Has anyone compared the rendering speed between Agile render + SID versus K-cycles? Agile render on its own can decrease render times by half, even without turbo mode. SID, according to some users, is even better than E-cycles. The last version of Agile Render is also compatible with SID.
K-cycles claims it can reduce by 50% render times compared to normal cycles, and it also makes the viewport experience faster and smoother.
What’s your opinion?
I didn’t. But I’m curios too. The whole matter is more and more central to my job’s needs.
If I got it right, Agile is a bunch of well optimized settings: something that, with practice, many of us found anyway.
The extra speed gain in E-cycles, afaik, comes from a modified sampling algorithm. But actually once I had the chance to try it i didn’t experience that big time savings. Imho, in the presets ecycles comes with, the real speed gain still was the biased tricks that are already in vanilla cycles (ao bounces being the most important). I can’t tell about kcycles, but I wouldn’t be susprised if the situation is similar.
What actually would make a big difference (at least in some of my projects) is the ability to render subsequential frames without reloading the whole scene, in animations where only the camera moves. It would be a game changer for scenes where the sync process can take more than a minute!
Anyway, for animations the real deal is to have a good temporal denoising. I dream of it being added in the sequencer somehow. In the past I also discussed about having a Vapoursynth addon, a sort of Avisynth but python-compatible.
A few words for SID. I used it but it comes with a downside: I have to save heavy EXRs with a lot of information for them to be used or tweaked later again. As far as I know the newest Oidn implementation does a really better job than before: in a quick test I made it seems that it makes multipass denoising not so useful anymore.
I understand that new version of Super Image Denoiser addon is using Cycles standalone for Lukas Stockner temporal denoising (Temporal mode in addon). Of course, this use internal denoiser and it is useful at high render samples (very little noise) and require EXR format as the output for this (Multilayer with denoising data).
No, it’s just settings. “Optimization” would settings in response to scene content. Looking at the code, Agile is just settings bounces, samples, and tile size.
If the author weren’t providing such clear access to the their repo I’d call this a scam.
The idea that it’s worth $20 is absurd though.
I didn’t try Agile render yet. It may be only adjusting settings like bounces, samples and tile size, like you said. However, if it saves time to the end user (setting up the parameters and rendering), maybe the $20 are not so absurd.
and then it happened!
Does this means that it only needs to import bitmaps and do the extra calculations in the first frame of an animation?
(I am a noob at Blender; one of my biggest headaches was when rendering animations with 3ds Max and V-ray. I used Brute Force + Light Cache for global illumination. The problem was that before each frame v-ray add to compile the kernels, load the bitmaps, calculate the light cache, you name it.)
If that’s so, this is huge!
It means Cycles will not reload geometry (+evaluate modifiers), textures, BHSs …you name it.
It will only proceed to the next frame and start rendering.
This provided the scene objects doesn’t change transformations.
Those are awesome news! I routinely have to do some fly-throughs in archviz, so most of the time only the camera is moving.
Is it already available in the last alpha of 2.93? I didn’t see a mention of it on their website: https://developer.blender.org/project/view/125/
that’s exactly what this feature is mostly useful for!
here’s the patch. https://developer.blender.org/rB50782df42586a5a038cad11530714371edaa5cd4
I don’t know if it’s already in the automated builds (https://builder.blender.org/download/) but it should: patch was submitted yesterday, builds are from today past noon
Thanks, I’ll check it out!