My goal is to make a YouTube SciFi TV series. I have 2 x GTX 1080s and it would take years to render a noiseless 40 minute episode using Cycles in Blender. All that, and it doesn’t even look much better than nexgen games, which I could easily play with my hardware. I was hoping to find something more “middle of the road”, something between real-time rendering of game engines and the very slow but super accurate lighting of Cycles.
Could Armory 3D, as it currently stands, meet my needs? I already have scenes setup in Cycles, with Cycles material nodes and it would be awesome if all I had to do was load Armory 3D and click play, without having to fix anything. $50 for your software is preferable than $100k+ for hardware to render an episode in Cycles within a reasonable amount of time.
Armory could be used for realtime rendering too but do not expect to just “click play”.
For example about materials you can read from the manual:
"…It is also possible to build materials without the Armory PBR node. Note this setup is not yet calibrated and therefore the results may look different/wrong compared to Cycles output. "
Sent you email back with more detail - in summary, current builds will not yet fulfil these goals at the quality we want, but it’s highly desired to get closer with each new release.