When will Blender Internal be discontinued?

Apologies if this is not the right place for this thread…

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to this site, so I’m very out of the loop. I’m asking all the devs and those in the know…
I have heard the news that Brecht has left Cycles for a new job (congrats, Brecht.) So, I suppose it means Cycles development will slow down some for a while…

Although I’ve been excited about Cycles for years, and have spent the past couple of years learning and using Cycles almost solely, everytime I make a new animation I end up going back to BI in frustration at the long rendertimes and unsupported gaps in Cycles. BI has always been able to do things very easily that Cycles has huge problems with, and do them VERY fast. Although, not as “realistically” as Cycles.
But you pay for all that “Cycles awesomeness” by panicking at the thought of the months a short animation will cost in Cycles rendertimes.
I’ve experimented lately with Cycles baking. But it’s not a solution, it takes time to bake objects too, and there are always problems and trade offs and more hairpulling.
And, although my computer is still relatively new, I’m not in the mood to start throwing money at the problem by buying an expensive graphics card or multiple computers with multiple graphics cards. I’m not Andrew Price, I don’t live in a computer lab in grad school, and I’m not rich.

And everytime I go back to BI it’s with a nostalgic feeling of returning to a lost love, coupled with tears of joy at the INSANE SPEED of BI rendering. It might not look perfect, but I’ll take those gorgeous painted BI renders (and five-ten minutes to get them) over extremely grainy 2-hour Cycles renders ANY day, no matter how much “photorealism” they have.

I make animation. And I work alone. That’s why I started using Blender in the first place. I don’t use the software to make pretty magazine covers.

All this would be well and good.
Except for the rumors, old rumors at that, that BI will be “discontinued” in Blender. “No longer supported.” Use whatever euphemism you please. I don’t really know what it means.
Does it mean that the Devs will no longer work to improve BI? That they will no longer increase the efficiency of BI?

Or does it mean what I fear most: that BI will be pulled completely out of Blender?
That, if you want to render something in Blender, you can only use Cycles, or some version of GSL?

I suppose, worst case scenario, I could just hang on forever to some 2.7* version of Blender, even as the software improves over the years, like some of the better artists who still use 1.49 to this day…

Anyway, sorry for the long editorializing. I’ve been trying to love Cycles over the years, and I have, thinking it was just a matter of time before Cycles was as fast as BI, that there would come a day when the fireflies and the grain just aren’t there anymore after about five minutes, that making animation would mean Cycles, and without expensive graphics cards, render farms, etc. But, no matter how good I’ve gotten with Cycles, that day just has never come for me. Going back to BI, I’m floored at the beauty of BI renders of some of the huge Cycles sets I’ve spent months building for the animation I’m working on, and the fact that they come out in five minutes, where it takes Cycles nearly an hour, complete with ugly grain. And all for just a single frame…

So, what date is the BI Apocalypse slated to take place?

There isn’t going to be any, just Andrew Price not having any fucking clue that if he makes himself into a hype machine, every sentence he says is going to be taken as gospel.

Ton said that BI retirement is unlikely, because of compatibility concerns.

What might happen is that there will be more attention paid to the GLSL renderer in the nearby future to give more rasterisation options to the user(amongst which yourself :slight_smile: )

BI is not getting retired anytime soon, but I’d recommend you switch to Cycles anyway.

Cycles is faster than BI for any nontrivial scene. The thing you have to remember is that you don’t have to use GI if you don’t need it. Use Branched Pathtracing, and turn the bounces down to 0 and voila, no noise and blazing speeds.

Thank you, Therahedwig, that’s GREAT news! Very glad to hear it.
Piotr @ Thanks for the reply. Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been I’ve been doing all night. Just experimenting with going into branched path tracing, shutting down everthing, seeing the times. No, this is definitely not a “nontrivial” scene. In fact, that’s the problem. It’s a huge scene, a city street, human characters with hair, the whole shebang. Think Bladerunner rendered on a desktop. I’ve been shutting everything possible down, getting it down to its most primitive, cringing. At best, I’m still looking at hour-long renders.
But, switching to BI, re-UVUnwrapping, relighting, re-everythinging, I get five minute renders, and they look gorgeous. Yes, like paintings (not really what I initially wanted, I wanted a SHINY future world!), but kinda cool, if you’re okay with Tech Noir… And I’m starting to think that I might just have to be…

I don’t know anything about GLSL, never used it. But, I’ll start looking into it.
When you make animation, unlike single renders, the name of the game is QUANTITY. It’s great to have a rendering engine like Cycles that can do anything and make it look gorgeous. You can make a pro-looking poster with no problem for zero dollars.
But if you’re making a 25-minute animated short film…
you have to keep in mind, the important thing is to get footage out.

Neat. I did what you said, Piotr, and you’re right. I shut everything down to zero, branched, and I’m getting 45-second renders. That’s crazy for this scene.
I don’t know why I never did that before. I think I was always scared I would break Cycles if I set those numbers to zero…
Side note: it’s a great way to render “nighttime” renders… Cycles Noir filmmaking is about to kick into highgear…
THANK YOU, PIOTR!

BI has already been “discontinued” for a while, in the way that it has not been updated pretty much since Cycles was announced. But it will thankfully not be removed in quite some time, Cycles can still not do everything that BI can and as long as it serves a purpose it will not be removed.

