Is Blender Internal Render Really Being Discontinued? I personally like the toonish renders from Blender Internal. This is what attracted me to 3D in the first place and it is why I am still here.
If Blender devs dump internal render then I guess I’ll just have to find something else to play with and somewhere else to teach because: A) I have NEVER had any desire to make even one photo-realistic render. B) I have no desire to learn how to use material nodes. C) Cycles is slower than Christmas. D) The compositor is much more difficult to set up for Cycles renders and is far less customizable. E) There is nothing intuitive about Cycles. F) I have no desire to learn how to use something that I never wanted in the first place.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one who feels this way. This almost feels like Obamacare being shoved down my throat (something akin to a prison rape scene). If the devs want to discontinue development of internal render engine then that’s their prerogative but please leave it in Blender. I am a long time user of Blender and teacher on these forums and I would surely hate to have to dump one of my favorite pieces of software.
If it was going away, then they wouldn’t give a damn about whether to remove the stars option, or whether it was time to remove the default edge rendering since Freestyle is in trunk… no, it isn’t going away. Too many people that use it like myself would throw a fit since it has many uses outside of what Cycles allows for.
That said, in time, Cycles might actually be finished in such a way thta all the things Internal is capable of would be there, and then we might not cry as loudly.
It’s not going away any time soon, but core devs likely won’t be developing any new features for it. BI’s code base is a mess, its core is over a decade old, and the tech behind it is dinosaur-aged in terms of render tech.
That said, you seem to have a serious lack of understanding of Cycles. Nothing about it demands photorealism; material nodes and nodes in general aren’t going away in ANY 3D package, so it’s best to get used to them if you want to keep up at all; putting Cycles in direct lighting mode, making it comparable to BI, isn’t much slower than BI, and in cases of heavy scenes is even faster; it doesn’t get much more intuitive than one slider for quality; and, above all, no one is forcing you to use it, but accept that it’s the future of rendering in Blender and will be the focus of render development for the foreseeable future by the Blender devs.
You can say that again. It’s been around this long and I don’t know a thing about it because I just have no desire to learn it. It doesn’t do a thing in the world for me. BI does everything that I want it to do and some things that I don’t even care about like SSS. I can do everything that I want to do with BI. I like a lot of the new features that are being developed like dynamic paint, masking, and motion tracking…cycles is just totally unnecessary for ME.
I wasn’t complaining about nodes, there’s not much I can’t do with them in the compositor. In fact, Blender’s hybrid compositor is what I love most about the program. I just don’t care for the material nodes. I CAN use them if I have to but I’ve only ever needed to do so on one occasion. I COULD learn cycles if I wanted to but it offers less of what I need with extra effort required for the setup so, there’s no pay off as far as I’m concerned…only wasted effort. I was just worried about being excluded from future developments in other areas of the program.
You’re right, nobody is forcing me to use anything but a choice of no choice really isn’t a choice then is it? I don’t give a hoot about or want to be bothered with bounces and samples, forgetting about that ridiculous little “Transparent” check-box on the “Film” tab when I already thought I enabled that option on the “OpenGL Render” tab (what’s the purpose of that tab in Cycles anyway? It doesn’t seem to serve any function what-so-ever), etc…
I’m happy with BI and can’t bear the thought that it might go bye-bye.
i understand that the old bl code is not modern!
but i still like the old bl way of making mat
may be it would be possible to keep the old bl panels but replace the old code for rendering
with something more modern but still have the old way of doing things without nodes
only the futur will tell us what will happen i guess
If you look at the dev. logs, there actually is an effort that has been started which aims to implement more features important for NPR in BI.
BI for example just recently got a light data node for use in NPR effects, so it won’t be going away, just that whatever goes into BI may end up being for a different focus than Cycles.
You can say that again. It’s been around this long and I don’t know a thing about it because I just have no desire to learn it. It doesn’t do a thing in the world for me. BI does everything that I want it to do and some things that I don’t even care about like SSS. I can do everything that I want to do with BI. I like a lot of the new features that are being developed like dynamic paint, masking, and motion tracking…cycles is just totally unnecessary for ME.
