So, if you guys haven’t noticed (you probably haven’t), I have been something on hiatus from any 3d work. Now, cycles had definitely come out before this, but it was very experimental then, so I still used internal. Well, now I come back, and need to do a quick simple render for something. So, I decided I’d try using cycles, the more realistic renderer. Well, I had a hell of time. When I heard about cycles, I was hoping/thinking that it’d be like internal but more realistic with bounce life and such. However, now that I try to use it, it’s quite hard to get what you want. I mean, it’s good for photo shoot type stuff, and architecture, but I’m finding it difficult for anything else. It’s much less intuitive. You don’t have to mix these shaders with other shader nodes, to a certain degree, etc. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I haven’t used it much, but all in all I’m not sold on it yet.
Check out Pokestuff’s recent threads in Finished Projects for examples on using Cycles for more ‘artistic’ pieces as opposed to photo-shoots and architecture.
I’ve also used Cycles for work that is more artistic than realistic, the materials might be physically plausible regardless, but the construction of the scene is more abstract.
To note though, it actually is possible to ignore energy conservation and/or physical plausibility and make an artistic shading material, but you have to be careful with it so as to avoid excessive noise when using GI.
It takes getting used to, but I find it much easier for things that require UV-mapping, or more physically based materials. The next iteration of Blender will have Freestyle, which is an NPR-based setup, so maybe it will be what you’re looking for. Cycles is the only renderer that the dev team will be updating from now on, so it makes sense to keep on trying to work with it.
Cycles does have a learning curve, no doubt, but features like the Ubershader should help to soften that learning curve for someone who wants a quick result without having to swim nervously through forests of unfamiliar nodes.
My advice is not to use Cycles because you think you have to. It has its time and place, just like BI does.
I remember when I started using cycles I had a similar feeling of not being able to make the engine behave like I wanted to. But ray tracers in general are another beast entirely than scan-fillers. You need to take your time and explore things. Simple stuff, such as a diffuse/specular setup, may require a mix of two shaders, but generally I find the mentality of cycles much more consistent and material-centric
Cycles takes some getting used to at first, but ultimately I think it winds up being a lot less confusing than the BI materials are; and I say that as someone who still mostly uses BI.
I see what you mean but you probably did not spend enough time in Cycles.
The Uebershader will help a little. In BI you turn on mirror reflection, in Cycles you add a glossy shader
or use Uebershader. Thats not really that much of a stretch is it?
The material system is not really more complex - it actually offers drastically more freedom.
The biggest difference is that BI has fake specular reflections rendered as round circle highlights.
In real life that is the mirror reflection of the env plus the light shape.
If that is what you need, it might be an issue.
I see what you mean but you probably did not spend enough time in Cycles.
The Uebershader will help a little. In BI you turn on mirror reflection, in Cycles you add a glossy shader
or use Uebershader. Thats not really that much of a stretch is it?
The material system is not really more complex - it actually offers drastically more freedom.
The biggest difference is that BI has fake specular reflections rendered as round circle highlights.
In real life that is the mirror reflection of the env plus the light shape.
If that is what you need, it might be an issue.
In Cycles to make it more act like BI you can also work with the light bounces setting it to minimum
so Cycles uses only direct light.
Maybe check out this thread:
When I saw this thread I thought you were going to specify the actual problem with cycles. My first thought was a pompous, “Is there a problem with Cycles?!” 
I’m sure there are numerous issue here and there so I genuinely interested to see someone else’s point of view. However, It kind of seems like you just aren’t ready to like it yet. I think you should just wait for the uber-shader. It’s an all in one shader thats more like a BI material in one node. Not that it’s goal is to be like a Blender material it’s just that it will be simpler because you wont have to mess around with Nodes. That will probably help a lot. In the meant time, I don’t think it’s going to hurt the world if another person doesn’t understand Cycles. It’s funny because it was specifically because of Cycles that I became more seriously interested in Blender in the first place. Well… That and smoke sim too.
But then, why not just use BI if that’s the case. I mean, if you aren’t impressed by Cycles in the first place, what’s the point? Just use BI if you think it looks better. 
That’s a good point. I think that with BI, you are more geared toward making things look using more abstract terms. Like, “This object needs to be reflective, this one’s transparent and this one is shiny.” In Cycles it’s better to think in terms of real world materials. You should ask yourself what these objects would be made out of in the real world. You can still get unrealistic result if that’s what you want but like I just said in my previous post, you might as well just use BI if that’s the case.
If you don’t feel like waiting for the official Ubershader feel free to grab mine from the Blender Tests section of the forums. It has full documentation and nodes only need to be used when plugging in normal maps. All other cases can be controlled just like BI materials.
Once again, the same wrong thing happened.
When cycles came up, I sticked on the appropriate threads, I tried to not miss anything important.
I knew very well, as time goes by, I would start searching for tutorials… I tried to avoid it, this time. I was right.
This never worked well in the blender community.
Still searching for cycles tutorials, to post to some friends;
Most of them are dated and lot of them are simply wrong.
We all do mistakes, we may also uploading some tuts.
But, please, we have to delete them after serious cycles changes, or update them.
The same goes to the very blender wiki library too.
This is all about cycles, IMO.
Because, it is a much more powerful, more well looking, more creative render engine, by all means. A modern engine!
Although I’m still using BI, Cycles with its full node support looks very tempting. When I find the time and right project, I’m definitively making the effort and learn to deal with it. Apart from some basic cycles tuts I haven’t found any more advanced ones showing how to handle the node editor and the shaders involved.
Any ideas where I might find such a tutorial?
Thanks for any input
How did this guy manage to WIN in this COMPETITION almost two years ago when cycles was barely born ?
The Problem with Cycles … yes …
troll
you are the enemy of the blender development! troll! troll!
The problem with cycles is that it is a PathTracer.
That is very simple. The moment you turn on raytraced material for BI it shows the ugly face of being an extremely slow and under performing render engine. The moment you also use AO or the fake GI in BI it also results in massive slow downs.
I am actually not against BI - but the engine is just utterly flawed once you leave the scan line method.
But I also work in product design so Cycles released me of the hand cuffs BI had for me.
And also I stated as along as you do not need fake specular highlights nearly everything you do in BI you can do in Cycles as well - probably better and faster. Consider the amount of test renders you need to do with BI !
In Cycles it’s better to think in terms of real world materials. You should ask yourself what these objects would be made out of in the real world.
Maybe it’s just me having trouble, but thinking in real world materials doesn’t really help. I mean, if it’s a glass or water object, add the glass shader. If it’s glossy, add the gloss. What would I do for oxidized tin. it’s sort of reflective, but not really. It also has a lot of defuse, but it’s a bit softer. Get my point. (at least for me) in internal I could just think of the properties, guess how much, put it in, see the little preview to guestimate, then render to see if it was right. It seemed a lot more intuitive. Also, a lot of people have been interpreting what I said to being that I wanted to be able to create NPR renders. Well, that’s not exactly true (and yes, I know about freestyle). It’s just it was more flexible. And, I know this is because it’s not as accurate, so it can fudge some things, but it was easier to change things and get it to how you wanted.
I think you make it too complex. Oxidized tin has a diffuse color base and via a mix node adds a glossy layer on-top for the reflection.
That is the same as in BI turning on mirror reflection. The amount of reflection in BI is equal the mixer value between diffuse and glossy.
Thats all that is really to it.
Fact however is BI is a mix of commands to combine to make it look either NRP or hopefully realistic. Cycles is realistic from the beginning. Thats why for example there are no fake specular highlights!
While I think BI is pretty useless today for me, I think it still has high values specifically for graphic render styles and thus should never be removed