When you get used to cyces and all its features and caveats, how do you feel when have to use internal blender renderer?
What was the case that made you refuse cycles?
Does node materials compensate the anguish?
Well, for me BI still outperforms cycles in terms of speed and flexibility, and also somewhat functionality. So not its the other way around for me. It hurts when I use cycles instead of BI, and the main cause for this is the inevitable noise ( unless you are totally stripping down the bounces and color bleeds, and I wont use cycle over BI anyday without those). The only thing good with cycles, the way I see is the node based shaders, and preview rendering. Other than that I really cant appreciate the whole “Path Tracer” thing over other algorithms, atleast for artistic works and animation. Its just too too slow using CPU, and there seems to be no way of getting a noise free render except for some node setups, obviously with the loss in quality.
Many people are using it already, and having fairly good results, but so far I havent seen a render that can actually be labeled as production quality, all look noisy and smeary. And I understand its still a WIP but I really cant see cycles could be the solution for Animation, especially not for the small studios and individuals, unless you have your own renderfarm. I think what Blender needed was better GI algorithms for BI, so removing dependence on fakes and tricks far less than it was, though they would be available if user wanted, and ability to switch between raytracing and approximations as the case would demand.
But what is more terrible is if someone wants to use cycles as BI, I mean by using direct light without bounces, and gradually placing lights where needed, and so on, it’s still very slower than BI, and also those noises just kill the render. I wished that cycles would have some other algorithms like irradiance cache, photon mapping etc someday, but Im highly doubtful as its really not in devs priority, not as of now. So, Im still using BI, and though many say its crap as compared to cycles, I really find it a lot better, atleast as of now. Maybe that will change, I hope.
They exists, but perhaps it’s down to opinion…
Art is very subjective.
Due to hardware limitations cycles is useless for me. I am in the market for a new monster machine. Once I get it, I will revisit cycles. Of course I do play with it just to make sure when I do go back to it I don’t start over. But with out a gpu to speed up rendering it is useless (to me) for any kind of production work.
They exists, but perhaps it’s down to opinion…
Art is very subjective.
To some extent its subjective, for things like lighting execution, photorealism over NPR , look development and shaders, but for things like noise, I dont think its desirable anywhere in art, atleast not in the art of CG creation. As a piece of art, the concept and its execution is the first thing to look at, but when it comes to creating CG assets for production, the very noise thing just kills every aspect of the render, however well it would have been setup, coz it’ll will not be approved. Although cycles material setup is really good, its rendering is just mediocre, and any attempt to reduce noise will just remove just about every good thing that cycles offer. And Im yet to achieve a render with completely noise free or considerably noise free , unless Im rendering just a default cube with anything more than using direct lighting, however high samples may I use.
Considering the BI, material setups may take time but the final render looks much presentable than cycles.
Actually, there are some artwork in this forum, rendered with cycles.
You’re probably not searching on the right topics. Or one the right forums.
Most probably, you don’t know how to use cycles.
Let me but it this way.
As time goes by, more and more artist are coming to blender. Because of cycles, among other new goodies.
Then, you’ll see more wonderful works, maybe better than those production ready masterpieces you have in mind.
You keep talking about noisy results, CG assets and creations, baked AO maps…
eh, indeed, I never shaw such noisy AO maps like the one’s baked in BI. AO of cycles are (will be) of a much better quality.
You don’t follow our tests, our efforts.
This is really a problem on this forum.
This is a thread for trolls, by all means.
Well, All you are presenting here are speculations on the future, like when this will happen, or that will happen, then cycles will be better than all others and whatnot…and may be it’ll. I just talked about the present and as of now unless you have a very powerful gpu to power renders, you cant come even closer to what BI can do. And I dont have a powerful gpu for a matter of fact, so cycles is more or less useless for me, as of now.
And talking about noisy renders, link to me something thats not a default cube which is noise free to consider for production, if the word production really makes sense to you, just with cycles. And I was not bashing cycles as being useless, the topic was about personal opinions, but the way you are calling people trolls is not understandable.
And talking about searching forums, well I have to say to you that, you really need to have some time off BA forums and look around other forums, like CG society for god sake and see what the production quality CG creation means. I know cycles is still WIP, but by the nature of the engine, its really hard to get noise free results, atleast with CPU, and it takes a lot more time to do that.
you cant come even closer to what BI can do
Are you challenging me? LOL
I can’t come even closer… wow. You mean cycles can’t come even closer…
It’s alway easy to click on a user’s name and search for some of his artwork.
