Today I messed around with some render engines, mostly seeing if it is worth learning the rendering and materials inside of blender. It has come a long way since I last tried rendering people in it, that's for sure.

I think this test convinced me to take some courses on it. Normally I have been only using blender's great modelling capabilites, then exporting to iray for rendering. 

If I can get such decent looking renders out that fast, without knowing much at all about using the render engine, I am convinced learning it will be worthwhile.

I didn't take a lot of time composing this, as it was more of a proof of concept to myself than anything else. I tried to get all the factors the same, I couldn't really line up the HDRI that is providing the lighting and scenery though. Also no idea why it looks nice and crisp in iray, but a blurry mess in cycles lol. Guess in the end it don't matter, usually I use real geometry for scene mostly anyways, and if I use HDRI it's only for light and reflections.  Here are the individual renders, Iray, then Ecycles, then Kcycles. If you click on each one, it will open the fullsized. Use middle click to open in a new tab is my suggestion.

 

Iray Render