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

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Focus on your Art

The fastest and easiest photorealistic render engine for Blender. A drop-in replacement, 100% compatible with the Blender/Cycles. You can use all your materials and add-ons while rendering up to 2x faster out of the box with NVidia GPUs. Features state of the art denoising technology (now including AI animation denoising), a streamlined UI for ease of use and fast workflows, Lightgroups in the viewport for instant feedback of lighting changes, and much more.

“Thank you for such a great product!” - Michael Bengtsson from www.Mindbender.com

PC Version:

Mac Version:

New E-Cycles November Feature Update is available with Light Linking and Animation Denoising for up to 8x faster rendering at comparable quality!!! You can try a free demo here and learn with free tutorials on the official Youtube channel.

New October Feature Update 2021.5 is available for E-Cycles 2.93.5 and E-Cycles X (3.0):

  • E-Cycles X now offers state of the art AI Animation Denoising enabling stable denoised videos with a 1/4th of the sample count. 256 samples instead of over 1000 for the Reithalle bei Artur Szóstakowski:
  • E-Cycles X now has viewport light groups too
  • E-Cycles 2.93.5 and E-Cycles X now support viewport light groups denoising
  • E-Cycles 2.93.5 and E-Cycles X can now denoise all passes (light groups, diffuse direct, diffuse indirect, etc.) and save the denoised version in EXR for high quality pipeline work using SSAA and all the E-Cycles AI-Denoiser improvements.
  • E-Cycles 2.93.5 and E-Cycles X can copy render slots and use overlay rendering for very fast iterations
  • E-Cycles 2.93.5 and E-Cycles X now offers much faster physical glare

You can see how to use the new features in the 2021.3 feature update overviews:

To compensate for the very high GPU prices and as requested you can now get the original feature set of E-Cycles with blazing fast render speed and multi-pass denoising on top of Cycles X starting at $20!

Happy rendering!

Rendered with E-Cycles recently:

Bulvar Apartments by Artur Szóstakowski

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bulvar_thumb113000×3000 1.96 MB

You can learn more about this render here

St Mary’s church by Bob Marshall

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bob-marshall-stmarys-1500-chancelscreen1400×1283 976 KB

You can learn more about this render here

Robot Tiger Figure by Michael Weisheim Beresin

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E-Cycles 7 builds available You can get up to 3x faster rendering compared to Cycles X on the Blender Market!

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Made with E-Cycles:

Distant World 2 main Trailer was done entirely in E-Cycles:

Premiere Lift Group, working for Zaha Hadid architects switched entirely from UE4 to E-Cycles for all animations and renders:

iMeshh, a high quality asset store also completly switched to E-Cycles for all their renders and made a video showing how E-Cycles features can help you as a professional artists:

New Features in E-Cycles 2021:

E-Cycles 2021 now gives you loads of optimizations for the viewport. You can now render millions of polygons with hundreds of thousands of objects in a smooth viewport experience!

E-Cycles 2021 - February update - New features and improvements:

  1. highly optimized viewport rendering for complex scenes. You can see the new viewport in action – along with a lot of other new features showcased – in a heavy architectural visualization scene by the iMeshh team in this video:
  1. reworked quick settings panel: all viewport options are now directly accessible in the viewport itself, making them faster to access and leaving room for extra options in the quick settings – for example, to easily scale the resolution of your image,
  2. improved quality for OptiX denoising,
  3. better defaults out of the box: new scenes will now default to Cycles with GPU rendering. The standard version of E-Cycles will use CUDA by default, while E-Cycles RTX will use OptiX by default. Please ensure you haven’t set the device type yourself if you want to use these new defaults and save time. If you’re using CPU or OpenCL, you can simply switch to this and save your preferences!
  4. artists who prefer to work with the compositor version of light groups, will now see updates when tweaking the light groups values, even if no compositor window is opened. You can now easily see the effect of your changes. The best way is still to use viewport light groups though, as it’s real time,
  5. Physical Glare is now available as a new mode of the glare node. It is based on the physical properties of the human eye, and gives very high quality results!
  6. higher noise/signal ratio in many standard archviz scenarios for even faster rendering using less samples,
  7. some very useful add-ons are now activated by default like sun-position to allow for easy use of the new sky texture based on time and location for example,
  8. a huge load of polishing, bug fixing and typo clean-ups to make the user experience even better!
  9. you can get 10% off an iMeshh exclusive membership. The coupons are offered with E-Cycles!