If you have no desire to learn Cycles, then this is your problem, not Blender’s. If you gave Cycles some attention you’d understand that you can get similar results with both engines. Instead you chose to go with the irrational fear of new and unfamiliar technology. BI isn’t going anywhere, but come on… you’re never going to learn anything with that kind of attitude. Give Cycles a proper spin before jumping to conclusions, it might turn out to be quite nice.
i love the look of cycles, but test after test shows cycles much slower. The noise is the problem with cycles. The problem i have is that as a hobbyist i cant spend a year to render one short! But what ever happens will happen. It would be nice to leave bi there as a diansoaur for the option of quick renders!
Something rather problematic is that you’re not considering everyone else, whether it be Blender Internal, the ACA, or what have you.
“I don’t know a thing about it because I just have no desire to learn it.” (Then why are you criticizing it?)
“It doesn’t do a thing in the world for me.” (How do you know that if you don’t know a thing about it?)
“BI does everything that I want it to do and some things that I don’t even care about like SSS.” (And what if you run into a situation where you need some bounce lighting?)
“I can do everything that I want to do with BI.” (That’s not true for everyone else.)
“I like a lot of the new features that are being developed like dynamic paint, masking, and motion tracking…cycles is just totally unnecessary for ME.”
Well, you’re not the only Blender user, are you? Don’t get me wrong, I love Blender Internal, and I use it about as much as I use cycles, and there are benefits and detriments to each. In fact, I prefer Blender Internal, but I understand that most people use cycles, and so I use both tools. If a time ever comes when BI is removed and I still need it, I’ll simply download an earlier version of Blender.
The point is that whether you like it or not (I know I’m not a big fan of it), the direction Blender is moving is Cycles, and it’s important to be able to adapt to it.
Heh yeah, but they used some pretty heavy scenes with all sorts of volumetrics, very detailed meshes and high resolution for Rango… It is the most visually impressive animated film i’ve seen so far. Disney/Pixar’s stuff look gorgeous, but they don’t go for such a degree of photorealism in their films.
The age of code is irrelevant. The Arnold renderer was started only two years after Blender, yet I don’t hear anyone claiming that it was old and crufty code. All of the operating systems we use were invented in the 1980s.
You can turn Blender Internal into anything you want, you can modernize, update, refactor, optimize or maybe even port it to OpenCL. All that you need is a skilled developer who’s willing to do it.
How easy is it to get anyone to work on BI when there’s the sexy well organised code of cycles sitting two directories further?
But, the majority of this is basically backseat coding, not?
Anyhow, Price’s claim of BI dropping is basically one of the reasons that, despite his tutorials, I don’t take him very seriously.
You can turn Blender Internal into anything you want, you can modernize, update, refactor, optimize or maybe even port it to OpenCL. All that you need is a skilled developer who’s willing to do it.
The probability of finding such a developer is close to zero. You may recall that Brecht start a new renderer because he didn’t want to deal with BI, despite being already quite invested into that codebase. BI’s design is convoluted and outdated and you can’t do a lot with it without breaking stuff. It’s easier and more fun to rewrite it. You also can’t just port it to OpenCL without rewriting and redesigning it almost completely.
You mention Arnold being old: I’m pretty sure they rewrote that thing at least once and they were free to break stuff, because it wasn’t a production renderer until recently and it doesn’t come with thousands of users, who might complain when someone removes the “Star” feature. There’s also at least two distinct branches of Arnold in use at their respective studios.
How easy is it to get anyone to work on BI when there’s the sexy well organised code of cycles sitting two directories further?
There is also the problem that the internal render engine is showing its age. Before and during the Sintel project, I have worked on refactoring and improving it, but found it simply too hard to get it where I think a modern render engine should be.
No, you can’t just modernize old code because at a certain point that would mean rewriting it from scratch. That’s the reason Cycles was created in the first place. If it were that easy people would still be using DOS-based operating systems. Windows 95 and Windows 7 may be the same product, but they’re completely different things.