What am I missing here

For years this forum has been almost obsessed with realism and the node trees from hell are legendary. With Andrew Price, among others, doing tutorials hollering realism from the rooftops. And, Cycles has not only got more realistic and faster but more artist friendly over time.

Now suddenly it seems Eevee is all the rage. And, while real time rendering is indeed amazing the results won’t make a pimple on Cycles ass in my opinion. Just look at the results for god sake. Especially in Archviz where the difference seems to be even more obvious.

So suddenly it seems camera realism is no longer the holy grail as it has been for years. And, by posting in this section I realize the damn flack sure to follow. But, where else could the observation be posted. If the hope is Eevee will become cycles in the coming years well I simply don’t have the time to wait around for that.

And, by the way the view port in cycles suited me fine as evidently it has others over the years. While the real time render wasn’t exactly the final results our eye adjusted to that. Or, I should say many did who turned out some award winning work with Cycles. And, CG Graphics will probably remain trial and error into the next decade. And, yes I realize by posting this I will be called everything but a human being. But, I simply don’t get it.

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Depends on the industry you work for. I used to work until recently in the VIZ and architectural industry, and realtime is the rage nowadays: everything has to be done RIGHT NOW and results are to be presented RIGHT NOW. It doesn’t matter anymore how much realistic is the render, just has to be “good enough” and has to be generated as fast as possible, and has to be changed overnight or during a meeting with clients, live.

In my country, nowadays you need to know Unity if you want to get a job in the arch VIZ industry. In just 6-8 months, people used to work with old fashioned “3-5 minutes rendering per frame” got out of jobs, and are being replaced with people working realtime, 24 frames per second.

I think people in the VFX and/or 3DCG movies/series still will have uses for non-realtime renderers, but probably, not far away, the reality of realtime productions will reach them. Adapt or be replaced. Or change carrers… whatever. :stuck_out_tongue:

You realize people use blender for different purpose, right?

So long as there is a choice as to which you can use I can’t see an issue. Even in the current version of Blender you can still select either Cycles or the classic cpu rendering option.

You are just missing this forum is about Blender.
And other things than Cycles can make the news, here.
The last addition to Cycles mentioned in its thread is about roughness baking.
It does not mean that all future additions to Cycles which will excite people will be about maps baking for EEVEE.
Seriously, did you miss how random walk SSS was welcomed ?

This is another pointless argument (no offense intended) because EEVEE is still an infant. Remember when Cycles first arrived and how people were saying it couldn’t replace BI because of all the bugs and the nodes weren’t complete or whatever? Same deal here – wait until the thing is in a finished state, and then trash it. In the meantime, I’m going back to doing all my work in 2.49 because I don’t get the new interface.

Hi.
Cycles is more alive than ever and a lot of realism will continue with us for a long time :slight_smile:

Blender internal is the one that will be replaced at a certain point by Eevee. So you with Eevee will have a nice and more realistic engine than Blender Render engine, a realistic fast preview for Cycles, the ability to quickly create animations with fast renders, and maybe some day the possibility of PBR Material Paint system, games, etc.

Rasterizers have simply gotten to the point where people are using them even for rendering movies and stills. Unreal Engine seems to have started this trend. It’s the first where I remember people rendering actual movies with it. Rasterizers will never actually beat Ray Tracing (unless you just use rasterizing as an acceleration optimization), but for a lot of people they may be good enough.

It’s true that actual GI, shadows and reflexion of eevee are not perfect, and maybe reflects always will be like that. But quality in general is really good for the targets of eevee and PBR ios a standard.

Interesting responses in many ways since I am only a hobbyist and can simply stay in Cycles if I desire. Or, 2.79b for that matter. And, i take it a client is charged for render time which would explain one comment in some cases.

Many years ago I did quite a few spots for news print so not a complete stranger to ‘The Business Mind’ when it comes to artist. And, it was not my intent to trash the new render engine. Hell, render time is The Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla we all deal with. Albeit I don’t on a deadline my hope is the machine will see me through a little project. But, Cycles has come a long way in that respect.

And, yeah I was one who dragged myself into Cycles screaming and crying so point well taken. And, while not a slave to so called photo realism who could escape that reading this forum since almost the concept of Cycles. And, of course the many tutorials on YouTube where photo realism seemed to be indeed The Holy Grail. So why as usual I might have worded it differently I don’t think the question in my old mind wasn’t one others have had.

Once again the responses have been interesting and informative so thanks. And, as I said real time rendering is amazing.
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And the bevel shader, and the optimizations, and the additional baking/compositing related features ect…

Cycles isn’t going away, because for those who need great realism, Eevee is not going to be the perfect alternative, Eevee actually requires a little more strategy to get the realism you need (where to place the probes, what resolutions the probes need to have, and how to get the shadows to where the lack of realistic softness wouldn’t be an issue).

Though like mentioned, it falls onto the principle of “good enough”, whereas the limitations of raster technology doesn’t show up to where it’s a distraction (by way of either hiding it, working around it, or simply not needing the feature that has it).

As of now, Cycles is far and away the only engine still that allows for perfect accuracy in reflections and lighting just from creating the materials and making the lights.

@theoldghost,
Haha, I must admit I’m quite surprised by the love for eevee too. I would have thought most would only be interested in photorealism that rivals even real world physics… for a long time, on this forum, it did look that way at least to me. It’s a really nice thing to have this much diversity in the forums. Maybe the community has just grown. Or maybe rasterization has just gotten so good that even raytracing fans would consider it. Or maybe it’s just the love for an additional option.

That said, I myself am very impatient so I never got on the raytracing bandwagon. I could not wait seconds to see my material preview after every little tweak. Or spend time debugging material node noodles. Or wait hours for my final render only to realize I needed to change one little thing. So I would often just export my models to 3D Coat or Unity or Unreal to visualize them. Since I use a PBR workflow, it’s near impossible to texture in blender or even see my textured models in blender (using BI. Not sure if it’s easily possible with cycles). So seeing eevee coming along, it’s a much welcome feature. I would finally be able to use blender beyond modeling.

I’m quite satisfied with the level of realism achievable in game engines such as Unreal. So much so, I developed my own renderer/model viewer app in Unreal to simplify my jumping between the 2 apps. This way I can get the quality of Unreal without the trouble of creating a whole unreal project just to render a model. Still, if eevee turns out to be half as good as that, it’d be a great new option. Whatever the case, a modern viewport in blender is long overdue.