I’m a Blender user since a few years now even in my professional work. I see everybody exited by the new Blender engine. It seems great, yes, but in production I really prefere something like the classic render engine. I heard that it will be remove in the future and entirely replace by Cycles. Should I continue to use the classic Blender internal or not ? I love the point cloud method for occlution and indirect lighting which works very well and fast, the actual node shading, the render passes. Everything you can’t use on Cycles. I’m afraid it will disappear.
[Opinion]
The internal renderer won’t be removed anytime soon, and certainly not before there is a viable replacement for all of its functionality.
[/Opinion]
Maybe one day it will be replaced, but for now, use whatever renderer gets your work done.
You can use Blender Internal. I pick a renderer depending on the project. Some days I use cycles other days I use Blender Internal, other days I use lux render, etc. It all depends on what you need for the project.
Cycles is far from complete. Blender Internal would not be replaced until cycles was feature complete, meaning it will have all or most of the features in Blender Internal. At the moment Cycles is not production ready unless you are able to work within cycles limited feature set. Mango development should give cycles a much needed boost, and get it on it’s way to becoming what it can be. Cycles is physically based, but is not limited to unbiased effects, making it easier to achieve realistic results while allowing you to veer away from them when you need to.
Cycles does indirect lighting, and node shading pretty well. There is still a lot of development underway to speed up the render process. Brecht has suggested speed improvements of multiples. You don’t need ambient occlusion for lighting anymore because of the global illumination, but it is still useful for texture effects such as dirt passes. Render passes are on the way, other people have suggested that Render passes might be one of Brecht’s projects for the next release. We’ll see.
The Potential of Cycles is what many people are excited about, and the fact that it can already do a lot for it’s limited feature set.
Even should Cycles become feature complete in terms of offering all the options & capabilities the BI does, eliminating the BI from the render-engine choices available from Blender would be a very poor move, akin to taking away an entire set of brushes, paints, and canvas from a master in traditional oils. Not all imagery needs be “photorealistic” or “physically based” to be effective, and in some cases is a detriment. Making Cycles the principal renderer is viable, but making it the only renderer would be too limiting.
I agree, but partially, I think they should rebuild Blender internal so that it can use openshadinglanguage and GPU, and can create DOF and motionblur that blends with cycles. Of course none of my opinions matter when posted in the forums, unless I plan to make it happen myself.
@Casio23, you are absolutely correct. The only reason that I could see for BI to go away is if the Blender feature set develops so much that it becomes unreasonable to to keep up with both renderers. Brecht gave up on Blender Internal after Sintel because the code was so old and convoluted (this might be the wrong word for it don’t attack me if it is). That is part of the reason for my impractical suggestion of rebuilding blender internal, so that it could be used seamlessly with Cycles, and vice versa, and still be updated.
DOF is certainly one reason to get excited about Cycles. With Cycles it is like getting a new Camera, and one that works much better than the BI camera.
