 3D modeler with the fastest, fully integrated ray-tracer. Because "rasterization is so 20th century™" 3D modeling, animation, photorealistic rendering, photorealistic VR content creation, CAD/CAM, 3D printing, laser-cutting and much more! Why is EQUINOX-3D better? As our artist said: "all engineers should be forced to use the software they write". I use EQX many hours a day and there is no need to force me! Super-fast photorealistic renderer, the first fully integrated interactive ray-tracer in a modeler. You can do full editing/modeling on ray-traced windows! Powerful subdivision surface modeling. Powerful CAD/CAM features, 3D printing and laser-cutting support. Universal rendering API that allows full modeling on any renderer and fully integrated Cg renderer with a quality that closely matches the ray-tracer. HDR texture support and HDR rendering output. Super fast importance-sampled HDR environment light support. -
30
DGArt
nitrio
DGArt is a 3D modeling and rendering tool designed for artists and game designers, and developers to create 3D assets and content from start to finish. It is affordable, complete, and easy to learn. With DGArt on your iPad, you can effortlessly construct 3D models/digital art. DGArt supports a variety of geometric primitives, including built-in geometry types such as spheres, boxes, planes, and text. It also features editable polygons that can be accessed through an edit mode, supporting extrusion, inset, loop cuts, and more. DGArt creates a .scn file. This is the data format used to store the geometry, nodes, lights, and camera. This format can be used in the Playgrounds App for your apps or games. Please refer to SceneKit for more details. For artists, game designers, and developers who frequently travel, work as freelancers, or prefer to work on a tablet rather than a desktop, this mobile 3D app is a wonderful alternative.
- Previous
- You're on page 1
- Next