It’s good to know this, because I was kind of concerned too, but it has been a while since I first heard the rumor of it being discontinued. I have to say, I was unaware the speed increase was that great by using branched pathtracing and turning bounces down. It is really, really fast. But I did get significant noise. Anyway, a good tip to know-thanks.

I still use Blender Render on my old PC, also there are a lot of small things that I need Blender render not cycles.

I have to say, if you are using CPU rendering, it’s really worth the expense to get a decent (but maybe older and used) GPU for rendering. I use a GTX 480 which I got for like $125 second-hand years ago and it still blows away CPU on my machine. They can be had for $60 on eBay right now.

You may not want to spend money, but if you really spend that much time on your hobby, isn’t it worth a little money, too?

Even for 0-bounce branched it should still speed things up a lot.

In one of Ton’s presentations at the Blender conference (I don’t recall which session) he specifically talked about BI and it sure sounded like it was not going away anytime soon. He even went as far as to suggest that perhaps there was a future role for it to play with NPR workloads or in some other fashion. So it sounds like it’s still viewed as having a role going forward and they’re still figuring out what that is. While it probably won’t get the same level of attention that Cycles will, it sounded like some amount of effort would be put into it.

Except for the fact that there has been a few patches made to add new shading functionality to BI since then and are currently stuck in the patch review system.

There’s still people out there who would like to tinker with the old code, but the current system is making it difficult to get code into master (though recent developments are showing movement towards improving the process).

I still think BI has a future if it went in a direction that made it a comprehensive legacy-based/non-physical/NPR solution rather than trying to make it into a full-fledged raytracer (because we know how that wound up with Sintel), so in a since BI would use a different approach for different tastes.

This I think has to be one of the most useful tips ever for those who miss BI speed with Cycles. I didn’t know Cycles could be so fast with those options. For scenes where 100% lighting correctness doesn’t matter, it’s a godsend.

Use Branched Pathtracing, and turn the bounces down to 0 and voila, no noise and blazing speeds.

This is not true in my experience at all. First off, you can’t set bounces to 0, only 1. And when you bottom out Cycles you still get a grainy as duck result. To get to a close to BI render you have to use at least 5 samples for a clean look. This results in about a 100% slower render compared to BI on the default scene.
All of you give it a try instead of just shouting Yeah!! Cycles emulates BI.

Just because a render completes in X amount of time does not make it acceptable for production. The visual quality is the most important thing.

I could not agree more, visual quality is a big issue here because the render quality of Cycles is like night and day compared to BI. Not that people cant make some amazing art with BI but its extra work.

On the other hand it would be cool if we see something like Marmoset Toolbag for blender, even as external render engine, real time rendering definetly has become a lot more popular nowdays. Of course this is wishful thinking.

Also Cycles has been improving a lot , it got faster and less grainy there is little reason not to assum it wont get even better in the future. So it may come one day that it wont make any sense to have BI around as less and less people use it. I don’t see such day in the close future but who knows. Blender is full of surprises :slight_smile:

As it is there is no way BI will get removed because there are still a lot of people who depend on it. Even I had some major issues with Cycles lately because of faulty CUDA runtime in MACOSX Yosemite.

I don’t think there is any reason for BI to be discontinued. If people still use it and find it useful, then it should stay as long as it does not clutter code, or poses some legacy obstacle preventing from innovation of certain areas.

That being said, i don’t think there is any place for renderers like BI in 21st century, so i would be definitely happy if some of the development effort was redirected from BI to Cycles.

I assure you, you can. Why don’t you try?

On the default scene? As in, the default cube? Like I said, pick something nontrivial. At least a couple hundred thousand polys and a few lights. And yes, of course you have to use more than one sample, lol, I’d recommend 16 AA samples at a bare minimum, and an appropriate number of shadow samples per light.

One of the great power-points of the Blender system has always been that: “you have several choices.” Within even the original system, you had OpenGL-based (Game) and conventional (BI) rendering, seamlessly integrated. You also had excellent import/export capabilities.

To this mix was recently added: Cycles. Some people love it; it gets a lot of use; it’s getting a lot of developer attention; it represents a fundamentally different algorithmic approach. And still, “seamlessly integrated.”

So, now, you have at least three options … which you can (and often do) combine to achieve the effects that you want.

It would frankly be “senseless suicide” for Blender to remove capabilities that it has had since its beginning, and it would provide no benefit whatsoever. If you have so fallen-in-love with Cycles that you can’t imagine anything else, just forget that anything else is there.

One day, it will occur to you that the fastest way to produce the image you want is to: start with an OpenGL render, superimpose Cycles-based soft-box lighting on it, and use BI for the sharp, contrasty details and tack-sharp shadows. Three renders, all of them part of what you wind up with, none of them doing it all, and with OpenGL(!) doing most of the lifting. Blender today enables you to do that, soup-to-nuts, without switching software, and it still doesn’t cost you a dime. Even though you have not yet approached a project in that way, some day you will.

I assure you, you can. Why don’t you try?

No glossy at 0 bounces, sorry.
Any fake specular effect maybe?

So bounces at 1.
BTW
BI is still much faster when using raytraced reflections (1 bounces)

If you set your glossy bounces to zero you will only get reflections of the actual lights - just like BI.

if I remember well it is easier/faster to learn the old Bl way then to try to understand how nodes works in cycles!

so for noobs it is still faster and simpler to use old Bl renderer then cycles !

and for nodes I do remember having problems learning how the nodes works for bl or cycles
it takes time to learn it - learning curve is steeper !

happy bl and cl