Hi everybody,
I’m the coder behind E-Cycles. As many say their truth, I though I would bring mine.
Buying E-cycles with a 980Ti costs 250€ gives about the perf of a 2080 to 2080Ti in many real use case scenarios and much more with the quick settings. So in fact artists with low income get more for their bucks and can spare money. This money is then used to make rendering better, which is a successful example of targeted funding if you will. So the argument paid addons gives advantage to rich people is at least with E-Cycles wrong and in fact the contrary. People with money can afford a 2080 or 2080Ti with very expensive external renderers which contribute 0 to Blender. E-Cycles enable poorer people to compete for an affordable price with the big and rich ones.
Now, normally I don’t speak publicly about such things, but it’s a bit too much currently. So some facts in chronological order:
- after several patches I did for free which are included now in Blender, I wanted to work more seriously, tried a fundraising for a new patch. I got 400€ and was accused of code hostaging although the code was available publicly and the builds also.
- I proposed to work for the BF. Ton answered he preferred Cycles dev to be paid by external companies and send me to Insydium. I worked for them, got never paid. I proposed my patches to Brecht and he told me maybe some render farm would like it but their was no interest from the BF.
- I started E-Cycles, got loads of people saying to be carefull because it may give bad image quality, break in animation, the foundation may not want from my patches, etc. All of this information are now proved wrong, even the one saying the BF may not want them (see next points) but the first image was there.
- I got several very heated debate bringing a lot of fear about feature that may not work, may not be finished, etc.
- after some user asked how it was looking for the possible inclusion in master, I decided to contact Brecht to discuss it. Long story short, he although he could include all my patches instantly, he didn’t to respect my work and because my users are very happy with my work. But as I said (although it was clear from the begining) that I would make the patches available publicly in late december, he said he wanted it all for 2.81. He also noted his opinion was not reflecting the one from the BF, but added at the end of the discussion that he can add similar features if I don’t do that. Inclusion in 2.81 or late December makes 6 weeks difference, so it’s not really a time reason. So in the end, he is ready to use fund money to do duplicate work just to show… I don’t know what.
- after the discussion with Brecht, the computer I use to post here and debug user files was hacked and the virus targeted only Blender files and source code files.
- Now I get some haters in my thread who say E-Cycles is much slower (like 2x) than vanilla Cycles.
As much as I would like to make E-Cycles open source now and don’t care about builds anymore, uploading on the different markets, etc. The BF refused my offers several times and now that I took another way, I want to respect my users and do what I said I will do.
Although I’m sure my work is beneficial to this community, I’m here to cooperate not to fight against some fanatics/haters or idealist who don’t do what they teach.
So is it possible to find a way to properly be mutually beneficial here on the long term?