Compare the Top 3D Rendering Software for Mac as of June 2025

What is 3D Rendering Software for Mac?

3D rendering software is used to generate realistic or stylized images from 3D models by simulating lighting, textures, and materials. These tools help designers, architects, animators, and game developers create high-quality visual representations of their designs, scenes, or products. 3D rendering software typically includes features like ray tracing, shading, texture mapping, and motion blur to enhance the realism of the images. It is used in various industries such as architecture, entertainment, product design, and virtual reality to visualize and present concepts before physical production. Compare and read user reviews of the best 3D Rendering software for Mac currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Unity

    Unity

    Unity Technologies

    The leading platform for creating interactive, real-time content. Build 2D, 3D and VR games and apps at speed. From artist tools to live-ops, everything you need to bring your vision to life today. The complete solutions for professionals to create and operate. Create and operate amazing applications and immersive experiences with a complete solution for professionals across industries. Change up your splash screen. Or completely remove it. Gain greater insight into what’s happening in your game with real-time data on crashes, exceptions and user feedback. Minimize downtime with access to expert technical support when you encounter issues. Available as a separate purchase through a Unity sales representative. Unity Gaming Services: backend and LiveOps services trusted by world-class studios to support multiplayer and live games at any scale, with any engine or tech stack.
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    Starting Price: $35.00/month
  • 2
    Coohom

    Coohom

    Coohom

    Coohom is a leading global cloud-based, 3D design platform that provides all-in-one software and services to empower designers and businesses to design a professional project in minutes, and get photo-realistic 3D visualizations in seconds. With a presence spanning the United States, China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, Coohom's innovative solutions have garnered the trust of over 10 million customers from 200 countries. With the aim of facilitating the digital transformation of customers in the interior design, furniture & home decor, and Kitchen & Bath industry, Coohom provides a comprehensive suit of software encompassing design, rendering, marketing, production, and construction, helping to streamline their workflows and achieve success.
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    Starting Price: $0 per month
  • 3
    Blender

    Blender

    Blender Foundation

    Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now.
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    Maya

    Maya

    Autodesk

    Create expansive worlds, complex characters, and dazzling effects. Bring believable characters to life with engaging animation tools. Shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools in Maya® software. Create realistic effects—from explosions to cloth simulation. A new visual programming environment using dynamic solvers enables you to create blockbuster-worthy effects quickly. Build custom graphs using the Bifrost Graph Editor. Create stunning effects—from snow and sand to dust storms and explosions—with ready-to-use graphs. Render your most complex projects with Arnold. Arnold is built to manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Arnold is integrated with Maya, so you can see high-quality previews and iterate changes quickly. Save time with Arnold’s artist-friendly UI and simple, intuitive controls.
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    Rhino 8

    Rhino 8

    Robert McNeel & Associates

    Rhino can create, edit, analyze, document, render, animate, and translate NURBS curves, surfaces and solids, subdivision geometry (SubD), point clouds, and polygon meshes. There are no limits on complexity, degree, or size beyond those of your hardware. Uninhibited free-form 3D modeling tools like those found only in products costing 20 to 50 times more. Model any shape you can imagine. Accuracy needed to design, prototype, engineer, analyze, and manufacture anything from an airplane to jewelry. Compatibility with all your other design, drafting, CAM, engineering, analysis, rendering, animation, and illustration software. Read and repair meshes and extremely challenging IGES files. Accessible. So easy to learn and use that you can focus on design and visualization without being distracted by the software. Fast, even on an ordinary laptop computer. No special hardware is needed. Development platform for hundreds of specialty 3D products.
    Starting Price: $995.00/user
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    Animation:Master
    Whether you’re looking to create whole three di­men­sional worlds or have a two di­men­sional project in mind, Hash Animation:Master is the 3D soft­ware you need to design and render amazing imagery and animation from the comfort of your kitchen table! It has been proven to be one of the most easy to use, affordable and powerful 3D programs available. A:M is as advanced as it is easy to learn. Our provided text and video tutorials will guide you through the steps to not only become an A:M professional, but to jump-start your career in the 3D industry as an animator. A:M experts from around the world are always available to help beginners with tutorials and answers on the A:M Forums. Our community is one of the most helpful, knowl­edge­a­ble and responsive anywhere. And if our users can’t help you, we surely can!
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    Modo

