I do mainly cartoon characters for animation, just recently I started to use cycles for my cartoons and scenes, and find it great for realistic images, but only when it comes to lighting, I get a little uncertain on it. When I have a lamp or car headlights, that is when I get bogged down using cycles to make my lamp, light bulb, car head lights (spot light).
My main question is and would like an answer from others that are more experience in doing animation than I, which is the best way to go, stay in Blender mode throughout my animation. Also I would like to know if it is better to do Blender rendering for what I want to do?
My secondary question is: Once I rendered in Cycles, is it easy to go back to regular Blender rendering without having to adjust my material and textures?
I hope I am in the right place to be asking these questions, if not, please direct me to the right forum…Thank YOu.
Oh, I have a Dell Studio 9100 computer with 24 gigs of RAM and a Graphic Card 560 NiVidia car and using CUDA.
Personally, I still use BI most of the time for most things. When I do use Cycles, it’s mostly to get a basic global-illumination solution quickly.
To use the two “products” together, I find that you need to have the assets in different files and to link objects to the same meshes, but with a completely different and incompatible set of materials and so-on. The geometry is the same; the cameras and therefore their positions and moves can be the same; everything regarding materials, textures etc. is of course entirely different because the algorithms (and therefore, their input-data requirements) are not the same.
This is not particularly difficult for me because I make very heavy use of libraries and linked-assets all the time anyway.
I suggest that in-general you should try to let Cycles focus on whatever you decide it’s best at, and BI “ditto.” These two algorithms are, quite simply, “different, that’s all.” Both are available to you in the very same product (along with GameBlender) and isn’t that nice. There’s more than one tool in that toolbox, and they all play very well together.
For example, Cycles might be great at producing the scenery for your cartoon characters to play-in, while BI may prove more suitable for the toons themselves. Composite them together. Use the eyedropper to grab actual RGB color-values from the Cycles renders as needed to make sure the colors are the same.