Moving to Blender from Maya on iMac | Cycles Question

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1

Hi all, first post. I come from 3ds (dos) -> 3ds Max -> Maya (yuck) to today.

I have a fleet of iMac’s that use an AMD 4gig video card. I have read there are some Cycles issues with using AMD GPU’s, but worst case could I not fall back on CPU rendering if need be? Would I lose any functionality if I did that, other than potential longer render times?

We are doing a computer refresh in 1 year and I may jump us to Windows, but for now I have to make this work. I just can’t take Maya anymore.

Thanks for input, looking forward to working with you guys/girls and Blender!

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No you won’t

3

Hi. CPU in terms of Cycles features is more capable than GPU

4

Perfect - thank you.

Follow up if I can - I am using 2.79b, but I am reading a lot about 2.8. Am I going to waste my time learning of Blender if I learn on 2.79b? Is 2.8 going to be night and day, or will the meat and potatoes carry over from 2.79b to 2.8?

I for the life of me couldn’t fine a 2.8 production release date.

Thanks for the help.

5

Interesting, I read some areas where some Cycles features are “experiential” on non-nvidia cards. I just want to have a backup plan of “we can use CPU rendering” for the year, without taking 100 hours to render a frame.

Thank you for the input.

6

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/features.html
Also some volumetrics things render better on CPU than GPU.

What is the CPU and GPU model of that machine?

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Amd radeon R9 M295X 4gb

It was decent when purchased - but I realize this is an iMac. I will be training new users, so we aren’t making Toy Story 4 yet.

We have been using it with Maya / Unreal / After Effects / Unity for 3 years.

I hope this will be doable for a year?

8

Is that card with similar performance to R9 285?
Well, you can run this benchmark with Blender 2.79b and compare results:

9

Interesting - will take a look.

BTW - what is your native language? New to the forum and haven see this many other places. Makes sense.

10

The basic nuts and bolts are about the same between the two. Think of the 2.8 UI as being a nicer looking, better organized take on the 2.7 layout. It’s more streamlined, but most everything is about where you’d expect it. If it’s not, it’s usually in a place that’s easier to find.

Based on the current builds, the biggest changes concern things that used to sit on the T and N panels. They’ve been assigned to on-call pop up menus, aligned along the top of the screen in the new work bar, or nested in alongside things where they make more sense. The real meat and potatoes stuff, pretty much everything in the properties panel, has been left relatively untouched.

11

2.8 will be quite close to 2.79. So no you won’t be wasting your time.

A beta version is planned for August, a stable one will come probably before the end of 2018. So you will have plenty of time to get used to 2.8 until you can use it as your main version.

12

Thank you both!

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Spanish. This is not a feature of the forum, I am the one who decided to put that note, mainly out of respect for other users who also do not have English as a native language, and maybe they want to use the forum to learn good English from others.