E-Cycles is the fastest and easiest photorealistic renderer for Blender. 100% compatible with Cycles, so you can use all your materials and add-ons while rendering on average 2x faster out of the box with NVidia GPUs. Features state of the art denoising technology, a streamlined UI for ease of use and fast workflows, Lightgroups in the viewport for instant feedback of lighting changes, and much more.

  • 100% compatible with Cycles
  • on average 2x faster on NVidia GPUs
  • state of the art denoising technology
  • streamlined UI for ease of use and fast workflows
  • Light Groups in the viewport for instant feedback on changes to your lighting setup
  • SSAA in the viewport for crisp textures and detail-rich denoising
  • access to both professional-grade stability and bleeding edge features to fit the needs of every project: support for Long Term Support releases, stable releases and master builds.

You can see an example of E-Cycles full render speed potential and new AI-Denoiser in action in the following videos:

You can find more details and a full description of the new features on the product page:

What artists say

https://twitter.com/BarbieMatthieu/status/1186727940375089154

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You can find more testimonials in the ratings section.

How does it work

The speedup out of the box (open the file, hit render) is achieved thanks to:

  • better memory access
  • better parallelism so that all CUDA cores are better occupied

Render faster, meat your deadlines and spare a lot of money. E-Cycles is a fork of Cycles which renders up to 2.5x faster out of the box when using NVidia GPUs, up to 13x using new options and with same visual quality, up to even 41x faster for real time speed. Better than other third-party engines, E-Cycles is 100% compatible with all your assets, scenes and add-ons so you can start rendering faster and get better denoising the second after you unpacked it!

You can buy E-Cycles 2021 now on Gumroad. You can also get a membership for CUDA or OptiX.

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What the artists say:

Flavio Della Tommasa “Obviously in terms of performance I believe the data speak for themselves. On 8 images, 2h each, I lost a day of calculation. With E-Cycles, in just over 2 hours I solved everything.” Original post here

Vitor Balbio, creator of Toonkit and BakeTool:
“I tested the Intel denoise node and It’s gorgeous for fast previews (and probably final renders too) in internal images. By itself already worth the investment!” Original post here

“Impressive speed-ups”, “support is good, all issues (specific to E-Cycles build) I have found and reported were quickly fixed” Original post here

“The Speedup is amazing” Original post here

“91s to 45s with a RTX 2070” Original post here

“3m:09s to 1m:42s, needless to say, I’m impressed!” Original post here

“Impressive! 32’53” instead of 1h02’42" Windows 7 pro, i7 GTX 680M laptop, Blender 2.80." Original post here

What users coming from Octane say:





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FAQ

Is it compatible with Blender?
Yes, Blender is actually untouched, only Cycles was modified. So it’s 100% compatible with the official version.

Is it worth for me?
If you render at least with a 70€ Cuda card supported by Blender on Windows or Linux, you get this build amortized immediately in most cases and on the long run anyway due to the electricity you spare compared to rendering longer or rendering with more cards.
Note that it’s CUDA GPU only for now.

Can I take 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. The reduced price can apply to the following months if you keep your membership without interruption.

Do the build work after my Membership finished?
Yes.

Is it open source?
Yes, of course. I even offer a course, with which you can learn how I made the optimizations, how to add new modifiers, customize the UI to streamline your workflow, etc.

So much faster, really?
Check other customers render times here in the thread :slight_smile: An example of what is possible with a scene rendering in more than 5 minutes normally, using all the new options of E-Cycles, here only 5 seconds:

Known limitations

  • Pre and post-processing:
    E-Cycles on average is like adding another GPU to your configuration. Just like another GPU would, E-Cycles will make the rendering phase faster. Pre-and post-processing are done on CPU in Blender and will be as fast as before in E-Cycles.

