why making this paid? why not rely on donations? Blender itself is free… mabe im being ignorant, but i wonder… pay for this but not for Blender?
Donations does work way better with a buy button. The ratio is arround 1 : 1000. So yes would love to rely on community donations, but looks like community is not ready for such sustainable model.
1 Like
Because people don’t live on love and fresh water…
On Gumroad you get on average 0,043 euro per download.
Based on my experience (23 245 free download).
Blender is free, but not its development. Currently, it is mainly donations from large companies that fund the Blender Foundation.
In addition, blender is already by far the cheapest marketplace.
6 Likes
E-Cycles offers 4x to 8x faster animation denoising and more. Now starting at $20. Launch offer with $100 off on Pro this week!
You can get E-Cycles 2022 now with:
- AI Animation Denoising and Viewport Light Groups AI Denoising:
-
Builds are now based on Blender 3.0, including Cycles X for state of the art render speed or latest 2.93.5 LTS with high speed and professional grade stability.
-
Denoise all passes:
Benefit from E-Cycles state of the art denoising quality in all your passes. Allows for very fast
workflow in complex pipelines. Simply save your work as multi-layer EXRs to get high quality
images in any application down the line.
- Copy render slot and overlay render results: You can copy any render to any slot instantly and only re-render a small part of the image while still getting the whole picture.
- Optimized physical glare: Offers physically correct simulation of the human eye.
- Very high quality denoising and SSAA for ultra-crisp renders:
- One click batch-portal creation with perfect alignment:
- Smart material override : preserves glass, mirrors and correctly detect volumes:
- Lower noise out of the box in many scenes for up to an additional 2x render speed boost at comparable quality!
- Copy Render Slot + Light Groups combo:
- Viewport Light Groups Denoising:
If you are only looking for better rendering speed and to compensate for the crazy GPU prices, you can now get E-Cycles 2022 with up to 2x faster rendering compared to Cycles X, render presets and multi-pass denoising for $20.
For 2021 users all the above features are available for free 
As an existing users you can pre-order your upgrade from any E-Cycles version (including 2019, 2020 and 2021) to E-Cycles Pro + RTX 2022 with 50% off. On the Blender Market you can use the coupon code ec-renewal (please be sure to be logged-in). On Gumroad, you should have received a mail with the coupon. It is also available in your downloads.
7 Likes
How do I migrate my existing installation over from vanilla
Hi, E-Cycles downloads are zipped files, you can unpack it anywhere and use it side by side to Vanilla Blender.
Cheers, mib
1 Like
I made this in cyclesX have a look
I have a question for you.
Assuming you’ll do a E-Cycles version of Cycles X when it is done and released, how much speed advantage you’ll be able to get out of it taking into account the new algorithms and methods that Brecht implements?
Do you think the speed difference will shrink, or do you think it will maintain its advantage?
Do you have some aces up your sleeve so to speak?
Hi.
I have a question, does the $20 E-cycle 2022 have RTX Version on it?
I was given a coupon with an expiration date, so I bought $10…
I’m not looking for anything other than a simple faster rendering feature, so I’m fine without the other features, but if OptiX is unsupported, I may ask for a refund.
E-Cycles 3.0 (available for 2021 and 2022 users) is already based on Cycles X since over a month.
For the speed difference in the Pro version, short version is around 2x to 16x faster depending on the use case. E-Cycles now provides better quality by default than Blender. You can lower the sample count to transform it in better speed in which case and at comparable quality:
- Animation rendering is about 4x to 8x faster compared to Cycles X thanks to the new AI animation denoiser, up to 16x if you have a scene taking advantage of the new sampling strategies.
- Static image rendering is between 2x and 4x faster, up to 8x if you have a scene taking advantage of the new sampling strategies.
You can add to all of this the huge human-time savings brought by light groups, light linking, automatic portal creations, etc. and you can get a return on investment for E-Cycles Pro 2022 within a few weeks. I’m preparing a video showing an RTX 2070 super with E-Cycles Pro 2022 beating an RTX 3090 with latest Blender 3.0 beta (using Cycles X).
iMeshh and @Alexander_Sokerov made some videos using the new AI animation denoising feature:
4 Likes
2x to 16x faster depending on the use case?
That is truly impressive, I did not expect that.
Great, considering the fact that many people (me included) can’t afford to spent the absurd amount of money a 3090 costs, seeing it being beaten into submission by an older much more affordable card is really nice to see. Gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Thanks bliblubli. 
2 Likes
You’re welcome Romanji!
1 Like
New E-Cycles November Feature Update is available with Light Linking and Animation Denoising for up to 8x faster rendering at comparable quality!!!
Happy rendering!
6 Likes
Note for Blender Market users: the Blender Market coupon system is giving errors to some users trying to upgrade. The price on the Blender Market is currently reduced to compensate. The price will go back to normal on Sunday. Please contact [email protected] if you had issues with coupons (or didn’t even receive it) and you need more time.
It blows my mind that this kind of performance is possible without any drawbacks (or am I missing something?). Oh how amazing it would be to see you guys working for the BF. Of course that wouldn’t be as lucrative I assume.
Nope not really.
Better sampling / denoise algorithms are a solution that use computation power more effectively, the advantage in speed is simply the consequence of better engineering.
If you analyse the end result on a pixel by pixel base, there might be some small advantage of not using a denoiser or certain kind of sampling methods in regards to image quality, but this advantage only applies to very specific use cases and is also shrinking the more these techniques advance.
The law of diminishing returns applies here.
Would you accept 200 - 1600% longer render times if the payoff is maybe 1-5% better image quality
that 95% of your audience doesn’t even perceive consciously?
I wouldn’t.
@bliblubli Do you know of any specific use cases where the advanced sampling methods clearly fail in creating an equally high quality image?
I don’t think that happens.
Can you say with certainty in what kinds of situations the denoiser creates clearly diminished quality images compared to images that don’t use it?
Lets assume I am an annoying perfectionist and absolutely want the last percentage of quality.
Sorry for poking you to reveal weaknesses, Its just for the sake of argument, I don’t think these matter, I am just curious.
Light linking is a game-changer! Thank you for adding this.
Will have a huge impact on archviz when describing shapes with targeted lighting, bringing visual attention to parts of the scene without ruining other lights in the scene.
It is a key part of high-end visualisation workflows like Jakub Cech’s in corona.
2 Likes
Hi,
I’m happy to speak about weaknesses, it helps having more happy users with realistic expectations. Regarding your questions:
- the new sampling strategy is made to always offer at least the same quality (so in some scene it will look comparable) or better quality. If you (anybody) find a scene where it’s otherwise, you are welcome to make a bug report.
- For static image denoising, it should also always be superior, but it’s AI so unpredictable by nature. I can at least say that all tested scene had significantly superior quality with E-Cycles compared to latest vanilal 3.0.
- For animation denoising, it’s a very young process. While it will easily win in most use cases, it clearly doesn’t like very bright fireflies yet (if you deactivated clamping, which is on by default in most render engines) in which case static animation denoising with OpenImageDenoise can be superior. A solution to keep render time low is to simply use the default clamping value of 10 for indirect light. In all my test even 100 is ok. Another weekness of Animation denoising is quickly appearing/disappearing thin surfaces. The AI looks takes it’s decision based on neighboor pixels and temporal data about the same pixels in the previous image. So if those pixels don’t exist in the previous image and you only have a few neighboor pixels of the same surface, there is very little data for the AI to take a good decision. In my tests, it’s still superior to static image denoising in this case.
You’re welcome Ryan!