Currently i’m using 3ds max for my work, mainly archviz and environmental stuff. Since Blender is used more and more, i decided to check it out. But before i do that, i have couple of questions.
Cycles is GPU renderer, right? So how are you guys rendering all those forests and fields of grass that i see in gallery? Every GPU renderer i know of (i’m by no means an expert) has to fit the entire scene into GPUs memory. There is no way in hell to render some RAM intensive archviz with millions of proxies for grass, trees, shrubs, stones, and tons of textures with iRay for example (unless you’re ready to sell a kidney and get several Nvidias cards). There is this render on Coronas forum that used over 50 gigs of RAM while rendering.
Is Cycles different in that way?
Could i, on my 32GB RAM / GTX650 with 2GB of VRAM machine use Blender to render such scenes with aforementioned millions of objects?
Is there a multiscatter equivalent for Blender? Multiscater - plugin for scattering aforementioned millions of proxies while keeping RAM usage withing reason.
Does Blender / Cycles use proxies, or is this solved differently?
Last one, i know i’ll get burned for this one, but here it goes - speed? When ever Cycles is mentioned on forums it’s always said that it is slower, both from Vray and Mental ray (when those are properly set up). How do you deal with it, just accept slow rendering times and live with it? Is it actually true?
Firstly you have to take into account that some features (OSL, SSS shader) are not available for GPU yet, only on CPU. Also GPU works fine with NVIDIA cards using CUDA, but not with ATI (through OPENCL).
In cycles GPU works with GPUs memories. If your don’t have enough memory in your GPU you need to use CPU. As far as I know, professional environments works with CPU for rendering, so they fix this problem with GPU memory. They only use GPU for tests.
Also I have read here in BA and in Blender wiki that Blender is working in using network rendering through OpenCL.
Not in GPU mode. As mentioned though, Cycles has a few different “backends” that let it run on different platforms. There’s a native x64 one (commonly called “CPU mode”) that lets you run it as a traditional CPU renderer, or a CUDA one (“GPU mode”) that can run on Nvidia cards. There is an OpenCL one too, but AMD’s driver can’t compile it properly and its slower on CPUs and Nvidia cards, so its hidden away by default.
The usual limitations apply in GPU mode, but in CPU mode…well, 32GB will hold a lot! Also, Cycles does support instancing, even in GPU mode, which is how all those plants are usually achieved.
Closest thing would be hair particles in “object” or “group” modes. In addition to actually making hair, Blender’s hair tools can be used to grow copies of objects on things.
No render proxies, sadly. As noted, instancing IS supported, but true proxies (where the object is loaded from disk and never touches the editor) are not supported.
Speed…depends. Usually yes, Cycles can be slower. That’s due to a number of things both in now it works (brute-force everything) and the fact that it’s not always well-optimized. It works fairly similar to Arnold, so if you’ve read comparisons on that, most of the same comments apply. Except for Cycles is slower in general then Arnold (again, optimizations).
Finally, Vray is available for Blender if you’d be more comfortably working that way. The plugin itself is free, but you’ll need a license for Vray standalone to use it. I can’t recall if Vray for Max includes one or not.
Cycles has a speed vs quality setting called samples. if you need to kick something out for an animation test just set the samples low. for your final render set it higher.
Also, Cycles does support instancing, even in GPU mode, which is how all those plants are usually achieved.