Thanks for your input.
No rendering addon for me.
Using Cycles but for character animation prefere Eevee for speed
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I think that one of the many āmarvelous featuresā of Blender is that you are gifted with three (!) built-in rendering options, and each of them is very different. Each of them uses the available hardware in different ways, and with different goals. There are good āimport/exportā options if you want to use something external. āWe have it very good.ā
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I never felt the need to use another engine, itās not the tool that makes the artist or good artwork. Cycles or eevee in good hands can produce amazing images.
You should know when you hit a wall that requires another tool for the job.
Cycles or eevee might be less powerful that arnold or unreal, but they are pretty well integrated in blender.
However I know some production company that uses guerilla render, others uses houdini, if you have a complex pipeline working on complex projects why notā¦ but doing that always comes at the cost of more complexities and some limitationsā¦
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The problem with cycles is rendering quick smoke. It took hours.
Indeed ! Iād probably use eevee for that and maybe for complex VFX I would need another engineā¦ How does cycles compares to other in that matter ? what would be the fastest engine to render high quality volumetric ?
Did you adjust the āmax stepsā in the āvolumeā section of the render settings? The default value of 1024 is way higher than you will likely ever need. For a smoke simulation, you can reduce that by 3/4 easily (256), or even less, and you will get a much faster render with no visual difference. Depending on the level of detail in the simulation, you might also be able to tweak the āstep rateā to get even more speed.
I did āfeel the need to try out luxcoreā for caustics, although an interesting experience I just ran into to many problems to make it viable learning a new system. It was a nightmare to install without crashes and errors, and in general seems poorly integrated, I think that integration and development is done by very few, (well intentioned) people and is more maintenance than anything else.
I also tried octane which is better integrated but learning a complete new system was too much for me. āOut of the boxā results are not as great as made out to be, you do need to learn the engine and shaders to get good results.
My conclusion was to foget that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and just happily graze in Cycles. Cycles is perfectly integrated and continuously improving + I am used to it and know what to expect.
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And most people never really learn to optimize it. Cycles can be made to render pretty much anything fast (apart from complex caustics) if you understand how you can use texture baking and compositing to your advantage.
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Then, your smoke sim was probably not a very heavy one. At higher smoke resolutions, it can make a significant difference.
Edit: hopefully, you werenāt expecting the render times to be reduced to seconds. Itās completely expected that a Cycles render could take minutes per frame, even on a good computer. That still makes Cycles a pretty fast renderer compared with most path tracers.
I use just object Quick Smoke
Nothing spcial but it took hours to render this simple animation.
How long was the animation? I see you have set a 32 seconds time limit in your render settings, so if the whole thing took hours, it must be a pretty long animation. I donāt consider 32 seconds per frame as very long for Cycles.
Hopefully I donāt come across like Iām complaining, but I am wondering what are your expectations for how long a render should take. Traditionally, a few minutes per frame would be seen as pretty good for any offline renderer. The fact that Cycles can render on GPU and use Optix acceleration makes it comparatively fast for a path tracer, but even then it will take some time. You arenāt expected to stay in front of your computer staring at the process, many people do their renders at night.
If you need to render multiple minutes of content on your own and donāt have access to multiple computers for rendering, I would definitely look at doing it in Eevee if possible.
But there are other factors, like resolution, motion blur?, CPU or GPU render, what hardware you have and even what Blender version.
I have a Rtx 3060 12 gb gpu the animation took only 10 seconds is set to optix but i use now eevee as renderer
But i prefer cycles like i always do normally.
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doesnt matter rendering smoke with cycles takes hours. for a 10 sec animation. !! Only eevee is the answer.
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You can test it yourself just make a quick smoke animation for 5 second or so.
The test it to render in cycles set to optix lower te volume to 265 and set the treshold to 0.256 or watch the blendergrid youtube video about that. They now what there doing i guess . But eevee is the answer for faster render !
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I am a blender user there is this forum for its called blenderartists not maya houdini but an opensource tool.
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