K-Cycles - 4.0 Performance Update, New Light Mixing Ultra Lighting, Post FX, & Denoising

Do you Norton mean Anti-Virus. K-Cycles should not be any different than installing Blender daily build.

I dont know why, never had a problem with normal Blender or E-Cycles.
deleted:
makesdna.exe
makesrna.exe
smaa_areatex.exe
datatoc.exe
msgfmt.exe
extern_draco.dll

Strange none of my beta tester reported any issues. These files where created as part of regular Blender build. I will look into removing them if they are not really needed. Thanks for your report.

Yes, NVLink works. So far everything seems to work exactly like Vanilla Cycles aside from the faster render/viewport.

CosasM,

That is correct. Stable releases and regular alpha updates through the end 2021. In addition new features are plan to be added.

2 Likes

Do you have plans to introduce light groups? Something similar to what E-Cycles or V-ray is doing to change light properties after the render

LTorrecilla,

After researching the light groups. Their is an patch done by Lukas Stockner and others on developer bender see: https://developer.blender.org/D3607.
Their is on the way a proposal to GSOC 2021 Light Linker / Light Mixer. See Light Linking/Group.
See looks it might get implemented into Cycles in the near future. So I will wait and see how it develops before deciding.

I like how @eklein has promptly ignored you. I mean Iā€™m all for selling addons but I make sure I comply to the license. You cannot sell a GPL derived binary and not provide the source or a link to the source with it, the license is very clear on that, needing to ask for the source is not in line with the license.

These derived binary addons are going to end up causing a lot of issues in the community, itā€™s just a matter of time.

10 Likes

Thank you for starting this conversation. This has been a frustrating for me on the topic of E-Cycles. I had asked for the source product a few years ago but the author had told me to ā€œRead the E-Cycles threadā€ which had over one thousand replies. I tried, but could not find information or was complicated because English is not my mother-tongue.

I am more active on Blender Devtalk forums and a comment from Juan Gea Rodriguez stated that a conversation from Free Software Foundation lawyers stated that the source must be included but if not there must be a conversation on how to obtain the source provided. I am not a customer of 2020 or 2021 E-Cycles because of this.

If K-Cycles does follow the GPL license, this is something that I will buy. But I will wait for confirmation from the developer.

Sorry for my English, I am using help from a translator.

3 Likes

7 posts were split to a new topic: On licensing Blender forks

Cā€™mon. It has only been 7 days. A little patience please. /s

I did have a response but it is on the new License thread.

Like I said am not a lawyer. So I canā€™t say what is the exact GPL distribution responsibility for a Cycles modification. Their seems to be some gray area and conflicting opinions. I will follow decision and requirements by an authority.
Your welcome to continue discussion on the License thread.

New update for 2.93 alpha with the latest from the master including persistent data for still images or animation under performance->final render.

New performance improvements for viewport preview rendering for both 2.93 alpha and 2.92 stable. Now the addition of interactive viewport denoiser (optix) with faster performance than previous viewport benchmark without denoiser. So it is recommended to always enable optix(automatic) denoiser for fastest viewport performance.

ArchWiz,

I fix the issue with the unneeded files with the update for K-Cycles.

Domiek,

New update now has interactive viewport denoiser with even faster performance than previous viewport rendering.

1 Like

Awesome, gonna give it a go. Thanks for the heads up.

Seems no many improvements for meā€¦
both were rendered by 2.93 alpha + Optix( there is no at least 2X faster in my case)

2 Likes

That is true not all scenes will get high performance improvements. It is scene depended and the benchmarks charts show that. In your scene above looks like close to 30%. Particle hair is an area where the core Cycles Optix still needs to improve in which K-Cycles depends on. Could also try the K-Cycles ā€œMediumā€ or ā€œFastā€ mode for faster speed. Really nice image by the way.

my scene has suddenly started rendering as a single massive 1080p tile instead of individual tiles. It gives no visual feedback as itā€™s rendering. I just have to stare at a blank window for 10 minutes and hope it is not crashing.

UPDATE - I re-enabled cpu+gpu rendering so I can get visual progress feedback again and the render time dropped to 7min 45sec

If I render a region instead of the whole thing, the last tile to render is slightly darker than the others.

Must have older GPU and fast CPU. Hybrid rendering I usually donā€™t recommend for device Optix their could be issues and with RTX card it can slow down the render. If it works for you go ahead. Using device Cuda should not be a problem, but might be slower than Optix.

K-Cycles very fast preview render should know what final render is going to look like. In 4K image you would get 4 tiles. Most of my renders are under 1 or 2 minutes, so update is not really that necessary and I get the best performance without the update. Very long renders I can see your point and will work on having some updates without affecting performance.