Witch is better and why?
Maybe a side-by-side comparison?
Cycles is better, IMHO. BI is probably faster in most situations. There are still a lot of functionality in BI which is not yet ported to Cycles, but for most cases, Cycles (with enough samples etc.) gives better renders. If you need certain features, you can render them in BI and composite them with Cycles render, inside Blender.
This thread will go nowhere.
They are completely different technologies underneath, it depends on the end user which is preferable for the task at hand.
Steak or pizza - which one is better?
a)
This is to some degree a matter of personal taste: Any renderer has a certain “look”, which you may or may not like and which fits your needs more or less.
b)
But it’s also a matter of appetite:
Does your rendering task require photorealism in general and a realistic lighting representation in special? Go with Cycles.
Or do you rather need or want stylized visuals? Then I would prefer BI, as it’s imho better suited for that kind of look.
Go through the renders in the gallery to get a feeling for the look both renderers create, learn both and use them according to your needs.
I can’t tell you what’s better but i can tell you which one i prefer - it’s Cycles because i’m more used to it (never learned BI in-depth) and because it’s more actively developed. In Cycles you can get a better idea of how your scene will look with all the lights and materials set up, but it will take longer to sufficiently “clear up” when doing a final render compared to BI.
When Cycles first appeared, I didn’t understand what everyone was excited about and what the big deal was. Eventually I got curious and researched raytrace lighting. Once I understood the actual functionality, I realized Cycles is indeed an awesome engine. To me personally, Cycles is better than BI for multiple reasons:
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First of all, ray tracing means physically accurate lighting, which is by all means more correct. The classic light system simulates brightness caused by light sources, as well as other effects like reflections. For example, glass deforms objects behind it because it really refracts that ray of light as it’s calculated, rather than using post processing to add distortion to an image to simulate refraction.
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Second reason is that due to the above, Cycles can do things Blender Internal can’t. Mesh lights, bounce lighting, HDR reflection maps and more. I’m fairly certain there’s no way BI can achieve the vivid feel in some of the stunning renders I saw with Cycles, because it can’t do some effects with its limited approximation techniques. Only thing BI has over Cycles IIRC is the ability to run as a game engine.
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Third reason is that IMO, Cycles is more clean and optimally designed. BI uses ray tracing too for shadows and AO, which from what I noticed is quite slow… comparable to Cycles shadows. If you have to trace rays, why not use that opportunity to do everything at once? In BI you draw the light on a surface, then trace the shadows, then trace the AO, then compute reflections / refractions… while in Cycles you just trace and all these happen naturally. In this sense, Cycles should actually be faster.
The only problem with Cycles is that it’s overall much slower. Especially if you want the physically correct stuff, such as light bounces and caustics. Still, you can disable bounces and get results and render times similar to BI. It also lacks some features currently (like volume support) although that will be fixed in time. So overall, I recommend people to switch to Cycles personally, although BI also has its uses and should not be forgotten in a dark corner.
Simple answer is: if you have an nvidia gpu Cycles and if you don’t BI.
But of course there is a lot more to it than just that. I think I heard that most of the work going forward would be in cycles primarily too. Even if you don’t have an nvidia gpu and can’t take advantage of the huge speed boost cycles gives, it is still a good idea to get used to it. BI is very cool but Cycles is fun. lol hows that over oversimplifying?
My take on the Nvidia part: If you have a Nvidia GPU, use Cycles with bounce lighting and all shaders and features you want. If you don’t, use Cycles without any bounces, no caustics, minimal settings, and simple BSDF shaders… which will give good render times on CPU and can be noise free if done properly. I haven’t used Cycles for anything serious yet (mostly testing) so my advice might not be as valid, but that’s how I see it.
Some say “or”, I say “and”.
You can work with both if you need to, and materials in Blender can be made nodal, and the Cycles shaders can then be added into the same material though you will need to add the appropriate output node and set up your image nodes, etc. You can then use scenes to render Internal and Cycles independently, and mix them in the compositor for effect.
Which is better? Kind of like asking which of my kids I love more… Like my kids, I love them equally, but they have different things they are good at…
The flaw I run into Cycles with (GPU mode rendering) is that at some point you will run out of graphics card memory. It does not matter if you have a single high-density texture mapped mesh or lots of texture on low poly meshes. At some point you will run out of memory and Cycles will render your textures as pink or Cycles will refuse to render anything at all. The fix is to render on the CPU which raise render time quite a bit.
So Cycles is all fun and yeah until you hit the wall.
Just keep the limit in mind. If you are a heavy modeler or texture person you can end up with GPU rendering problems as your scene grows in size. But it is all solvable by throwing money at the problem.
RO : Nu ma asteptam sa vad romani pe aici…
EN : Thanks guys!
cycles is pointless for animating if you dont have Nvidia GPU render
Just remember that with Cycles, you can determine how much you need for bounces of each component so that you conserve render time. Used to be called Non-Progressive Integrator, I forget what it is called now, but I got good results on CPU by limiting what was happening.
That’s just not true, I animate with Cycles on an i7 2600k all of the time. Anyone who thinks they’re going to get a professional-looking animation with realistic materials out of either engine on the average home PC is living in a dream world though.