E-Cycles - The fastest render engine for Blender. 3.2 release available now!

norka · October 16, 2019, 11:07pm

As a seven year user of Octane, my suggestion is to get E-Cycles now, and if down the road you find that there is something that Octane has, that Cycles/E-Cycles doesn’t, that you simply must have, then get Octane… Entrance fee for Octane and being able to use more than 2 GPUs will run you something like $699 to be a licensed Enterprise Octane user. I have only used Octane a couple times in the last six months to make tweaks to and re-render old Octane LightWave jobs. Yes it has out-of-core rendering and can instance like a mofo on the GPU, and displacements are second-to-none, and there are a buttload of fancy bells & whistles that I almost never need in ordinary day-to-day work, so I hardly miss Octane, at all. And also be aware that using Octane requires all materials to be set up with Octane’s material nodes… So forget about using many addons that use PrBSDF mats (like Graswald for example)… Get E-C Richard. You will not be sorry. And get B-Renderon (best render queue manager ever! and only $8!) while you are at it, for banging out renders like a champ.

Edit: And here is another heads-up Richard; releases of Octane are often painfully slow bro. You may find that you would be using a build of Blender that is many months old before you get the next one. Mathieu on the other hand is firing off new builds pretty much weekly, with all the latest Blender goodies. You will never, ever, get that with Octane…

davorin · October 17, 2019, 8:23am

Sounds like a plan (o;

Well the subscription is currently payed by my employer…and there is still no RT core support in Octane…though they’re talking about it to be implemented soon…

Yes…downside is the vast amount of plugins and materials missing…like the new UMSS material plugin…
got it only half-working so far with Octane Blender with some python code changes…

Time to pile up my paypal account 'til end of October then…

Hmm…does the 2020 in the product title mean it is accessible throughout 2020 or just normally 12 months after purchase?

davorin · October 17, 2019, 8:44am

Hmm…just installed Linux E_Cycles 20191010 version…

When previewing a render it is stuck at sample 1/32 and keeps rendering first sample forever…not with all blend files though…

Final render is fine…

Grzesiek · October 17, 2019, 8:51am

Thanks for the comparison.

I noticed that you changed tile settings between blender Optix and E-Cycles RTX. Can you add another render results:

e-cycels at 256 tiles
Blender Optix with auto tiles

As you knwo tiles do have good impact at render speeds, as such it would be good to compare at similar settings.

Hyesung · October 17, 2019, 9:23am

Thank you for your advice.

Yes. I set E-Cycles to Auto tiles because it is the default setting, (This looks like Tiles size 256 in 20191010 version.)
and OtpiX set the Tile size to 256 because that was the fastest value when I tested.

But with your advice, I’ll apply it to the new benchmarks next time If a significant improvement release comes out.

Thanks

bliblubli · October 17, 2019, 9:40am

Hi Richard,
can you provide a file per mail please with the bug that stick at 1 sample? Please generally do bug reports per mail. Here it is easily overviewed and it’s hard to keep track with several parallel discussion about different subjects.

bliblubli · October 17, 2019, 9:43am

Hi,
thanks for the report. The AI denoiser addon now only create the node tree through Python. Any bug happening in the compositor after the tree was created is a bug in Blender itself most probably as I only modify the path tracing and modifier code now. 2.81 is in bugfix mode, so it’s a good time to make a ticket on developer.blender.org to get it working properly hopefully in the upcoming stable release.

bliblubli · October 17, 2019, 9:47am

The bug with HSV is fixed since more than 2 months now. I just double checked and it works in latest build. For the line in the composited image, like I said, E-cycles only creates the node tree and is 100% like blender for the compositor code. So it’s most probably a bug in Blender. As you are using an old version, I recommend to first update to the latest version, it may already have been fixed.

bliblubli · October 17, 2019, 9:50am

Thanks a lot for your very detailed test. I indeed added a lot of optimisations in the new RTX build. More are being worked on

bliblubli · October 17, 2019, 9:55am

I’m happy to hear E-Cycles RTX is so fast in your current scene. Depending on the geometric complexity, RTX can indeed bring a lot.
Several user confirm E-Cycles RTX works very well with multi-GPU rendering

sabbinet · October 17, 2019, 10:08am

This is awesome to hear! Saving for another 2080 Ti these days, hopefully will get it at the end of month. RTX build is rock and roll, can’t imagine with two cards… Cheers!!

brano · October 17, 2019, 12:49pm

I am using E_cycles_2.81_v20191010 I downloaded from Blendermarket, but the Separate HSV node still gives black output. I dont understand it. Any idea?

The outline is regular result of compositing when you want a transparent background, but you do not include alpha information. There is no bug. If someone want clean render with AI denoiser and transparent background, alpha info needs to be add(I did it with Set Alpha node…). It would be nice to have it in compositing when creating or regenerating AI denoiser tree when transparency is checked.

Hyesung · October 18, 2019, 5:48am

Here is E-Cycles RTX benchmark of Blender Demos. For those who want to know.

Try a comparison with the old Blender Demos benchmark
It’s very interesting.
https://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snapshot.html

Lumpengnom · October 18, 2019, 8:21am

Isn’t that what this is?

ChristianVFX · October 18, 2019, 8:49am

Why yes it is. I had know idea they already set it up. I wonder how efficient it is and if it also works while using RTX features.

Lumpengnom · October 18, 2019, 9:22am

No idea about RTX but according to Derek Barker its speed is “holy poop”.

Fallirini · October 18, 2019, 9:39am

So is this the real OOC rendering like redshift (even octane I believe) ? Or the version that was implement some time ago? Unfortunately I haven’t tested any VRAM intense scene lately due to lack of time but I am really curious about that. Because yes they did introduce OOC rendering in cycles but it wasn’t 100% ready (there were scenes where you would run out of memory anyway with GPU rendering).

PS: Also there is a lack of informations about this topic and sorry if I am injecting that into this topic (which is about E-Cycles). On the other hand Bliblu could know about this like a part of E-Cycles (if that is a case and you can like include OOC into E-cycles as part of its development)

ChristianVFX · October 18, 2019, 10:06am

I think it is a wise area to focus on. Stacking multiple RTX cards still has it’s issues apparently. But even getting Out Of Core Rendering running quickly and efficiently on a single card is a real achievement. I already maxed out my motherboard on RAM when the price dropped. And I can see this having a huge positive effect on rendering. And I didn’t even know they had already started working on it.

Lumpengnom · October 18, 2019, 10:15am

I don’t know. The commit is from January 2018. I have never needed it so I’ve never tested it either.
Interestingly the manual states that it is not implemented at all. Might be a case of the manual being outdated, though.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html

Why does a scene that renders on the CPU not render on the GPU?

There maybe be multiple causes, but the most common is that there is not enough memory on your graphics card. We can currently only render scenes that fit in graphics card memory, and this is usually smaller than that of the CPU. Note that, for example, 8k, 4k, 2k and 1k image textures take up respectively 256MB, 64MB, 16MB and 4MB of memory.

We do intend to add a system to support scenes bigger than GPU memory, but this will not be added soon.

Fallirini · October 18, 2019, 10:24am

Yeah well it would be wise and it had its moments like a year ago (when they implemented that kinda OOC) but it somewhat died out and I dunno why. Probably due to lack of interest? Honestly it has its use mostly in Archviz area and even there people seems to get around it via instancing, linking, etc. They might also just render via CPU + intel denoiser (2990WX can do some tricks there). Still lets see if Bliblu got some insight about it.