Hi all,
I have a question about rendering character animations.
I was curious if anybody made a render test of animation in Cycles vs Eevee?
Im preparing an animation of my “Bad Guys” minion family and I am struggling with Cycles render times… One frame is rendering for about 20 min on my iMac, of course I could use my PC with graphic card but the rendering time is not significantly shorter than on the iMac CPU.
I saw that several Blender Studio animations, e.g. “Charge”, were rendered in Eevee and that makes me wonder if the rendering time of my animation would be better in Eevee than in Cyles. I’ve never tried Eevee before.
Does anyone have experience rendering animations in Eevee and Cycles?
I will be grateful for your thoughts on animation in both engines
Hey,
eevee is generally much faster than cycles and with the right lighting and materials is very similar.
I just did an animation with evee and the rendering came out very similar to cycles
total rendering time also depends on so many other things like lights, materials, number of objects, how detailed they are…
for very short animations I recommend cycles otherwise for long animations it is infeasible and you can only use eevee
However I would advise you to look at the number of samples, 20 minutes is way too long, lower the number of samples,
the visible difference is small but it reduces the time a lot
First I split it into many 200 frames videos (total frames were 3400) then I also slowed them down by 0.8 to match the music , it took me a total of three and a half hours using 40 samples x frame
Rendering in Eevee is dramatically faster. It is so dramatically faster that you shouldn’t even be asking, you should just be rendering in Eevee and seeing, it would take you less time.
There are a lot of things that Eevee doesn’t do, or doesn’t do well, compared to Cycles. It is a completely different style of rendering. There are no light bounces. Any reflections or refractions are faked, or require some form of manual creation. Many shader nodes don’t work, like anisotropy, or bevel. Volumetrics work differently. Area lights work differently. Shadows require some manual tuning to eliminate “Peter Panning.”
Eevee is like what you see playing a video game. Cycles is like what you see in the five minute cinematic intro to that video game.
Thanks for your answer. Yeah, I assumed that Eevee is speeder than Cycles from what I’ve seen on YouTube but I’ve never used it so I supposed it requires different approach from scratch to achieve result similar to Cycles. For sure I will give it a try!
On average it took around 60s per frame for the final render, but keep in mind I did a lot of test renders and dialed in settings in order to try and get something I was happy with quality wise, but didn’t take ages to render it all.
I didn’t bother so much with Eevee, as one would have to pretty much plan for that from the very start. Even so, just because its a ‘real-time’ renderer, doesn’t mean it’s actually going to render in real-time.
On the subject of ‘Charge’ I grabbed the splash screen of that and rendered and that actually takes a lot of resources and time to in fact render just a single frame, so using Eevee doesn’t instant mean everything will render way faster. A complex scene is a complex scene and takes time to render, no matter the engine used.
Keep in mind I do have a 3080Ti.
If you are interested, I also have a more detailed breakdown of the whole process.
Thanks for replay. Yeah, I know there are a lot of things in the scene that affect the final render time.
yesterday, curious about whether eevee is able to render something faster, I tried to render a single frame of my “Bad Guy” and the rendering time amazed me.
In Cycles, the same scene took 20 minutes to render, in Eevee, after 10 minutes of adjusting materials and engine settings - the rendering time of a single frame was 18 seconds. When I added the smoke rendering took 1 min. For me, rendering 20 times faster on the same hardware is quite convincing. The end result is quite comparable.
The funny thing is, it maybe the smoke that is really slowing down Cycles. I think some people use Cycles to render the main scene (to take advantage of what Cycles does well compared to Eevee) and then just render effects like smoke, etc using Eevee (which can be way faster and still look very good).
Then the two are composited together.
In theory ‘Eevee Next’ should make things even more interesting, as either a much more total replacement for Cycles (still not true real-time, but way faster) or for compositing. Maybe even to the point of going the other way around and do all the main rendering in Eevee and then only select special items using Cycles.
Yes, I agree with you. I suppose that it could be quite good pipeline.
I spent yesterday only 30 min in Eevee since I didn’t know it at all but this 30 min was enough to convert the scene and I consider result as really decent.
I noticed 3 “problems” to the detriment of Eevee or my skills in working with it
glass - reflections are completely different (which may be a disadvantage or an advantage, I don’t know yet, for now I like the Cycles glass better)
hair particles - reads shaders strangely (I like the hair shader from Cycles better) because for now I don’t know how to make hair strands to be more reflective.
light sources should have more strength in Eevee.
But I think that there is somewhere a nice tutorial for both of my problems. And spending more time with Eevee will deftly help to solve my problems.
This is a rough sketch because I played with no rigged model in Eevee.
Left one is Cycles, right one is Eevee.
Yup, along with refraction, hence the eye looks way better with Cycles, as its a ray-tracer, compared to Eevee.
Not sure how much Eevee Next will improve things, but even with ‘hacks’ there’s a limit to how much a non ray-tracer can do.
