does this annoying error solves by getting studio version? why does not many talks about this? :<
To be perfectly honest, Iām not aware of that part at all.
Iām assuming that the features that makes E-cycles good are directly linked to Mathieuās hard work.
If i made a False assumption then i give my apologies to K-Cycles creators as what i said wouldnāt make sense. However If my assumption is correct then yes, the pricing is completely ridiculous and i still believe itās hurting entrepreneurship.
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So what is the difference between $1 E-Cycles 2021 Premium RTX and $299 E-Cycles RTX 2021 pls?
@Frostensen As I understand it, it has the 2x speedup only. Iām assuming no lightgroups, no AI denoiser, etc.
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So i just got the 1$ version and, like the documentation says, opened my file and hit render.
My render time went from 8:46 to 8:00.
Do i have to do anything else?
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If e-cycles 2x faster, render time will be 4:23 right? So where is 2 time faster rendering? I got a same results overall.
I am wondering the same thing.
Perhaps my scene is just a really bad example, though.
Unfortunately for NDA reasons I can not show it but it is a pretty standard scene with an imported CAD model of an industrial warehouse robot (looks like one of these lawn mowing robots). The robot is on a large floor and in the background there is a wall. It is lit by an hdri and a single spot light.
1024 samples, opitx on with a RTX 2080 and a RTX 2070. No bitmap textures only a bunch of procedural textures with principled shaders.
Any chance you can try with a different scene that you can share?
I donāt know about the $1 version but with the regular E-Cycles 2021 I get about twice the speed.
So far I only had one case where itās been difficult for me to get fast renders, but it is indeed a particular case: Hard Surface animated piece - #10 by phoe-nix-art
Dark environment, mesh emitter, and glass. That said, it went down from 25min to 15/17min per frame, not exactly half but still a significant gain.
Mathieu tested the scene, and he had some tips on how to improve it a little further but, unfortunately, I didnāt have the time to move forward with the project.
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Try selecting one of the āQuick Presetsā, there should be render presets like āQuick Previewā, āVery Fastā etc. This is the main thing in E-Cycles as far as I know. After applying one of those you should totally get other render times.
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Thank you I didnāt know about the presets thing. I set it ot āvery fastā now.
I put toghether a sharable scene.
In this scene there is no speed up at all. In fact e-Cycles renders 3 seconds slower than normal Blender. 6:55 vs 6:52.
I exchanged the NDA geometry with a free CAD file from GrabCAD. The materials are the same as the ones I use my real file.
The HDRI is not in the file but it uses the 4K version of this one from hdri haven:
Here is a render at 4K resolution:
Here is the blend file:
Holy crap, you deserve a prize for the most insane comparison ever made on internet. If it was written today Iād say this must be an april fools joke.
First things first:
I donāt argue pricing in general, it is relative make your prices however you value your time. I bought ecycles before I bought a lot of plugins or models etc of varying quality. If Mathieu wants to sell this for a million I donāt careā¦
But letās make one thing clear, you legit just compared pricing and development of a full blown commercial render engine(OCTANE) developed for years to an OPTIMIZATION of an existing render engine(CYCLES). Letās make this clear, e-cycles, k-cycles whatever cycles is still just a MOD of an existing engine.
Go ahead and make arguments about speed, or quality comparisons. But research and development of an rendering engine VS a modification of an existing render engine is few another dimensions and years apart each other.
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Hi Lumpengnom,
thereās a texture missing (paul_lobe_haus 4k.hdr). Would you mind to check for the missing one?
And: Which Hardware do you use?
The texture must be the hdri from hdrihaven linked in my last post.
Or perhaps it is a camara background image which i deleted and is not necessary.
Hardware:
RTX 2070 and RTX 2080
CPU:
Intel Core i7 6800K
@BD3D I agree with @chippwalters, @lacilaci86 and other guys. However, I have E-Cycles already costed version and Iām happy with that. BUT all that guys are saying you that both aspects are deeply different than READY-CODE and IN-DEVELOPMENT-FROM-THE-SCRATCH. Thats it! By the way, Iāve not knowledges about software licenses (related to Blender and cycles).
I will post you some differences with some scenes today I will have free timesš
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I gave it a quick test. But smaller in size (only 960x540) and without the hdri, just to not take longer for all those things than 10 minutes or so. I just have 16gb Ram and a 1060 with 6GB and only tested the āraw performanceā.
The results are, and mind I have an older ECycles Build, 2.82:
Blender 2.92 stable default (nothing changed, only resolution): 03:45
Ecycles 2.82 default (nothing changed, only resolution): 02:45
Ecycles 2.82 changed (resolution and very fast preset): 01:50
The GI was a good bit darker in the āvery fastā render but the overall quality still pretty decent.
Yes, E-Cycles is based on Blender and yes Blender is freely available code.
No Iām not complaining about other using freely available code, Iām complaining about it being a simple copy with some slightly changed values and being sold as own work.
I would be more than happy to have real competition. I find getting pseudo-competition through lies is on the other side at best a shame. If only Lukas or someone as skilled as him could challenge me in the open source field, that would be awesome 
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Thatās true. again, iām not aware of how both are made until now i guess.
You will note that from a consumer perspective buying an external render engine or buying such product is the exact same. When i first discovered E-cycles i directly compared it with octane, and hesitate between buying one or the other, so yes, they can be compared, from a consumer perspective, so can their price right?
Iām coming from a perspective of addon developer, so Iām assuming that the features directly comes from Mathieu work. Again i donāt know about all this source code subject (and i probably shouldnāt comment on things that i donāt know at the first place so thatās my fault i guess)
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As acadgatsu said, it has the original 2x speed-up from 2019 only, plus some tweaks to make it work on OptiX too and the presets. The full version has the AI-Denoiser which allows to cut sample count by 4 to 10, viewport light groups for very fast light setup, persistent data for instant start of renders etc.
more can be seen on the youtube channel and product pages.
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I understand the reasoning to a point.
If scene or type of scene is done equally fast in 2 engines I pick cheaper. (for the sake of argument letās say quality, level of support etc is identical too.) This is ok.
But saying value of work on a product from ground up = value of tweak/modification on existing work is nonsense.
Again, everybody charge as much as you want and can get away with it.
OFF TOPIC:
The sole reason E-cycles or other mods exist is simply that blender devs didnāt gave a damn about cycles for a long time. This is all their fault and I wonder if it is about to change.
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