  • Multi-GPU configurations and denoising:
    due to a new bug in Blender on multi-gpu configurations, only the AI denoiser on 2.79x is officially supported when using multi-GPU configurations. If you want to use the AI denoiser on 2.8x with multiple GPUs, I keep a version of E-Cycles from 16th of May (v20190516) available, which doesn’t has the bug and thus is fast. The non-AI-denoiser is slower with multiple GPUs in all versions. It’s still faster than the official builds. Single GPU configurations work properly. A fix for the above-mentioned bug is being worked on.

  • Low samples renders:
    E-Cycles produces higher quality samples (lower noise at same sample count). At comparable noise level, E-cycles is around 2x faster, but at low samples (under 64) you may have to tweak your sample count manually. Earlier version of E-Cycles had automatic sample count for such case, but it was decided after feedback from users to let the user decide if they want a cleaner render or a faster one in this rare case.

  • CPU+GPU rendering:
    While many user report good times with CPU+GPU on E-Cycles, only CUDA GPU rendering is officially supported.

What can I expect in my case?
On Cuda cards, a lot. On a 1080Ti, most of the time you can expect to render 1.65x to 2.42x faster rendering with path tracing (in the time you rendered 1 picture before, you can then render 1.65 to 2.42 of them). The time is for the path tracing itself. Long pre-processing time can make the overall speedup smaller.
Here is a table of the times on the 1080Ti and Vega64 to see which kind of scene get which speedup.

Render%20times%20on%201080Ti%20and%20Vega64%20of%20the%20official%20benchmark%20scenes
Render%20times%20on%201080Ti%20and%20Vega64%20of%20the%20official%20benchmark%20scenes1647×419 91.5 KB

What if it doesn’t work so well on my configuration ?
You have 30 days money back guarantee. If you are provide a real production files where the path tracing phase is less than 1,5x faster using CUDA GPU rendering, you get a full refund. Cases like “my 64 thread threadripper and 1050Ti render nearly as fast with master as with E-Cycles” or “my scene which has 2 minutes preprocessing time and 5sec path tracing render only 2 sec faster” are normal and are not accepted for refund. Again, only the path tracing phase using a CUDA GPU is optimized. Only for Flythrough (only the camera moving) and using 2.79x builds is the preprocessing time done once for videos, which can greatly reduce overall render time. A file also has to be provided, just like for any bug report for any program you buy.

What about the cool features added regularly in Blender’s builds?
You get free updates every week to always get the latest improvements made in master and there will be 1 feature or optimization added every month.

How do I report bugs?
Blender at the time of writing has 1700+ bugs opened. Check first that the problem you experience is not in the latest buildbots and that it’s a bug happening during rendering itself. If it only happens in this build, you can make a bug report. Please attach a blend file (links to google drive, we-transfer, etc. for big files are ok), the steps to reproduce and your configuration. On Gumroad, answer your emails about E-Cylces, on Blender Market, use the “create message” button on the product page.

Which GPU are supported?
Only CUDA GPUs supported in official Blender.
Although not officially supported, several AMD GPU and CPU users also use E-Cycles for it’s new optionsand still get up to 20% faster rendering out of the box.

Is CPU rendering also faster?
Not yet. I’m working on normal CPU rendering, maybe it will be added later as a monthly feature. For the same reason as above, several user use E-Cycles on CPU still for it’s new options and faster user interface.

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My, that’s a big speedup if true. So what’s the catch?

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I am expecting nothing less than a secondary bounce solver like Corona UHD cache, RT for the image should exactly be 24:12 (plus some seconds for denoising) because it is Christmas-Time. Joke aside every speedup for Cycles is welcome, will watch this closely!

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It’s for real, no catch, you have 30 days money back guarantee from Gumroad, so you would get 100% back anyway.

