When comparing Panda3D vs Armory3D, the Slant community recommends Panda3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Panda3D is ranked 4th while Armory3D is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Panda3D is:
The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free, open-source, and permissive license
The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.
Pro Will be very easy for developers already familiar with Python
Although it's possible to use only C++ to program in Panda3D, all its power is available to the Python scripting language, while not trading in performance since the performance-critical parts are implemented in C++.
It has a powerful binding layer that exposes the vast majority of the API via Python-based interfaces.
Pro Supports most popular physics engines
Panda3D has in-depth integration with industry standard physics engines such as Bullet, NVIDIA PhysX and ODE, but also offers a simpler built-in physics engines that will cover more basic needs.
Pro Flexible scene and object hierarchy system
Creating weird world constructs is generally a breeze. The node system the engine runs with allows to build self-looping worlds and, on large scale, non-Euclidean scenes without having to introduce a huge amount of custom code.
Pro Powerful profiling and debugging tools
Panda3D has a suite of powerful tools to help track down performance bottlenecks, memory leaks and examine internal state.
Pro Supports browser deployment
Panda3D offers web plug-ins that allow deployment of an application to all major browsers. A WebGL port is in the works as well.
Pro Runs inside Blender
Does everything in the same application. No exporting-importing assets, make a cube, hit run, cube appears, make a character, hit run, the character appears!
Pro State of the art physically based rendering
Physically based
Cycles material nodes
Voxel-based global illumination
Temporal anti-aliasing
Tessellated displacement
Screen-space raymarching
HDR pipeline
Pro Free and open source
Pro Easy to use
Pro Node based programming and materials support
Pro Lightweight
Pro Export to multiple platforms
Export to all platform that Kha supports.
Pro A good community
Although the is an obvious lake of community help, it is still there if you look on the Armory forum or there discord your sure to find help for any problem you have.
Pro A growing community with more tutorials and documentation.
Although Armory has been a little slow in the development, tutorials on YouTube are being released almost daily and the documentation is also being updated regularly.
Pro No programing experience needed
Cons
Con No unified editing program
Unlike Unity and Unreal, Panda3D doesn't currently offer a single, unified editing program in which objects can simply be dragged in and assigned properties (although third-party solutions are available). Developers are expected to design their scenes in a modelling program like Maya or Blender instead, and import them into Panda3D using Python code.
Con Limited tutorial
Step by step tutorial is limited. Manual is too general and short without examples. Samples are too complex for beginners.
Con Direct3D support is behind
Direct3D support not up to par with OpenGL support, only version 9 is supported.
Con Terrible compilers support
Does not support any other compilers then MSVC on Windows, neither Clang nor MinGW.
Con Developer isn't very competent
Panda3D only has one developer and he utterly fails to fix problems with his engine, instead focuses on style guidelines and breaking code.
Con Loading Pandas3d will change your builtins to contain non explicit references to non-standard helper functions
A lot of the pollution comes from storing global state. Instead, you can store and update the global state of a namespace instead. As for the built-in pollution, you can make a wrapper that backs up builtins, imports pandas and then restores builtins, though this may not work as pandas almost certainly uses it's extra builtins to work. The best thing to do would be to explicitly import the same objects that are in the builtins over the top of the modified builtin namespace, although it doesn't remove the code smell, it helps to make things look less (if not at all) magic.
Con Lack of documentation
Con Not many developers use it
Armory3d seems to be quite exotic and it should be hard to find developers to help in projects.
Con Still in development
Con Slow development
Focus from the developer has shifted to another project, so development of this has slowed considerably.
Con Good looking but a terrible choice for any serious development
Terrible lack of support and lack of a serious delivery strategy. Multiple breaking changes to the master branches (usually the only branch actually) from the core projects as well as the myriad of dependencies it uses make it a nightmare to have something stable to create with. Might be good for prototyping if you stick to the releases, but stay away if you are planning to create something serious.