Does Cycles make the Internal Renderer useless?

The last year i spent with books about blender - obviously they didnt feature cycles back then. With everyone talking about how great the new cycles rendering is, I wondered if there is still a use for the internal renderer or if it will soon vanish from blender anyways

thanks for every answer (:

And, yes. It’s still quite useful. Some things you can do with BI still can’t be done with Cycles; they’re getting there, but it’ll be a while.

IMO you should learn Cycles in priority, it’s clearly the future :slight_smile:

i was doing some smoke sim lately and rendering in BI seamed a lot faster, ok not that realisitc as in cycles but still it was enough to me

I see where you only have eight post. And, I wouldn’t add much to what Richard said except this. If you were in a traditional art school I doubt if they would insist on you using just drawing pencils or ink. Or, oil paint for that matter. A picture is in your mind and the medium should follow that vision. And, that’s why they expose the students to various mediums.

These render engines are nothing but that medium. Today you might have a idea where Cycles is the obvious render engine or medium to accomplish that and tomorrow it might be Blender Internal. Or, maybe YafaRay. They all have a different look. So yes it might be mind boggling right now but explore all the render engines. I can’t imagine just having one to be quite frank.

Or, what Richard said. :slight_smile:

///

Cycles is much faster more responsive and handles a lot of geo much better. The final image takes longer to converge but thats just how pathtracing works… Over all Cycles is crazy fast its just not smart.

I have found that for certain cases like making textures, BI is still useful as it has scanline based effects that can facilitate in such a thing.

both have their uses but cycles is probably more powerful in general and is getting more new features, BI not so much. However, as Richard pointed out, this topic has been discussed in exhaustive detail already. Use what you know, but if you want to learn “modern” tools, spend your time on cycles.

In Blender (today …) you have multiple very-powerful built-in rendering systems: BI, Cycles, OpenGL, Game.

(And all of this is in addition to interfaces to several external rendering systems.)

Each of these built-in renderers takes its own (very different!) approach to the same fundamental objective of “producing 3D images (and portions thereof).” Yet, each one fits into the same data-processing pipeline. And, each one shares 3D-world aspects such as camera, 3D coordinate system, and so on. Thus, they can all produce renders which will coincide exactly with the work-products of the others … and this is very important.

When you look at any final scene in a movie, what you’re looking at probably isn’t “the single final-output of one render.” Almost certainly, it is the combined (composited …) output of many different renders, any of which could have been done in several different ways. “And then, on top of all that, it’s the product of many committee meetings.” :yes:

So … no strategy for rendering a 3D scene (or, portion thereof …) can ever be called, “useless.” The notion truly has no meaning. It’s just another blade in the Swiss Army® Knife that’s called “Blender.” Part of your creative (and project-management) decision making has to do with which blade(s) to use, when, and why. All of the “built-in” rendering strategies, very-different though they all are, are nevertheless “readily at-hand,” “under the same roof,” and “easily compatible.” (What’s not to love?)

The audience, when they stare open-mouthed at your amazing graphic artistry, will never know, or care, just how you did it. (But they will know if you didn’t meet the deadline, because they’ll be staring at a blank screen.) :wink:

To note, these are more or less exactly the same (unless you use custom GLSL code during gameplay).

Psy-Fi is working on new real-time 2D filtering and the like to modernize the visuals of the viewport though, which the game engine will eventually use once it becomes ‘interactive mode’.

I use BI for render on older system, for mine or for my clients, so I even think Blender Internal should be improved not abandoned.

BI tends to be a lot faster for me, so I use it. 8 core CPU.
It has some limitations and it won’t look quite as good, but I don’t care, I’m using a toon shader for a more stylistic look, no outline.

I agree with this.
BI is still quite useful.

Agree with all of the above. Also, it’s not as if Blender is bloated as compared to many other software packages with comparable capabilities. However, I do see BI being made an optional add-on sometimes in the future, but it can certainly still hold its own!

I use BI for render on older system, for mine or for my clients, so I even think Blender Internal should be improved not abandoned.

The reason why development of BI has become pretty much standstill, is because during Sintel, Brecht realised that BI was hacks ontop of hacks ontop of hacks, and improving it, inevitably broke functions, and it was a headache to work with. Instead, the direction was to develop a new renderer with modern techniques in mind and not resort to any hacks of sort. I have submitted a few patches to cycles nad a few of them have been declined on the premise that they are introducing hacks / workarounds that should not be in place.

BI is useful, It just wont be improved upon because it isnt the most efficient use of developers time.

Hmmm, good to know about this, then how about using another renderer like Yafaray, and improve it, I tested one file for my client to get a faster render and I used BI + AO I got 10-min and then I tried another test with Yafaray direct light + AO with some other tweak and I got 5-min and much better look, so I think they should let another Renderer live longer or improve BI (which in this case is not), see here should be a sacrifice I think, a renderer can IMPROVED is important.

Aside from what everyone else has already said, which I pretty much agree with(except the statement that Cycles is “crazy fast”:confused:), it really comes down to GI vs. Direct Lighting. While BI has some Indirect Lighting capabilities, it lacks meshlights that cast shadows, and other GI-related things, so using path tracing or photon mapping might be better suited for whatever you might be doing, like an interior for instance. In addition to what sundialsvc4 has said, you still need to know how to light to use any of them, and a lot of final products are the result of heavy Photoshopping/composition anyway. Having said all of this, I would never tell someone not to learn something, as the fundamentals are all related in some form or another. Also, there’s render engines out there like Vray, which operate very similar to BI as opposed to Cycles, as far as creating materials and such. Basically, it doesn’t hurt to know both Cycles and BI, but BI is far from useless. In my experience, many people who flat out say to not use BI, or direct lighting in general, have never used it at all, have been unsuccessful in using it, or have seen other people be unsuccessful in using it, so be wary of those people(which can usually be solved by clicking on their signatures or portfolios, if they have either one at all). Their argument is usually, “that render looks like crap, so the render engine MUST be crap”, taking away the skills that person may, or more than likely, may not, possess.

UE4 Architectural visualization, almost close to a BI quality, however, a real time engine!
BI is dead, please accept it.

exactly even more, someone rendered a interior architecture scene around 1 hour with v-ray, and I show them nearly same quality with Unreal engine 4 as real-time. their jaw fell.

As someone who renders quite a lot with Cycles… no.

Until Cycles or the OpenGL renderer can do everything BI can as well or better (not almost or nearly), it’s still very much alive in my toolset.