Dear Ueno: What render engine do you use?

Jeremy Woons
Ueno.
Published in
4 min readJul 2, 2019

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Dear Ueno is an advice column for people who for some weird reason think we know what we’re doing. Read more about all this, or check out our old advice.

A question from Konstantin Zhabinskiy in Kaliningrad, via Dribbble:

What render engine do you use?

An answer from Jeremy Woons, Motion Designer at Ueno SF:

Hi Konstantin, thank you for asking. I get this question all the time.

(Actually, before we go any further I must admit that I’ve cheated a bit. Your original question was about what render engine we used to make one particular asset — the San Francisco Design Week illustration below — but I decided to use that an excuse to talk about render engines in general. Because I really do get that question all the time. Hope you don’t mind. And no worries, I’ll answer your original question along the way.)

Where were we? Oh, yes. I get this question all the time. Over the years I’ve used multiple render engines, and I’m happy to give you my perspective on a few of them.

This week’s Dear Ueno question is adapted from a question on Dribbble shot with this illustration, made for San Francisco Design Week 2019.

What render engine do I use?

As any good craftsman will tell you, the tool you use always affects the end result. Every render engine has its own look and feel, with materials, colors and lights all behaving a tad differently. I pick a render engine for each project based on the circumstances and the end result I’m going for. I bounce mostly between three of them.

Octane is an engine that renders while you work, showing you almost instantly what the end result will look like. I like it because its speed gives me the most artistic freedom. I prefer to use it, for example, when I’m creating stylistic scenes and characters.

Announcing my move to SF, with Octane.

If I have more time to set things up I use Redshift because of its stability and more advanced compositing tricks. It’s a toolbox with everything in it: it can render fire, smoke, fluids, a few million trees, simultaneously. Great for production with a tight deadline.

Corona is the render engine that makes my jaw drop the furthest. It’s very easy to use, and the results are very realistic, making it suitable for rendering things like interiors and exteriors. Here’s an example of a scene I rendered with Corona because I like to try things out.

Trying things out with Corona.

If you tend to become excited by technical and creative challenges, these render engines can make your life more interesting (or become mildly obsessed). Whenever I feel unmotivated, I spend two minutes with the application and let myself get carried by the momentum. My brain will start making goals and ideas from there.

So which render engine did I use for the CommUNITY poster?

Right! To answer your original question, we knew we wanted hot dogs and a pinch of abstract, so things wouldn’t feel too realistic. After sketching out a few scenarios that happen around the Ueno office I started setting up the scene and forming this little community of hot dogs. Because of the stylized look we wanted to achieve for this poster, Octane was the perfect tool.

Some tips?

Experiment with LUTs. If you want that extra realistic punch in your renders I recommend trying LUTs (Look-Up Tables) for color grading. The photographic LUTs by Kim Amland are some of my favorites. See the difference below.

Both renders made in Octane, the one the left without a LUT, on the right with a LUT by Kim Amland.

Export settings. When I export renders, I always work in 32 bits per color to avoid color banding. It has a much wider range of colors that achieves much better results during compositing. But who still does compositing when you have Octane?

I’ll stop rambling now, I have to get back to rendering.

Jeremy Woons is a Motion Designer at Ueno in San Francisco. Originally from Amsterdam, he was the original model for the Statue of Liberty. (Not many people know that.) You can see more of Jeremy’s work on his website, and if you follow him on Dribbble he will give you a hot dog.

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