When I made my latest 3D render in the Art Portal, Stinkums the Cat, I rendered it in Blender Cycles, as per usual. But I've seen so many impressive things lately, such as The Voice in the Hollow and Tenacious D's Video Games music video, being rendered much faster and more efficiently in the video game engine, Unreal Engine 4/5! Unfortunately, Epic's bloated game engine really doesn't like my laptop or its smaller screen, so I wondered if I could achieve similar results in the open-source alternative, Godot Engine, which recently got a massive update that, among other things, drastically improves the 3D rendering and simplifies importing .blend Blender files and animations in and out of the engine.

Here is the result when I used the most advanced console/PC-oriented Forward Rendering+ engine, rendered on an RTX 3060 mobile GPU and a massive dollop of anti-aliasing and post-processing effects:

Looks nearly indistinguishable from a path-traced Cycles render, right? I even added some stuff like Fog and subtle Bloom, which you can't get with a raw Cycles render until AFTER you do mountains of photo editing.

Here is my first attempt with the more energy-efficient Mobile rendering, with the bare minimum of anti-aliasing and many of the ray-traced/screen-space post processing effects no longer working:

It looks a bit flatter, unfortunately, particularly without the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion under his making Stinkums's unibrow stand out more. Does this mean Godot is only a viable alternative to rendering in Cycles if you have a powerful modern GPU for Forward Rendering and your laptop is sucking in a lot of power while plugged into the wall? Kinda, but I found if I can pre-bake the AO map and composite it into the Albedo Color Map, I can make up for some of the deficiencies in Mobile Rendering:

There are some artifacts on Stinkum's face since this was a quick and dirty bake, I didn't want to go through all the trouble texturing Stinkums properly again just for this demo, but hopefully you can see you can still get some decent renders out of the Mobile or possibly even Compatibility render engines, so long as you use some "cheats" from the PS2 and PS3 eras of video games to make for the less-sophisticated rendering on Mobile as opposed to Forward Renderer. Basically the less work the computer does, the more work you have to do (Mobile), and the more work the computer does, the less work you yourself have to do (Forward Renderer).

This may sound like a lot of shop talk, and it is, but if your art style is simpler, all you really need to remember is to go into Edit>Project Settings>Anti-Aliasing and turn on both MSAA and FXAA as high as your computer allows to get a clean image without "jaggies"--you can ignore TAA, it's not necessary and also only works with Forward Rendering. If your animation is supposed to look like an old PS1 game, then you could even ignore the Anti-Aliasing and leave in the "jaggies" if you want!

Safe to say, I definitely plan on instantly rendering my 3D animations in Godot 4 instead of waiting and twiddling my thumbs for Cycles to render from now on. You can't beat a fast, real-time render that only takes 1/144th of a second to render each frame of animation. Hopefully this inspires you to render your 3D cartoons in Godot 4, too, especially if you haven't had as much luck rendering in more mainstream game engines like Unity and Unreal.