Though most are working on some Mac comparable versions but I wouldn’t expect those to be production ready for a while. Most of the Gpu based ones need cuda so any new mac is out of the question and most popular render solutions will not work natively. Being on Mac is going to hold you back right now from a render tech side. Going to echo some of what’s being said already but I’ll throw my opinions in here.
Neither are very useful for realistic things like skin shading or hair, and AFAIK the AOV support for render passes hasn't gotten much better either (especially in regards to AA and fringing issues). They're still apparently pushing that in the newer versions, albeit with ProRender as an option. The material system was kinda whack up until R16, but the changes introduced via the "Reflectance" channel weren't much better. I've never had much luck with C4D's built-in engine. I have heard that Redshift is slightly better than Octane from a material standpoint, since Octane tends to have a very peculiar look to the specular components that sorta stands out. Haven't used M4D (I think that one might even be discontinued by now), Octane, or Redshift. Didn't get to spend much time with it though, unfortunately. Kinda reminded me of a mini-Maxwell, but a bit faster and slightly more flexible. Apparently the C4D plugin is now owned and maintained by ChaosGroup as an official product, so maybe that's changed, maybe not. It seemed like it was capable of great things (especially at the time), but the C4D plugin was pretty tweaky and I always felt like I was "missing something", almost as if you had to be a part of their inner circle on the forums to know enough to truly make it sing. I never really got the point of that engine. I've also used Vray (formerly VRAYforC4D, back when Laublab owned it). For metallic/glass stuff though, it's borderline unbeatable. I found it rather slow and the material system somewhat inflexible, especially for character stuff. It's great for scientific accuracy (especially when it comes to caustics and refraction). The entire setup is extremely predictable, however depending on whether or not you're using the CPU or GPU version- you might need a beefy processor or a higher end GPU to render out stuff in any reasonable amount of time. I personally use Arnold, since it's a very unified and straightforward package. There's a lot of different engines out there.
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