    Modo

    Foundry

    3D modeling and rendering platform designed to help businesses create 3D drawings and configure UV mapping and texturing workflows. Modo’s powerful and flexible 3D modeling, animation, texturing and rendering toolset empowers artists to explore and develop ideas without jumping through technical hoops. Modo® is your starting point for creative exploration. With fast direct modeling, flexible procedural modeling, the award-winning MeshFusion Boolean toolset and built-in sculpting tools all working together, Modo’s modeling moxie is unmatched. Free yourself from creativity-killing constraints, with Modo’s intuitive, artist-friendly toolset. From roughing out volumes to creating highly detailed forms, Modo lets you focus on creation, not construction. Build your own kit of specialized tools by combining different operations, with Modo’s flexible tool assembly system. With Modo, every job you do becomes easier, as you continually develop new efficiencies.
    Starting Price: $65 per month
  • 8
    form•Z

    form•Z

    AutoDesSys

    form•Z pro is a powerful 3D design application featuring a variety of modeling personalities and tools with an easy to use interface to express and communicate your imagination. It is based on advanced 3D solid and surface modeling methods that maintain accurate representations as you progress from design to visualization, layout, animation and fabrication. Object Symmetry creates a plane of symmtrey for an object. Subsequent operations to the object maintain symmetry by updaing the opposte sids of the model to match. The symmetry functionality has special consideration for NURBs curves, NURB surfaces and Sub-D objects. Reference Files are simply data from one project displayed inside another project. Reference files allow for complex static data to be mainteined in external files and supports coloboration where files can be shaered between team members as a design evolves. Python is a easy to use yet rich scripting language.
    Starting Price: $175
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    LightWave 3D
    NewTek LightWave 3D® is designed for independent artists who desire control of their vision from start to finish. Affordable, complete, easy to learn and use, LightWave is well established as one of the leading 3D systems on the market. With the ability to model, animate and render stunningly realistic imagery and animation, LightWave allows you to create new worlds, build your brand and shatter expectations. LightWave 2020 refined and retooled. Don’t take our word for it — try LightWave 2020, unrestricted for yourself. Download and register to unlock a full-feature trial version of LightWave 2020 for Windows & Mac today. LightWave 2020 gives you the tools you need to deliver any project on time and on budget. Add the power and efficiency of LightWave 2020 to your pipeline today. And start creating with a stable, streamlined, effective workflow. Fresh. Fast. Easy. Proven.
    Starting Price: $995
  • 10
    V-Ray

    V-Ray

    Chaos

    Chaos® V-Ray® is a 3D rendering plugin available for SketchUp, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Rhino, Revit, and more. It is widely used in architectural visualization, advertising, and visual effects for film and television. With V-Ray, artists and designers can explore and share their projects with real-time ray tracing and render high-quality visualizations. V-Ray has a large community of users and is recognized for its incredible versatility. V-Ray has been honored with a Sci-Tech Academy Award® and an Engineering Emmy Award® for bringing fully ray-traced photorealistic CGI to the film and television industries. For more information, please visit chaos.com
    Starting Price: $60 per month
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    3DCoat

    3DCoat

    3DCoat

    3DCoat is the one application that has all the tools you need to take your 3D idea from a block of digital clay all the way to a production ready, fully textured organic or hard surface model. Today 3DCoat is available to learn at 300+ Universities, colleges and schools worldwide. 3DCoat is one of the most advanced software applications for creating detailed 3D models. Where other applications in this market segment tend to specialize in one specific task, such as Digital Sculpting or Texture Painting, 3DCoat provides High-End capability across multiple tasks in an asset creation pipeline. These include Sculpting, Retopology, UV Editing , PBR Texture Painting and Rendering. So it can be called a 3D texturing software and 3D texture painting software and 3D sculpting program and Retopology software and UV mapping software and 3D rendering software all combined. In short, 3DCoat removes the need to purchase (and learn) multiple specialty software titles.
    Starting Price: $49 one-time payment
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    Render[in]

    Render[in]

    Render[in]

    Render[in] is a fully integrated, real-time radiosity engine developed for SketchUp (Free and Pro) users. Powered by Artlantis 6.5’s rendering engine, Render[in] 3 gives SketchUp users the high-definition, photorealistic renderings they’ve been looking for, in a robust, easy-to-use application. Just as in photography, the respect of color is essential in rendering. Render[in]’s new global illumination engine improves images for a better perception of colors, textures, and materials. Thanks to both the ISO and Shutter parameters, it is easier than ever to fine-tune a scene’s lighting.
    Starting Price: €190 per license
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    FluidRay

