This is an issue I’ve been struggling with. Looking around the forums, it seems that everyone is making all their stuff with cycles. This makes sense; cycles is a great renderer. But, it still lacks so much compared to internal (imho) and will never really replace it. However, I feel pressure to switch over to doing my stuff in cycles because someday internal could be obsolete. I feel that the 3D community tries focusing too much on going for photorealism. This is why I like internal; it gives you a lot of flexibility. Ideally, I’d like cycles to get some of that stylistic flexibility and ituitivity. I don’t know really.
Internal is making it’s way into an asset that is crucial to Freestyle and possibly the BEER project. In my opinion, it is currently completely valid and extremely useful for texture painting on layers, creating the different baked maps and demonstrating with the game engine. I don’t see that Cycles will completely eliminate Internal right away, but the way that Cycles works actually helps understand the nodes in Internal. My opinion.
I think BI will still be around quite awhile. I do mostly low-poly hand-painted animation things, so still mostly stick to BI. That being said, I would look at it a different way and think in terms of broadening your horizons rather than resisting change. There isn’t any reason you can’t or shouldn’t know how to use both.
3dsmax still has the scanline renderer so what’s wrong with keeping BI?
BI is getting so much use form me recently… I love cycles, but BI is a lifesaver for animation…
there are a few issues I wish could be resolved… and then BI would be used by me for much more!
textured environment lighting only works with raytraced AO… it woud be great if AAO could support it too…
AAO doesn’t support bump maps and neither does SSS…
When Pixar’s SUbdivs get added they’ll bring a lot to cycles… but they’d be amazing wth BI… It seems that there are plans to support it in cycles, but I’ve heard nothing about supporting it in BI… that could be the death knell for BI right there…
the adaptive tesselation should work a treat with AAO and Ptex in BI would be fantastic…
A real pipedream would be real motionblur and dof in BI…
AAO really is BI’s ace in teh hole… the more I use it the more i love it for its quality and speed.
Craig JOnes is so right! freestyle and Beer mean it’s hopefully bot disappearing!
I’m LOVING BI right now!
is it possible to render a scene in BI/cycles “without lights”?
like,textures only,like in texture mode.(texture viewport shading)
as for bi,it was rumored that is was dead,but then they started adding things to it recently (freestyle,viewport render)
what I heard is that the code was a mess,and it could not be improved upon.The only reason people wanted it gone was because it left devs cleaning up bugs on a dead render engine,when time could be better spent elsewhere.
but now nobody knows for sure what the future of it is.
In BI , on every materials of your models enable the “Shadeless” option of their Shading tab
But it is not a ‘dead’ render engine. I was just using it yesterday. I agree with Michael, for animation and render speed it can not be beat.
except the Cycles cheat for shadeless is not real shadeless, since the emission affects other objects and materials around it. In BI, I use a shadeless plane with a texture, and a similar plane set to catch shadow only just above it, and the plane below the same way to get a faked “drop shadow” like in photoshop between the images I have set to shadeless. In Cycles, this is not as easy a task.
Like mentioned here I remember reading or hearing (Podcast) Brecht say when he started trying to improve the BI it became obvious it was a patchwork of… . And, I’m paraphrasing here. So I guess like noted above there is the problem with improving the BI.
Like many I also like having both renderers. And, consider myself lucky to have started with the BI. We now seem to have a entire generation of blender artist, many very accomplished by the way, who can’t use the BI. And, by can’t I simply mean they have never learned to. Download Blender and straight to Cycles. Some like me like to animate and put up with render times I find obscene personally. But, Hell, why not since many tutorials have been sounding the death knell of The Internal since day one of Cycles.
Suddenly it seems computer graphics didn’t exist prior to Global Illumination. Vicky in this forum has done some outstanding work without GI and take a trip to a site called; blendermama. Jonathon left a comment there one day inquiring was this done using Cycles. It was a BI render of a interior by the way.
But, photorealistic seems to be the hot smoking trend in CG art right now. However, clients drive trends in commercial graphics. And, clients are looking for stoppers to jerk a consumers head around. They will embrace a look that will do that as graphic studios will. Today it seems to be photorealism. If I was a young person looking to break into CG art I would be busy in both render engines. And, by break into I mean going to work for a small studio where you wear many hats.
Since I used the word trend here in reference to commercial work let’s see if I can upload a notice from the Fifties. And, a more recent link. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=11489 These things run in Cycles.
If every print or TV commercial was made photorealistic tomorrow just how long would it take for some studio to throw up a somewhat surreal look to get the viewers attention. You saw them playing with black & white within the frame last year I believe it was. I think Cycles is a outstanding renderer by the way. Down the road it might even be a hybrid for all we know. Using a biased algorithm for some functions if that is the right word. So Blender has two outstanding renderers. I would also like to see some work done in The Internal but that might have me in a pissing contest and it’s way to early in the day for that.
I don’t see the internal going anywhere and why would it have to. Use both or whatever one you choose to. When the airbrush arrived on the scene over a hundred years ago it allowed artist a realism never seen before. And, they’re pictures you can’t distinguish from a photograph when it was used by a accomplished airbrush artist. But, studios didn’t suddenly run out back and throw all the brushes in the damn dumpster.
“Is Blender Internal on the way out?”
I hope not. I can use Cycles, but not every render or animation requires pathtracing. I would like to see it continue to be developed and stabilized along with Blender’s real time GLSL render engine. The three render engines are complementary to each other, not in competition.
I don’t think any thing dies in Blender unless there is absolutely no one there to work on it, if someone sat down and refactored the code you could breath more life in it.
In cycles you have to make sure to turn off ray visibility for anything other than direct camera rays - then it’s a proper shadeless. I like that because you can do some tricks like a shadeless reflected in a mirror, but it’s not as simple as turning on a checkbox of course.
pesho, it’s easier and faster to render to change ray visibility of an object in it’s object properties box rather than in shaders…
That reminds me, In BI if i use emmisive mesh lights it’s often desirable to make them unseen by teh camera… but visible to other thngs liek reflections for example… the object properties solution and teh shader solution are both lovely to use in cycles…
I’ve tried to think of a way in BI but it gets to complicated render layer setups very quickly! and you soon loose teh speed advantage of both setup and render when you do that…
the BI intercative viewport isn’t much fun with render layeres…
but BI is still getting teh love from me!
do not fear, the developers are not amateurs, they will not make the commands of the amateurs
The shadless cheat for cycles does not effect the other objects and materials around it, unless i am thinking of another cheat, this is the one which is emission -> mix shader slot 2, lightpath - is camera ray -> mix shader factor
Just remember to disable MIS from the material, and in the object ray visibilities panel disable all apart from camera ray
But will this allow for the object to receive shadow, like the second part of my statement there? To my knowledge, there is not a simple way to get a transparent material to gather shadow only line in Blender Internal. And true shadeless materials as in Blender Internal take a whole scene 5 seconds to render, where as in Cycles you still have to wait for the same GPU processing time. I am not bashing Cycles, as I use it daily for my work - but let us not forget that it is incomplete and still in the works.
Sometimes I can’t help but read his posts as if they are being said by a Dalek from Doctor Who. That harsh, metatlic, staccato voice yelling “they will not make the commands of the amateurs!” while staring menacingly with his eyestalk…
Two good things happened in blender development, one of them is cycles. The other is the new UI + bmesh.
Everything else looks like projects left unfinished on their baby shoes. BI among them. Ghosts.
abc123 is so wrong…