3D RENDER ENGINES and 3D-RELATED SOFTWARE

Renderers / Render Engines

• Aqsis is a free rendering suite compliant with the RenderMan standard.
• Brazil is a rendering engine for 3ds Max and VIZ
• FPrime for Lightwave adds a very fast preview and can in many cases be used for final rendering.
• Fryrender is a multi-platform renderer which forgoes raytracing, global illumination and radiosity in favor of photon rendering with a virtual electromagnetic spectrum, resulting in very authentic looking renders.
• Gelato is a hardware-accelerated, non-real-time renderer created by graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA.
• Indigo Renderer is a closed source (but free for all uses) photorealistic renderer that uses XML for scene description. Exporters available for Blender, Maya, Cinema4D, Rhino, 3ds Max.
• IRender for SketchUp add photorealistic rendering capabilities to SketchUp.
• Kerkythea is a freeware rendering system that supports raytracing. Currently, it can be integrated with 3ds Max, Blender, SketchUp, and Silo (generally any software that can export files in obj and 3ds formats). Kerkythea is a standalone renderer, using physically accurate materials and lighting.
• KRay for Lightwave offers very fast radiosity rendering solutions
• LuxRender is an unbiased open source rendering engine featuring Metropolis light transport
• Maxwell Render is a multi-platform renderer which forgoes raytracing, global illumination and radiosity in favor of photon rendering with a virtual electromagnetic spectrum, resulting in very authentic looking renders. It was the first to market.
• mental ray is another popular renderer, and comes default with most of the high-end packages.
• Pixar's RenderMan is the premier renderer, used in many studios. Animation packages such as 3DS Max and Maya can pipeline to RenderMan to do all the rendering.
• Pixie is an open source photorealistic renderer.
• POV-Ray (or The Persistence of Vision Raytracer) is a freeware (with source) ray tracer written for multiple platforms.

• Sunflow is an open source, photo-realistic renderer written in Java.
• Turtle is an alternative renderer for Maya, it specializes in faster radiosity and automatic surface baking technology which further enhances its speedy renders.
• VRay is promoted for use in the architectural visualization field used in conjunction with 3ds max and 3ds viz. It is also commonly used with Maya.
• YafRay raytracer/renderer distributed under the LGPL license.

3D-related software

• Swift3D is a package for transforming models in Lightwave or 3DS Max into Flash animations.
• Match moving software is commonly used to match live video with computer-generated video, keeping the two in sync as the camera moves.
• After producing video, studios then edit or composite the video using programs such as Adobe Premiere or Apple Final Cut at the low end, or Autodesk Combustion, Eye-on Digital Fusion, Apple Shake at the high end.
• MetaCreations Detailer and Painter 3D are discontinued software applications specifically for painting texture maps on 3-D Models.
• UVMapper is a freeware/shareware program for setting UVs on Alias Wavefront Object models.
• Headus UVLayout is a software package for creating UVs on models. Rather than the traditional 'projection' approach, it uses a 'slice and flatten' approach which leads to less seams and distortion.

source: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics_software