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  1. So your point is that I’m a bad person because I don’t work for free all the time. 3 years of free patches and builds are not enough, I should do it my whole life? You know the Official devs are paid ? Some people here write addons for free, some sell, some do both, but it’s right because it’s python and I’m wrong because it’s C/C++?
    What the reasoning behind that, please explain?

  2. And regarding the posting/giving to the devs: This patch for example: https://developer.blender.org/D2254, lot’s of discussion, happy users who saw real benefits with it https://developer.blender.org/D2254#53699, I rewrote it in 3 parts, still nothing in master. Days lost at speaking. And it’s not only me. You only see the devs staying, but on the tracker, you can find many devs who posted patches, got ignored or rejected for politics and never came back. Speak with the fracture modifier in PM, you will see what they thing about posting patches for inclusion. And at that time, Blender had sometime less than 100 open bugs… Why would that be any better in your opinion now that 2.8 must be made stable with more than 1300 bugs opened, please also explain?

  3. In the course, you get the code, so you can do the updates yourself (everything included in this build is in the course) and you can even do the review process for the parts you want to have in master. With this option, I do all the work for my clients during a full year, so that you just have to click to download like for the buildbots. It’s just some people like to do things themself, they can take part to the course other prefer ready to use products with support, they can take this option.

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If it continues like that, you will get 1 year for free with your joke :smiley:

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As I do not plan to buy it, I support your reasoning completely.

Keep up good work!

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“And we’ll I didn’t know that blender devs are so hard with C++ additions to master… its quite sad”
Sometime it’s positive. Quality code is also important in a codebase many person work with, but sometime it’s based on opinion with few technical arguments, sometime it’s just they have way too much to do and simply have to do choices, but whatever the reason is, in the end it hurts and takes time which can be invested more wisely.

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@bliblubli my guess is 100 sec.

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@bliblubli I would guess 4 min.

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@polygonsoul don’t forget to give your name and email address if you want to participate.
If nobody else answers, you 3 get one year of update as there is no other contender.

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@bliblubli my guess 5 min.

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@bliblubli My guess is 3 minutes.

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My guess is 5 minutes 30 seconds.

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My guess is 60 seconds

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@bliblubli My guess is 45 seconds

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Looks like you still heavily rely on AO… I wish it was rendered in 30 s, but i’ll assume 113 s is decent enough (you got my contact) :wink:

Q
What about EEVEE? Any advancements planned in that area (shadows, reflections, refractions…)?
Would be nice, if we could auto-blend best of both worlds

Anyways, looking forward to learn further :smiley:
Thanks

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The build doesn’t use any trick. The images converge to the exact same results.

Regarding AO, Evermotion uses it indeed if i remember correctly, but nearly all interior renders you see in the forum gallery do (go look in the thread if you want like here Archviz - Interior - Emily) and the Blender Foundation films uses it too (the Agent Movie has it, you can see it in the bench files). I’m from those thinking what counts is the mood. Non-biased rendering doesn’t exist anyway, reality is way too complex, even for today’s computer. So what counts is that your image is liked by it’s audience.

But again, this build doesn’t use any trick. The images converge to the same results.

About Eevee: I didn’t start to look at it as a coder yet. For me, it still crashes too much, I don’t find it that good looking in my use cases. It also needs manual tricks and lot of tweaking to compensate it’s nature, like in the Internal Render in it’s time. Cycles on the other hand can not only be extremely fast at rendering when configured wisely, but can also saves huge amount of user time by only needing 1 to 3 parameters to be tweaked per scene. GPUs are extremely cheap today after the mining boom. If you want to earn money with Blender, the GPUs are way cheaper than the human time, even more with the optimizations in this build. So even if Eevee would render 100x faster than Cycles, as long as it needs manual work, it just doesn’t make sense economically.
If you need real time, I find there are much better alternatives for real time rendering in the architechture field for now.
But it’s improving fast, so I keep an eye on it.

To all: You can just post here if you want to participate for fun, but to win a year, you have to send email (to get the coupon) and name (to check people don’t post 20 answers)

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