You also misunderstood me. My bad english, sorry.
This thread will become the favorite of some trolls, you’ll see.
Speculations on the future… I was talking about new blender users, artists.
Not this or that will happen. These are happening already and they are not speculations. You just missed them.
Are you challenging me? LOL
I can’t come even closer… wow. You mean cycles can’t come even closer…
I said “you” as “any user”, not you. And I’m not challenging you, and I know you are a good artist, Ive see your work and really like your sculpting and I wanted to have ur sculpt render as the new splash screen for 2.66, but I was not talking about you, but cycles. I can see you completely misunderstood me.
This thread will become the favorite of some trolls, you’ll see
Trolls feed on our fear!!..Dont be afraid of them, they come,say and go, and if no one feeds them, its actually not much issue. And talking about myself, Im more of a lighting and look development artist , so even a minor glitch seems like a big thing for me, especially in the final renders. And at present, though cycles offers a very good GI and ways to control the bounces and all, but the noises really kill the look for me. Although maybe BI doesnt offer a realistic ways to render, and lots of faking goes under the hood, the final output is just completely noise free, atleast with all I do.
i am using bowth depending on what work im working i use one of those renders or bove.
You can always turn the bounces to one and have faster render than BI and noisy free, right?
I still remember the bl 2.49 calculations for radiosity… or some experimental GI on BI (2.5). It was taking for ever.
Regarding noise. This happens on interiors mostly. On studio setups (my sculpts) it takes less than a min to render without noise.
Well, I did my tests on interiors. Lot of tricks can make cycles 10-20 times faster. The basic tool for this, is the lightpath node. You don’t really need the reflections of a shinny floor. You obviously need the diffuse BSDF to reflect but not the possible glossy BSDF.
You need all the diffuseBSDFs to reflect of course but you can live with the frames of a window to not reflect anything.
Such elements, close to lightsources cause the most of the noise. Caustics, you don’t always need them. etc etc
Optimizations, a faster access on them, could be nice. A filter for not letting more lightpaths to be reflected from a close to lights diffuse for instance.
In general, IMO, it’s completely wrong to assign a pure white color on a diffuse BSDF. Such a material is never physically correct.
We could talk for ever, on cycles techniques. It’s a new engine, two years old only. It’s just fine already.
BI exists and will be there for long time. But, development stopped. It’s already dead then. When cycles will be able to bake on UV textures then BI will stop existing. It’s not something I’m asking. But an app without further development… you know.
Maybe currently for rendering animations in a cartoonish style BI is good. BI fast speed drops instantly the moment you start using raytraced shaders specifically with glossy values.
Well Cycles is noisy and might need longer to render than Octane however I do not wast time on test renders like in BI and thus is the work done faster in Cycles than BI.
I am in product design and Cycles is the finally a tool that makes Blender professional for me. For animations I am sure that Brecht + Ton and the devs have a plan. Cycles is not even finished yet.
BI won’t be completely gone until 2014 I think.Bi stopped development some years ago.Cycles has plenty of room for improvement.
Brecht said he plans to have the major features of cycles finished by summer (probably the end of summer like august-september)
after that will be optimization and performance.Cycles is designed for animation so ofcourse this will be addressed.
SSS is next,once zbrush users/hobbyists see what that can do,you can bet that cycles will become main render engine for a lot of personal work of skilled artists once word gets out :).
Having high end or even mid range hardware is the nature of computer graphics,if you really enjoy your hobby,you can start saving now,or ask for birthday or Christmas gift.
Rendering has always been “expensive” and GPU can only go so far anyway,eventually you will have to use CPU if the scene size is huge.If you want to create anything close to the scale of hollywood features,you’ll have to end up using a render farm anyway,unless you want to spend three years rendering.
also you can clean up noise like this for now…
From my point of view “production quality” doesn’t mean more realistic results,but mainly clean results,with no artifacts,good antialiasing and so on(obviously a more realistic render is a great thing btw).
It’s clear that currently Cycles cannot be fast enough for some task(to clear the noise which I consider an artifact),but it’s also true that Blender Internal is dead,the future is Cycles.
