One of the big things that really made me want to use armory was the supposed ability to “render scenes as-is in cycles” but after creating a level in cycles and then starting armory, it looks nothing like the render. How do I make it look like the cycles render?
There is not a lot you can do about that. Some material nodes are not working, the lightning just looks different because the engines are using vastly different ways of rendering. Maybe turning on voxel gi improves things but it is for a heavy performance cost.
So it will look better in the future?
I find the materials are actually really close in most cases. What is different is the way the background or HDRI is handled (at least that seems to be my experience) If I darken the back it get much closer to what cycles does.
I’m pretty sure it will never look like cycles. Cycles is not a real time render. It’s more likely armory and eevee will look similar.
You can get a good proximity but you will need plenty of lightning setups and reflection probes going on. Have you tried using voxelgi ?
Real time rendering can’t have the same quality as non real time rendering.
Do you have screenshots to show the difference ?