How is blender cycles vs others rendering engine

How is blender cycles vs others rendering engine

The forum rules (point 1.e) forbid vs threads.

Mais la règle dit aussi: " Si vous voulez comparer empiriquement moteurs de rendu, fonctions de modélisation, ou encore des sortes quelque chose, cela peut être très bien. "

That refers to things like comparing test images, not threads like this which are nothing more than holy wars over feature lists and personal preferences.

So you deny that some rendering engine might be better than others?
Where is cycles in the big world of CGI?

Some render engines are most certainly better than others for a given purpose, but threads like this have historically always devolved into flamewars. Hence, they’re forbidden.

I kind of wonder the same thing, too. especially if cycles in it’s complete form.

Most render engines have at least trial versions freely available - I suggest you try some and form your own opinion.

No render engine is any “better” than another in general. They can only be better for particular use cases. There’s absolutely no way to answer such a question without knowing your needs, use cases, and experience with other renderers.

Cycles is designed for teams who want a physically plausible path tracer catered to the needs of production character animation. If those aren’t your needs, there are better options. If those are your needs, the only similar renderers are Arnold and Appleseed. I suggest you try each and decide which works best for your workflow and budget.

From the images on this thread, it appears that Vray gives better results than Cycles http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?323292-3ds-max-VRAY-vs-Blender-CYCLES-(test) However, this is an old thread. Nowdays, the same tests would make Cycles have better results.

 When comparing images, note the ammount of light that is reflected from surfaces, to produce a realistic effects. You know that in BI, when you light an object on a side the other is completely dark. In Cycles, there is not, because the light is reflected around. Vray seems to reflect more light, giving better results. I don't know how Vray behaves in Blender...the demo images were made with Vray in 3Ds Max.

 You should also take in account Unreal Engine 4. It's not a render engine but people began to use it a lot for ArchViz. It remains to be seen how a static Cycles render compares to a static UE4 one.

  UE4 archviz demo :

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eTt7AGIpV2I

Unfair comparisons. Shaders setup in Cycles are really off, while evermotion guys know really well how to do such stuff with Vray…vray gives a “softer” and more bouncing color bleeding because of Light Cache and Irradiance Map (and different tone mapping maybe). The GI is on steroids :slight_smile:

Try Vray with Brute force + Brute force and you will face much more similar results.

Vray seems to reflect more light

Thats not true, vray working in linear mode (linear workflow + linear tonemapper) gives comparable results.

It’s not the only factor, I notice that a basic mix of a glossy and diffuse shader in Cycles can produce a bit of energy loss that isn’t seen in those engines.

To get more similar results you need to increase the energy reflected by the shader, which luckily is something the add shader node can fix (done in a way to limit the effect of course).

In general, you should probably look into limited use of the add shader node when it involves mixing two shading effects that work with different ray types (so you use it in cases of diffuse / reflection rays or reflection / transmission rays, but not diffuse / diffuse).

I guess the one of the main purposes for gooseberry project is to put cycles under the test, and see how far it can go. From what ive seen so far it will be pushed, probably to the limit.

@Ace_Dragon
I had not noticed that.
Maybe you’re not using pure white glossy color, that can cause energy loss.

Aaaaand this is why the rules are there.

Only the common rule of thumb is to never use pure white for anything (perhaps other than glass).

My post concerns adding some of the glossy ray energy on top of the diffuse ray energy without using just a straight mix (so you can actually go above 1 when the two types are added together to an extent without blowing out the scene, the main thing being that the net energy for both types remain below 1).

Only the common rule of thumb is to never use pure white for anything (perhaps other than glass).

But we’re talking about diffuse/glossy mix not pure glossy.
The white highlight is clamped by fresnel node an adittional math nodes for specular maps.


My “glossy” shader.

Glass is not 100% transparent, so the correct color should be <1.

Sadaj, how does that specular color input work? It looks like it’s just plugged into a value input, so I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work.

Sadaj, how does that specular color input work?

This is input for grayscale specular map.
To change reflection color you can use glossy color (colored reflections are correct only for metals).