Blender Render vs. Cycles Render

Hi,

I read a little to understand how the two rendering engines work differently.

Until now I always used Blender Render (because it’s set in default :smiley: - and I did not know better back then).
My question is whether I should switch to Cycles Render.

When watching videos about Blender the guys always use Cycles Render. In Nodes editing there are far more options in Cycles Render than in Blender Render. Also when reading the changelog of new Blender versions there are always new features and improvements in Cycles Render, never in Blender Render.
Is Blender Render a dead end?

To understand my question: I have a number of Blender files for game items. They all have to fit together (lighting for example). By simply switching the render engine to Cycles Render the output looks completely different. I have to go over all over again.
My motivation is that if I should switch I should do it rather early than late when I’ve got many more files.

Blender Internal development is essentially dead. That said, it’s still entirely usable. Just don’t expect anything new out of it in the future. In fact, once we get some custom OpenGL in the viewport, it will be practically useless IMO.

On the subject of materials, you can’t just switch over to Cycles. It uses a completely different material paradigm compared to old fashioned scanline renderers, and thus materials must be recreated for it.

Blender internal tends to be faster unless you have a beast of a graphics card or two.
It’s a bit simpler and sorta easier to use too.

It’s not physically accurate but is probably the best choice if you’re doing anything simple and or super stylistic.

I use it half and half with cycles, it has its uses.

Cycles on the other hand is physically plausible/accurate, and the node system is freaking amazing once you learn how it works.
You’ll need a decent Nvidia GPU to run cycles ideally however.

No Blender Internal is most certainly not dead, far from it. Its still improving. But is not the focus of blender development . Cycles is. It is understandable. Cycles can give high quality renders faster taking advantage of powerful GPUs and even affordable GPUs that are still easily 3-5 times faster than an average CPU for rendering.

So by far the biggest majority of people use Cycles and the developers as would be expected focus on Cycles. Saying that nothing stop an artist from using BI. BI is a lot faster for lower quality renders where Cycles really sucks giving very grainy unusable grainy results at low resolutions.

So there is still a lot of room for both renders in Blender and we should forget the so many external blender renderers. So actually Cycles is extremely far from your only choice but none the less is by far the most popular for a very good reason.

Blender Internal could get even less popular with the new Viewport , which will allow for real time high quality rendering for Blender and none can predict the future what other engines make come up that will disturb the waters. So in the end it never hurts to know as much as possible, try everything and decide for yourself. None knows your needs better than you. Use the right tools for the job at hand.

I agree Blender Internal is not dead, though it is slowly dying. The rendering technology is evolving at a fast pace and the developers don’t add major functionality to Blender Internal anymore because this is hardly possible due to different reasons.

From what I understand, Cycles just does lighting better. I haven’t messed around enough to really understand why, but the way light works and how objects react to it is more “life-like” in cycles and you can manipulate it better in Cycles. Really I think it depends on how far along the process you are when debating on switching.

  • It also does various effects such as blurry refractions and reflections better (for a fair comparison, set the number of diffuse bounces to 0 and disable caustic tracing).
  • The features also play well together in almost all situations, compare that to BI where numerous scanline features either cannot be combined with raytracing or is only partially supported (not to mention that blurry raytracing effects will not work if the eye depth is more than 1 when it hits the surface).
  • Cycles will also not see a massive slowdown if you subdivide a surface into the millions of polygons (such as for displacement).
  • Cycles has a node-based system that is implemented in a proper and clean fashion (not like in BI where the primary purpose of nodes is to simply mix materials together and expects the user to use dummy materials if you want to emulate a material building system).
  • The Cycles material system paradigm in addition means you don’t have to put in a major effort to get materials that resemble their real world counterparts (it doesn’t make use of legacy hacks like fake speculars).

BI = good for motion graphics and fake looking basic stuff (like from the 90s)

Cycles = dramatically more realistic more advanced and accurate materials much much faster glossy materials

You can bring Cycles down to look like BI with setting GI to 0.
Turn on glossy reflections and good AO in BI and then tell me again that it is faster cause BI is only fast when
you not use it with raytracing.

Honestly ditch BI and jump to Cycles.

The are where BI only is better at the moment is the GLSL viewport but even that might change when Cycles has real time shaders.

Anyone knows if BI is going to be ported on GPU (CUDA or OCL)? Is it possible?
Seen what Redshift (biased renderer on GPU) can do & am astounded. :yes:
Is there any thread about?
TIA

It might be possible to do so, but there aren’t any plans for that.

Blender Render is good for NPR, and I recommend it as the basis for texture painting.

Cycles is physically accurate to a degree, and will get you better shader control. Sometimes when I paint, I will start with something I built in Cycles and bake it to get a starting point for my texture, then take it back to Blender Render internal material so I can paint with GLSL preview of bumps and overlays in the texture stack. After I get done painting, then I switch to Cycles and plug all my textures back into Cycles shaders to get a more realistic effect.

Psy-Fi is working on the new Viewport with some help, and if they get done what they intend we will see PBR in the viewport and an easier way to view painting in Cycles setups too I hope.

I think users shoudl learn both is what I am trying to say.

Advice: Decide on the Look before you start. Use references & stick to the plan.

Off course, both are pleasure to work with. Learn them both! As both have advantages & disadvantages in different areas. I use what fits best to get me to intended goals, am not a puritan, as long as it fulfills the need (clients & mine). Am very glad that both are integrated.
And i think, with GPU accelerated BI, stylized animations, motion graphix, data viz… even old school/fake techniques for photo-real rendering could be rendered faster than real-time. One could start rendering and viewing at the same time (not limited to OGL or GLSL)… when render is finished, i’d still be watching… ah, imagination.

You shouldn’t expect any major development like this, because the developers hesitate to spend significant amount of time on it due to its fragile nature.

I have seen some good renders with BI using bakes from cycles. Keep in mind blender Internal is a Mature Asset. They may not be rebuilding it on a daily basis now and that is not a bad thing. It means what ever you build on it today is very likely to work on it the same on everyone’s install. And straight up if you are doing anything cartoonie BI lends a wonderful feel to it.

@KWD, CraigJ, Dantus, joseph.r
Thanks
Assumed so. No problem… it’s nice to know, to be content with for a longer time (as mentioned^) :slight_smile:
Have been testing PBR viewport and just love it. The time gained with makes work in Blender so much more pleasant.

In my experience, Cycles is almost always slower than BI, expecially when raytracing and glossy reflections. The rendertimes in cycles just explode.

I’ve made pretty much the opposite experience. Raytracing in Cycles is more efficient. Glossy reflections in BI require a very large amount of samples to be noise-free. You really should try comparing the two.

If you need a significant amount of raytracing in BI (soft shadows, ambient occlusion, environment light, glossy reflections), you’re likely better off (in terms of performance) with Cycles (and all indirect bounces disabled). The end result should look pretty similar either way.

If you own a relatively new Nvidia video card, Cycles renders very fast with GPU rendering. If you are new to Blender, learn to use Cycles. If Cycles can’t do what you want, there is probably another external rendering engine you can use that is still better than Blender Internal. That’s not to say you can’t get great results with BI, but there are more efficient choices now.

Worth mentioning that despite the word “bias” in the description, Redshift works FAR more like Cycles than BI. RS just has some precaching and interpolation tricks you can use that Cycles doesn’t have.

Redshift also craps the bed in terms of performance with larger scenes as things exceed vRAM. So… just like every other GPU production renderer.