The addon is up. Activate it, then at the bottom of the render panel choose quality level (1 for fast, up to 3 for very high quality) and hit “create node tree”
I used quality level 3 for the 4 second renders of classroom, so it’s still fast but requires more memory.
Edit: a quick tutorial to use the addon is also up now. Some hours left to benefit from the reduced price.
I was getting more and more interested, but I made an account especially to be able to respond in this thread. I do not care for something for which the price goes up and up… I can imagine your response on the growing functionality, but I use Blender for fun only and 14 euro per month just to try e-cycles is too steep for me. I think I will wait until you include all of this in the (free) master of Blender.
I may be mistaken but from info on gumroad you can pay for one month only and then cancel subscription and keep current build without any further payment. Sure you will not recieve any more future updates (until you renew your subs) but still you will have all the improvements from that month you subscribed. And for 14 euro that is not bad at all.
aka : Can I do only one or two month?
Yes, you stay as long as you want, you are free, and you continue to get updates for the month you have paid.
Thanks, but yes I know you can unsubscribe. However, when in real life, somebody offers me something and then says: if you wait too long it will get more expensive and in a couple of weeks again it will get even more expensive, I tend not to want to buy anything anymore. I really admire the progress you seem to have made here with this addon; I was ready to try it out in a couple of weeks but with rising prices I seem to see only commercial aspects to this and I do not like that at all. I know it is a free world, but wanted to voice my opinion anyway.
Hi Flup,
the price in fact was reduced during beta and until now only grew to it’s normal price.
A lot of users who joined early still pay 6€/month for 2x faster render, reduced noise, new denoiser, etc.
I also have students at 3€/month.
To be fair, you should also say that the year option is now more affordable.
And every time a user kindly asked in PM to benefit from a reduced price after the limit, I gave him a coupon to still benefit from the offer. So if you got surprised, just PM me.
For the amount of features and the stability it reached, it’s more than fair I think.
For the mac users, after speaking a bit, the deal would be the following. Everyone does a step. I do a build, you gather users. The more Mac user join, the more I do updates. If that’s ok for you and you would buy a mac version, post “Mac 2.8x” or “Mac 2.79x” depending on the version you want.
So I sent you a PM and got the previous price, thank you for that. However, in my first test the render speed is about the same as this build (20 sec of 12 min render time): http://graphicall.org/1242
(this is 2.79 with dithered sobol and scrambling distance, sort of a 2.79 gui with a lot of the new stuff from 2.8 under the hood)
So my question is:
where can I find the options which are specific for e-cycles? I can only find the dithered sobol, scrambling distance is not in your build?
I have trouble getting the AI denoiser to work, it keeps crashing on me (maybe having multiple renderlayers is the problem). And to understand: did you include the new denoiser in your build or is this also in the master of 2.8?
E-Cycles just works out of the box. Indeed, you can get a good speedup with the scrambling distance patch, but you have to fiddle a lot to find values that don’t break your renders. And it won’t help at all at low spp, which is now possible with the new denoiser.
E-Cycles supports RTX cards
Dithered sobol in E-Cycles has a lot of fixes.
You get E-Cycles builds every week on both the 2.79 and 2.8 version and also get support. To give you an idea, where I work we pay 140€/hour for support for one of our software. It’s just a programmer that answer your mails or discuss with you on the phone, the software price is separate. In your case, you will get 4 builds for 10€ so about 2,50 €/build. With Graphicall, you have an old 2.79.6 build from November with all it’s bugs and you are dependant on other willing to do the job of patching and building for you.
If you like to do things yourself, you can also take the course, you can then patch Blender yourself, do as much builds as you want, based on the branch you like. And you will also learn to add modifiers, customize the UI, etc. Maybe a better fit for you?
The new denoiser is not in 2.8, but it will certainly come in at some point. If level 3 crashes, use level 2 as it requires less ram.
A new version of the addon is ready for download. It makes transmission and sss optional, so that you can use only half the memory to denoise when using level 3.
I’m working on on it, here is a preview of my dev branch. This is Branched Path Tracing and it took 33sec per frame instead of 1min49 on master on a single 1080Ti for FULL HD and without denoising:
I’m planning to use E-Cycles for my company’s cloud rendering system which has over 50 GPUs on it. With this improvement, we can save tons of cost per month to keep the system alive.
I will make some test on our system as soon as the release of branched path tracing is ready.
just wanted to say thank you for what you are doing here. As a hobbyist and a father of three with a full-time job, time is my most precious resource. Both your course and your build service for E-Cycles help me save some of that, so thanks again
