Hi,
Finally decided to have a serious try with Cycles under Blender 2.82a.
So I decided to convert my “Villa near the river” scene which was initially created to be rendered with Octane Standalone.
Lot of things to discover as I didn’t used Blender 2.8 previously and my experience with Cycles was more or less limited to cube render
Many things to say about Blender 2.8 and Cycles, my first impression was quite disappointing but of course without any previous practice this judgement is a bit biased. After 2 days using them more deeply I see some really good points but still find some aspects really annoying. I will try to make a more precise list of what, imo, should be reconsidered to improve the workflow.
So here is what I got from my scene conversion, lot of things could be improved of course but I wanted to see what could be done with basic functions and without entering in complex nodes settings.
Here is the second try, this time I used a box surrounding the scene with a principled volume shader with low density (0.008). The result is much more natural.
Thank you for the effort, i think this is a really important showcase. I know you are far from finished or satisfied how it turned out, but this first try is really significant as a progress record.
Even now, comparing with the corresponding render from the other thread you can feel a certain cycles ‘signature’ here… I am not quite sure what it is, but i’ve always felt it, there is something wrong in the atmosphere of it, or the light distribution across the surfaces, some kind of ‘cheapness’ that prevents it to achieve the quality standard of other engines.
I am really interested in seeing how far will you manage to push it. If by the end you’re satisfied with the result, i think we’ll all be too…
Just to be clear, I’m not in a process to switch from Octane to Cycles, I’m satisfied by Octane and it will remain my main render engine
I post here since several years now and people often asked me to check how my scenes would render with Cycles, so I thought it was time to have my hands on it.
Agree indeed, some Cycles feeling.
I found lighting very difficult to manage, I got poor shadows with the same HDR map I used under Octane and had to tweak the HDR map resulting in dark sky that I had to replace in postpro.
Regarding the atmosphere, I saw that volume option in the world settings and selected volume scatter expecting something magical, but not at all, but I probably don’t use it as it should. So I used the mist postpro which is a really nice feature but not that easy to apply to that scene.
I will try something else for the atmospheric ambient, similar to what I’m using with Octane to check if it works the same way.
All in all I’m must say that even if I’m not completely satisfied with the result I find that something not that bad came out, still much practice before fully handling the app but beside some weakness Blender together with Cycles is a good solution.
It does seem better. Although you can still see the subtle difference in quality
I am constantly comparing it with the corresponding render side by side, perhaps it could be useful having the same camera position and focal length for this first try? How do you feel, maybe just go for simple emulation of the qualities of the first one?
I just want to note that Luxrender is a gorgeous renderer as an alternative to Cycles and now has CUDA and will have RTX implemented soon. I tend to think its naturally more realistic/beautiful than Cycles or Octane and it seems like it could end up pretty fast too. Maybe you know about it - but if you dont i really recommend it!
yes thanks, I already checked it out but I find the time before it even starts to render too long to be usable in production. It works great for smaller projects but in bigger archviz scenes it’s not responsive enough for me.
I never precisely plan my scenes before starting. It may start with the building and then I place the terrain around or I create a terrain and then think to what build could be fit there. But indeed I usually change the scene during the creation process as well Not very annoying I enjoy it.
Yes I used Luxrender for several projects in the past and found it quite useful, but I don’t want to go all the ways, I’m fine with Octane and wanted to test Cycles but will limit my investigation to those two solutions for now
I BELIEVE this is something that has been majorly improved in 2.3. And supposedly it is integrated/coded in a way now that means theoretically Octane could not be faster because of the handoff of scene data. I’m talking out my butt now - but just wanna make sure you know its really exploded in the past couple months. Relevant Youtube vid: https://youtu.be/XwQZx5-QGkE
Sorry to derail! Its very interesting to observe the overall aesthetics that emerge from different engines though!
Was curious to see how it evaluated, so download it and installed it.
It says that the installation succeeded but I cannot find the addon in the list, it exists exists in the scripts/addons folders but it doesn’t seem to be recognized by Blender 2.82a …
The daily build has CUDA support for Windows (you must unroll the device list and deselect your GPUs as OpenCL devices - I also think it works faster to deselect CPU here). RTX is coming. In general its still very much in process but it shows promise. Its also worth mentioning it has some compatibility with Cycles nodes as long as you check the box per object to use Cycles settings (or use the global button on Render tab).
I’d be VERY curious to see your scene with LuxCoreRender as well. To do it properly you might want to bring over the materials to Lux nodes. I love Cycles but I was a bit nonplussed by how good your Octane render looked compared directly to its Cycles counterpart (even with contrast/color correction discrepancies etc).
Enjoy your weekend!