The only benefit of Blender internal is that it works more like a rasterizer rather than a ray tracer, making it produce 100% clean renders. This is very useful for various works like alpha maps, stencils, flat shaded / illustration graphics. Unfortunately there is not powerful node system there in comparison with cycles and you are very limited to what you can do with materials.
internal can use Texture nodetree output. Cycles dont need it right now due to osl, but what if somebody improves Texture nodetree nodes? Only internal will benefit from this.
There is a node system there, and you can do many things with it by combining materials and textures there as well.
I am not sure what you are using but BI with raytracing is slow as a snail when you need blurry reflections and if you want to use an HDRI for AO because to get smooth results you need to have quite high samples and then moment you set samples high the BI raytracer shows how slow and out dated it is.
Some simpler raytrace effects work reasonably quickly in BI such as shadow, and reflections, as well as having easily accessible stylized visuals, though learning node based systems in general will help in the long term. Heavy glass use, or lots of indirect lighting however, Cycles on the CPU wins out by far, let alone using a decent GPU.
Interesting, I don’t actually use raytraced AO or environment lighting in BI, so that might be why I’m getting faster results. However, for realistic effects like that, I’d recommend using an engine like cycles, too.
I like the blender internal, really, I can get almost sem results as cycles (ofcoruse whith some bad ass lighting and some time of work for material and texture work) but i preffer it over cycles… idk… is just like good for me
If you turn off raytracing in BI, you can still use environment mapping for glossy reflections, you still have (noise-free!) AO, and you can still render shadows, volumetric lights, Half-Lambert GI, subsurface scattering, smoke, fire, hair…
On the other hand, what can Cycles do with bounces = 0? Not much, but even so it’s still slower than BI.
To have the most fair comparison with BI, you would need to just turn the diffuse bounce count to 0 and check the no caustics option.
For the absolute most basic scenes, yes, Cycles is slower than BI, but once you start bringing in reflections, glass, very high polygon counts, soft shadows, ect…, you can see that it’s a lot faster.
Depends on how you do it. Glass, metal, water, soft shadows, even high polygon counts can be faked with textures. CryEngine, Unreal and Unity do it all the time. Of course the results are not 100% physically accurate, but who cares?
I might be imagining it, but volumetric materials like smoke render faster on BI.
For everything non-GI BI is pretty good. However honestly I would rather ditch BI and use Yafaray for that because Yafaray can render like BI with ambient occlusion and blurry reflections at a much faster rate.
It is sad that Yafaray was never used to replace the internal Blender render engine.
Ah in animation one cares?
agreed, it would be great if another Biased renderer was plugged into to trunk. This way it could advance independently of the Blender Institute and simply be synced periodically with the Official build.
Of course they do, they’re horrible depth buffered messes with no actual scattering or lighting effects.
The slower is the BI render engine. Most of what it does should be rendered in real time.
If you ask for AO, GI, ray traced reflections, SSS, etc etc, if you are to render dense meshes, cycles is much faster and much more accurate.
agreed, it would be great if another Biased renderer was plugged into to trunk. This way it could advance independently of the Blender Institute and simply be synced periodically with the Official build.
@comeinandburn, now that’s a interesting idea and would expose more users to Yafaray possibly speeding up the development. I think some interested in animation would be surprised with the look of Direct lighting with AO and the speed. However, I recently turned to Cycles set to Limited GI because of the baking.
It seems almost everyone who has given Yafaray a decent test run likes the little render engine for some projects but needs a feature it lacks sooner or later maybe. Leaving you thinking if they only had a few more part time developers.
Are you talking about the volume mode for BI materials, I’m pretty sure they had scattering and lighting effects last I used them?
It’s the cone volume feature in the spotlamp settings that’s barely capable of any effects.
Thanks a lot for your replies. I am following the discussion.
This confirms that I am using the right engine :yes:
In my usecase I don’t use any of the features you mentioned within the discussion. My materials get the diffuse color/intensity set, may be the specular values and that’s it. No glossy, transparent, complex lighting… All my renderings result in very small pictures (average 100x100 pixels) where Cycle’s noisy output is contra-productive.
I guess the reason why people want an OpenGL-based renderer in Blender is because they hope to achieve visual quality like here:
While this no doubt qualifies as animation, the effects in it are 100% fake. And no one cares. Which tells me that rasterization is far from dead. How long do you think Cycles would spend on rendering those 3:45 minutes of animation? At 24fps, that’s 5,400 frames. Let’s be generous and assume that Cycles can do a noise-free frame with motion-blur in 30 minutes. On a single computer, you’d be done in 112 days. And it wouldn’t look any better than what Unreal Engines apparently produces in near-realtime.
Path tracing is an interesting technology, but it’s not an enabler of good quality, low cost animation. Blender needs at least one rasterizer in addition to Cycles, and as long as the aforementioned OpenGL renderer hasn’t materialized (either in the form of better BGE integration or an improved 3D viewport), Blender Internal will remain indispensible.