    FluidRay

    Fluid Interactive

    All the tweaking of materials, lights or any other scene properties are immediately visible as real-time feedback in the viewport, making your workflow faster and much more pleasurable. FluidRay is the only interactive renderer that doesn’t suffer from GPU limitations. GPU based renderers work well only on specific tasks while FluidRay does it all easily and quickly. Working with FluidRay is effortless. The interactive workflow is extremely intuitive and anyone can get up to speed in just a few minutes. FluidRay allows you to quickly make visually stunning previews of your architectural projects, interior designs, jewelry projects, and more. Interactive rendering makes designing products and environments an easy and fun process. FluidRay makes it easy to quickly prototype your designs and generate super high quality preview images. FluidRay’s compatibility with Rhino enables designers to create 3D models in Rhino and easily import into FluidRay.
    Starting Price: $14.99 per month
  • 14
    Adobe Dimension
    Discover new dimensions in design. Adobe Dimension is the fastest way to bring your designs to life in 3D. Get it as part of Creative Cloud All Apps plan. Create engaging content in 3D faster with high-quality models, materials, and lighting. Dimension makes it easy to build brand visualizations, illustrations, product mockups, packaging designs, and other creative work. Create real-life images in real time. Visualize your branding, packaging, and logo designs in 3D. Drag and drop a vector graphic or image onto a 3D model to see it in a real context. Easily search Adobe Stock for 3D assets optimized for Dimension right within the app. Create lifelike virtual photographs with depth, texture, and the right lighting. Combine 3D models with 2D designs from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, materials from Substance, background photographs, and lighting environments. Import custom assets from third-party 3D apps, and export your scenes as layers to refine them further in Photoshop.
    Starting Price: $20.99 per month
  • 15
    RenderMan
    Advanced technology from Pixar Animation Studios for rendering VFX and animation. With a new state-of-the-art framework optimized for physically-based rendering, RenderMan can deliver unmatched flexibility for any production pipeline. Not only is RenderMan used for our own feature films at Pixar, it is also used throughout the industry for rendering Visual Effects and animation, making scalability and versatility one of its core strengths. Now you can get out-of-box production tools straight from Pixar Animation Studios, including materials and light transport, no development required. Physically based shading allows RenderMan to deliver highly realistic lighting with minimal setup, including full support for multi-bounce ray traced global illumination and ray traced subsurface scattering. Much research and development has gone into making these traditionally expensive effects a production reality. Materials come fully loaded with all of the creative options.
    Starting Price: $5 per lincense
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    Verge3D

    Verge3D

    Soft8Soft

    Verge3D® is a powerful and intuitive toolkit that allows Blender, 3ds Max, or Maya artists to create immersive web-based experiences. Verge3D can be used to build interactive animations, product configurators, engaging presentations of any kind, online stores, explainers, e-learning content, portfolios, and browser games. The high-tech 3D web technology becomes accessible with Verge3D. Your exquisite content will live on your website being appreciated by the billion-sized Internet population. Interactivity, including the true 360° view, zoom, and animation, will bring an entirely new level of engagement to your creations. It will work everywhere, from a small smartphone to a workstation and even a TV set. We designed and assembled all the tools you need in one place and called it Verge3D. Find out how Verge3D can transform your business and differentiate your enterprise from the rest of the industry!
    Starting Price: $290
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    Maxwell Render

    Maxwell Render

    Maxwell Render

    Reality means predictable, reliable first-time results. Maxwell Render™ unleashes your creativity without having to struggle with complex computer graphics terminology and countless parameter tweaks. Maxwell Render is specifically made to help architects, designers, and artists to visualize their projects efficiently and accurately with minimum set-up time. Maxwell 5 is the best rendering software for light simulation. The rendering engine combines physically correct lighting with thousands of Maxwell materials to create accurate and extremely realistic images. It is compatible with most 3D or CAD applications. Best lighting engine for designers, architects, and artists from any industry. We constantly strive to improve the realism quality of the render and make the engine faster and easier to use. Maxwell remains unbiased with an easy transition from GPU to CPU, as well as the best cloud rendering service.
    Starting Price: $60
  • 18
    Miarmy

