One of the reasons that got me interested in Blender is Cycles. I liked the feeling and the quality of it. Of course, like any other software, there’s always something that can be improved.
So, I got curious. I wonder what long-time users think about Cycles. What are the most annoying things? Or, quality-wise, what could be improved?
I understand opinions on this subject can also be very personal based on one’s own taste, but still, I think it can be interesting to hear what people have to say.
I was reading just about some comments about the “Cycles look” on a thread lately which reasoned my curiosity even further.
What are your thoughts?
What would you improve or change in the way Cycles works now?
What is (if there’s any) that particular thing that always makes you think “this is the typical Cycles look”? (In a bad or good way)
Is there something that you envy from some other render engine? Something you are like “I wish I had this in Cycles”.
As i started doing product shot lately i found myself needing Light Linking
micro displacement
all the tasks that will make a performance impact especially Texture cache and mipmaps, i feel like cycles/blender have hard time with a few 4k textures
a real Shadow catcher ( with reflection catcher etc )
Not from the list :
Spectral Cycles
Better out of the box setting for light like falloff ( funny enough eevee have that ), temperature color, Laser area light, etc
Mesh deformation motion blur
Secondary rays cache
Beside Cycles i also use Redshift and every one of them have a certain “look” but it depends on the artist to break that
This is a BIG one. Coming from Arnold where it has .TX files it can process 100s of gigs of textures. Blender starts to choke on 4K maps pretty quickly.
I would love to see GPU supported by OSL.
A more modern RandomWalk algorithm for skin shading(Arnold RW2.0 is the benchmark now)
My only doubt is about Spectral Cycles (I know someone is working on it, not sure how much is doable keeping decent render speed results).
I also use Redshift and I agree, they all have some particular look although I have to admit that of all the render engines I tried so far, the one that I think delivers the best results is Arnold.
I would rather cycles OSL-implementation itself was more feature-complete (metadata, passing around arrays and structs, ‘shade’-parameter support for the ‘trace’-call, pointclouds, dictionary lookups, setmessage, etc., etc.).
To be fair though, maybe more people in the community woud care about OSL to begin with, if it ran on GPU…
greetings, Kologe
Photometric based lights like in Luxcore and I’m guessing pretty much all renderers? Optional, and with all the relevant settings.
Better sun & sky rendering.
Light groups like in Luxcore, for easy control without custom node groups stored in world for access - just feels weird.
“Anisotropic” velvet shader for certain fabrics. Simulates direction of strands; correct way = bright, upside down = dark.
Support for a collection of CSG objects and compound uses. Constructive Solid Geometry - no tesselation and great boolean support.
Support for B-Reps, import and correct representation via NURBS which then also needs to be improved significantly. Preferably non-tesselated. (For CAD imports).
Roughness input and thin switch for the fresnel node.
Switch on glass shader to enable fresnel modified Transparency based simple shadows.
Fix box mapping so it can be used with rotated coordinates.
Node that does from/to mapping coordinate system transforms. I.e. from Cartesian to Spherical or from Disk to Box or from Cylinder to Pyramidial.
Generator node for Gabor noise. Can this be 4D? Not sure.
Bias and Gain functions for the math nodes.
Smoothing tangents over seam i.e. when using the tangent node for aniso. Normals are…
Generator scale separated from texture coordinates for many generator nodes.
Camera visible lamp lights.
Analytical tube lamp lights.
Laser light, for fun - I don’t think I would ever use it. Some might.
Named color swatches and better color selector modes, i.e. spectrum or kelvin.
That’s “all” I could think of at the top of my head, probably forgot a bunch.
Sorry for the silence, been caught up in some work.
Thanks for the list, that’s a nice one!
I’ll need to digest it, I don’t know most of the stuff listed in there
I already love Cycles, but I wonder with all the things mentioned so far in this thread what would Cycles look like if, say, only one-third of the suggestions made here would be implemented! What a powerful beast it would be!
