Octane also isn’t such a great choice, because render farms are a pain with it. And in an animation you probably won’t be able to notice the subtle nuances that maxwell produces anyway. Unless you like spending thousands of dollars on render farms. First speed is waay more important to you, and something like Maxwell is a dead end. However if you are doing animation you have to pay attention to other things. But you also have things like Maxwell, which is really slow, but produces results that are hard to match for anyone else. It has great inbuilt post effects, so you don’t really need to do post work in a 3rd party app and there is a huge amount of tutorials on it. I’d say its the one to beat, especially since it’s now just $20/month for the 2 gpu version. So for stills octane for example is great. Furthermore if you don’t render animations, you don’t really care that much about render farms, or render node licenses that come with the render engine. However in animations, you need atleast 24 frames a second, so it adds up very quickly and speed will be more important. Firstly, if you render stills it’s not such a big deal to wait 10 minutes for a final render, even waiting an hour for all the noise to clean up isn’t such a big deal. This is important because it affects a couple of things. (Since they change quite often) Animation vs stills I wrote this article quite some time ago, now I’m coming back to update it and I decided to add a bit more about what you should pay attention to when picking a render engine, rather than just listing off pro’s and cons. This article is my personal opinion, this question comes up a lot, so I’m going to try break it down here.

Octane render farm