I see currently Blender Internal to be useful only as a workaround when you need some feature that you don’t have yet with Cycles,more as a composite tool that can expand what you can currently do with Cycles.
People who complain about Cycles taking too long compared to BI must be rendering with a lot of bells and whistles turned off.
Glossy reflections, Environment Lighting with Final Gather and Ambient Occlusion take a lot of samples in BI, as well. In fact, Cycles is significantly faster than BI at these raytracing-based features.
If you want to converge your image to near zero variance, all you need to do is wait. Most people will however leave some of it in, because it doesn’t hurt the look (at least for people who aren’t obsessive about it).
Also, if you find Cycles “useless” now, getting a GPU to render won’t really fix it. You get maybe a 4x speedup over a decent CPU, which is not exactly a gamechanger.
Yep, I enjoy the “Ugly” noise that both BI and Cycles can produce.
I dont have much of a problem with BI but switching to Cycles and back do. I have figured out how too render both at the same time and mix. My biggest problem is switching, this is causing me a lot of errors mostly with textures just clicking nodes on or switch back to Cycles or BI is a major problem mainly because Blender is just not responding to the demand. Saving the file and rebooting Blender helps but not allways. I thing modifiers can cause a lot of problems for any render engine and this is a big issue, how do you know what is really going out the door. My biggest problem is rendering a room that is closed in cycles but have the same problem in BI to much spec light wrong colors ect. As for the blender rendering a high mesh I think cycles is rendering just as good a BI. I can take up a long render time in BI just as easy as i can in cycles but in cycles the render times a have been even.
I am switching between Cycles and BI (and loads of other render engines) a lot. Cycles is good for a lot of things while BI is just faster/better/more flexible for other things, there is no “best” renderer.
I currently have no trouble switching between engines but I am concerned about how it will be in the future. I am still using a custom build of Blender 2.63 for most of my work and I see Cycles change a lot and fast in the newer versions of Blender. I do not have time to play with all the new features and I fear that when Cycles is “finished” I won’t recognize it anymore and have to learn it all over again.
No, I don’t think you will ever see any one renderer “go away” or be abandoned. It’s a silly thought: you don’t have to “choose,” and there are plenty of workflows that use multiple techniques at once.
Cycles uses an entirely different algorithm from the other two renderers (BI and Game) which Blender already provides “under one roof.” Therefore, it’s great for some things but not particularly for others. It’s a great way to produce “big, global illumination” in an evenly-lit space. It does not do well, at this point in time, when the lighting and the tonal-range in a particular scene is more widespread, since the algorithm converges on its solutions. However, a combination of the two techniques, composited together, produces excellent outcomes. You take the best of all worlds to efficiently produce components for eventual compositing … and it is that compositing step, not the render steps, that “create the shot.”
Many interesting thoughts here. And, one guy mentioned subjective. Another cartoonish results. Hey, skip on over to blendermama and check her BI renders out. http://blendermama.com/ One thing you have to notice is many blender artist evidently consider realistic results the holy grail of CG art. Now without a doubt that type of work needs to be in anyones portfolio pursusing a studio job as has been stated many times in other places.
But, are we not simply talking about two different looks and two mediums if you will. In the heyday of illustration Albert Dorne used colored inks while Norman Rockwell used oils. Each going for a certain look and both highly successful commercial artist. If Blender Internal is gone by 2014 as one post suggest many CG artist will simply seek out another render engine of that type.
Hell I just discovered they are 500 render engines out there some realistic like cycles and some like BI. http://www.animationartist.com/2001/03_mar/features/rendering/render_engines.html I would imagine many professionals will continue to use both types depending on subject matter. Both are just tools to be used on any given day.
I’m doing something for my daughters business right now and immediately went to BI because of the look I was searching for. Several minutes ago I decided to use cycles on the same composition just to compare. It will be done in BI by the way. Now a different concept and composition with different elements might have called for Cycles. Both just two fine tools at my disposal.
Speaking for myself sometimes I get so tied up in computer graphics I forget art is still alive and well using other mediums. I have a childhood friend who makes enough off of one oil painting to buy my damn computer, The Blender Guru’s, and probably five more just like them.
With the success of Pixar Disney immediately got busy firing their entire 2d animation department. Something that saddened the artist at Pixar who liked the 2d cell look. So with that being said I defer to the post mentioning this entire thing is subjective.