    Miarmy

    Basefount

    Miarmy (read My Army) is a human logic engine-based Maya plugin for crowd simulation, AI & behavioral animation, creature physical simulation, and rendering. Miarmy simulator is free forever. You can download the full software package, along with tons of tutorials, samples, demo files, and documents. We also provide some official samples and ready-to-run presets. And the most amazing part is, they are totally free. Create stunning crowd VFX using Maya particles, field, fluid, and transform. Support standard production pipeline, reference, and motion builder. Build a human fuzzy logic network without any programming or node connecting.
    Starting Price: $1,350 per year
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    iC3D

    iC3D

    Creative Edge Software

    iC3D allows you to create 3D digital prototypes fast and easy. Whether you create carton, glass, cans, flexibles or shrink-wraps, iC3D enables real-time visualization and validation throughout the design process from concept to production. No specialist programs, hardware, or outside assistance are required, just a single application using a simple Illustrator file or PDF for photorealistic results on-the-fly.
    Starting Price: $145/month
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    Autodesk Arnold
    Global illumination rendering software. Render high-quality 3D images faster with Arnold–so you can focus on the art. Arnold software is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer that helps you work more efficiently. Interactivity produces immediate results, leaving more time for iterations. The controls and UI are simple and intuitive. Switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering to suit your production needs. Arnold thrives on heavy datasets and complex scene files. Production-ready tools reliably manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Compute performance is optimized when creating elements such as hair, fur, skin. Easily integrate with all of the top 3D digital content creation (DCC) tools. Get the scalability of an open and extensible architecture. Arnold GPU allows users to switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering. High-performance ray traced subsurface scattering eliminates the need to tune point clouds.
    Starting Price: $27 per month
  • 21
    Cinema 4D
    3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software. Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24 (S24) includes functionality to easily browse and obtain models, materials and other assets, and to intuitively place them within the scene. The release also includes key workflow enhancements and a sneak peek at the continued progress on the Scene Nodes and Scene Manager interfaces to the new core. Cinema 4D is a professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software solution. Its fast, powerful, flexible and stable toolset make 3D workflows more accessible and efficient for design, motion graphics, VFX, AR/MR/VR, game development and all types of visualization professionals. Cinema 4D produces stunning results, whether working on your own or in a team. Cinema 4D is widely recognized as one of the easiest and most accessible 3D packages to learn and use. To soften that learning curve Maxon offers thousands of tutorials on Cineversity and hundreds of Quick Tips.
    Starting Price: $16.58 per month
  • 22
    Fujiyama

    Fujiyama

    Fujiyama

    Fujiyama is free and open source, distribution oriented ray-tracing renderer designed to handle production image rendering. Multi-threaded rendering - dynamic assignement of tile rendering per theread. Rendering preview - fbview shows rendering progress. Region rendering - accelerates distribution rendering pipeline. Tile based rendering. Volume Filling Procedure - Pyroclastic clouds procedure provided. Volume Filling Procedure - Spline wisps procedure provided. Volume Filling Procedure - Surface wisps procedure provided. On demand reading of mipmap - unlimited number of texture images. Pluggable shader DSO - shaders can be written in C/C++. Subsurface scattering - implemented in shader. Bump mapping - perturb normals based on mipmap images. Primitive groups - multiple shader assignment on triangle mesh. Gaussian and Box pixel filters - supports filter width bigger than 1 pixel. Adaptive grid pixel sampling - subdivides pixels based on color threshold.
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    LuxCoreRender

    LuxCoreRender

    LuxCoreRender

    LuxCoreRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine. Based on state of the art algorithms, LuxCoreRender simulates the flow of light according to physical equations, thus producing realistic images of photographic quality. LuxCoreRender is built on physically based equations that model the transportation of light. LuxCoreRender uses OpenCL to run on any number of CPUs and/or GPUs available. LuxCoreRender is and will always be free software, both for private and commercial use. LuxCoreRender is a physically based and unbiased rendering engine based on state of the art algorithms. A showcase of what LuxCoreRender users have been able to achieve. LuxCoreRender features a variety of material types. Apart from generic materials such as matte and glossy, physically accurate representations of metal, glass, and car paint are present. LuxCoreRender supports dynamic and interactive scene editing.
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    Redshift
    Redshift is a powerful GPU-accelerated renderer, built to meet the specific demands of contemporary high-end production rendering. Tailored to support creative individuals and studios of every size, Redshift offers a suite of powerful features and integrates with industry standard CG applications. Redshift has the features and uncompromising quality of a CPU renderer, but at GPU rendering speeds. Unlike other GPU renderers out there, Redshift is a biased renderer that allows the user to adjust the quality of individual techniques in order to get the best performance/quality balance for their production. Redshift supports complex, advanced shading networks and texturing capabilities as required for production-quality rendering. Flexible, production-ready shader, compatible with PBR workflows of Allegorithmic Substance and Unreal Engine. Control how materials behave for certain ray types. Useful for customizing GI or double-sided polygon shading.
    Starting Price: $500
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    Radiance

