Blender - Cycles Renderer
17 Nov 2011 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysengrinWell, Cycles, the new renderer for Blender, is now part of trunk, which means that a standard trunk build from Graphicall (or one you build yourself) will have it. It will be available alongside the old Blender internal renderer for a while, but it will eventually become the standard render engine.
Today was the first time I could take a bit and get some idea of how it works (well, other than as a released proof of concept some time ago I played with).
Yes, it's a shiny monkey on a polished table, the equivalent of the default teapot in other packages. It's not to show off my l33t 3D skillz -- which it certainly doesn't -- but to see how quickly you can do a decent "Hello World" image.
First, the pros: you now get area lights and proper soft shadows without a bunch of fiddling, indirect lighting with multiple bounces, proper-looking glass and caustics. You can light a scene much as you would a real set, instead of endless little tweaks and cheats to make it look right. All materials are now node-based (and a lot more flexible) under the hood, though with simple materials you don't have to work with the node system unless you want to. You can get immediate results when you're tweaking things, to get some idea what the final will look like without constant stopping, rending a test, tweaking and repeating.
On the down side, it's slower (way slower if your graphics card can't handle CUDA, more options to follow), and your existing Blender materials will need to be recreated (ouch). Some lighting techniques haven't been ported over properly (yet), and while Cycles recognizes old-style Blender lamps, they don't give good results. Some modeling tools aren't available when working with a rendered viewport (keyboard shortcuts work). In short, you can't just render an existing BI scene in Cycles -- the geometry is fine, but the lighting and materials don't carry over.
I'm still excited about Cycles. I think it'll be a lot faster to work with than the old internal renderer, at least to get to something presentable.
Today was the first time I could take a bit and get some idea of how it works (well, other than as a released proof of concept some time ago I played with).
Yes, it's a shiny monkey on a polished table, the equivalent of the default teapot in other packages. It's not to show off my l33t 3D skillz -- which it certainly doesn't -- but to see how quickly you can do a decent "Hello World" image.
First, the pros: you now get area lights and proper soft shadows without a bunch of fiddling, indirect lighting with multiple bounces, proper-looking glass and caustics. You can light a scene much as you would a real set, instead of endless little tweaks and cheats to make it look right. All materials are now node-based (and a lot more flexible) under the hood, though with simple materials you don't have to work with the node system unless you want to. You can get immediate results when you're tweaking things, to get some idea what the final will look like without constant stopping, rending a test, tweaking and repeating.
On the down side, it's slower (way slower if your graphics card can't handle CUDA, more options to follow), and your existing Blender materials will need to be recreated (ouch). Some lighting techniques haven't been ported over properly (yet), and while Cycles recognizes old-style Blender lamps, they don't give good results. Some modeling tools aren't available when working with a rendered viewport (keyboard shortcuts work). In short, you can't just render an existing BI scene in Cycles -- the geometry is fine, but the lighting and materials don't carry over.
I'm still excited about Cycles. I think it'll be a lot faster to work with than the old internal renderer, at least to get to something presentable.