    Radiance

    Radiance

    Radiance is intended to aid lighting designers and architects by predicting the light levels and appearance of a space prior to construction. The package includes programs for modeling and translating scene geometry, luminaire data and material properties, all of which are needed as input to the simulation. The lighting simulation itself uses ray tracing techniques to compute radiance values (ie. the quantity of light passing through a specific point in a specific direction), which are typically arranged to form a photographic quality image. The resulting image may be analyzed, displayed and manipulated within the package, and converted to other popular image file formats for export to other packages, facilitating the production of hard copy output. The major portion of the Radiance package, and the part that is of chief interest to users, is the lighting simulation engine that calculates light levels and renders images.
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    Realsoft 3D

    Realsoft 3D

    Realsoft Graphics

    Open design combined with a rich set of features has been the main strength of Realsoft 3D. Feature wise, Realsoft 3D challenges the most famous competitors and offers a better price/performance ratio. In some areas (e.g. SDS modelling, ray tracing), the product is the best on the market. Another major advantage is that the intelligent, context sensitive user interface is suitable for both novice users and skilled professionals. The program grows with and adapts to the skill level of the user. The program is used in different applications, for example by artists working in the advertising industry, architects, product designers, educational institutions, game industry and hobby users. As a versatile yet affordable product ($700), Realsoft 3D has quite a large group of potential users. Realsoft 3D is a powerful tool for making best quality photorealistic images, and there is a huge number of people who need images every day.
    Starting Price: $700
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    Visual Vertex Muster

    Visual Vertex Muster

    Virtual Vertex

    Muster 9 is our software to provide a clean and powerfull system to manage CGI Renderfarms and distributed computing. It has a wide range of incredible features, a clean interface and an huge amount of customizations facilities. Easy for wranglers, powerfull for pipeline’s developers. Muster includes an integrated web server engine that’s the core of our HTTP/Rest APIs but also exposes a minimal, clean, and intuitive web based interface to its core features. Based on the Bootstrap framework, Muster is mobile ready right from the start. Its responsive, mobile fluid system let you take control of the dispatcher service using your phone, your tablet or your web browser. Take total control of your farm hosts with a clean report that lets you manage any aspect of your devices. You can even take remote control over them or shutdown and wakeup hosts, manually or automatically!
    Starting Price: $85 per license
  • 28
    Arc+

    Arc+

    Space Tech International

    ARC+ a software created by architects, for architects. For over 30 years ARC+ develops software solutions serving architects, designers and building professionals. ARC + offers architects and other building professionals a simple and ergonomic way to move from idea to reality while respecting everyone creative spirit, "The Freedom of Design." With an interactive and efficient 2D / 3D modeller it is possible to model any geometry or to use the existing architectural modules for creating stairs, walls, windows etc. ARC + does not stop there as it offers a range of fully integrated add-ons. A 3D rendering engine allows you to sell your project by generating, among others, photorealistic images. An editing and project’s structure management module allows you to display areas, perimeters and other quantitative data in order to communicate them to the client directly from your production documents.The construction industry is changing, ARC + too.
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    Art of Illusion

    Art of Illusion

    Art of Illusion

    Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs. Highlights include subdivision surface based modelling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials. The current version is 3.2.0, released January 13, 2021. This version is both stable and powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work. We now have an extensive documentation section. This includes the user manual, as well as a number of tutorials covering different aspects of the program. The interface is designed to be clean, easy to learn, and simple to use. Art of Illusion provides subdivision surface based modelling tools for creating smooth surfaces from control meshes of arbitrary shape and structure. A powerful set of deformation tools allow you to "sculpt" objects in a natural, intuitive way.
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    Horde3D

    Horde3D

    The Horde3D Team

    Horde3D is a small open source 3D rendering engine. It is written in an effort to create a graphics engine that offers the stunning visual effects expected in next-generation games while at the same time being as lightweight and conceptually clean as possible. Horde3D has a simple and intuitive interface accessible from virtually any programming language and is particularly suitable for rendering large crowds of animated characters in next-generation quality. The complete scene graph and animation systems are designed with this requirement in mind. For example, Horde3D tries to keep node hierarchies small to reduce call overhead and to use cached data for faster animations. The geometry is optimized for efficient cache usage and you can use several levels of detail for a model. Furthermore, it is possible to use vertex skinning and apply deferred shading to reduce the number of draw calls for scenes with many lights.
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