You were not stupid at all, technically it would be very obvious to set up materials once and then use them in various renderers/engines inside the same app. Unfortunately - as I wrote before - Blender development missed this obvious step when Cycles came in.
Substance will offer this solution in the future ‘on the fly’ (I’m sure).
Yep… that`s what i meant by it will help you to learn basics of raytracing (not from the coding/programming side at all)… it will help you when doing stuff with Cycles (ever wondered what the light path node is good for?) 
cool stuff you can do with it
BGE with quality like Cycles not possible (due to technical differences).
BGE with quality like Unreal Engine is possible but there is not enough developers to do that.
BTW: not being stupid… not everyone have to understand everything about how 3D works
Ok then, now I remember that you also had experimented with the use of vRAM in that thread related to the problem of the GTX 970 and 4GB.
But I did not understand your previous message, in my tests Blender/CUDA is not using less vRAM.
A similar idea is on the to-do list: progressive animation rendering, where you would set a number of maximal number of samples and a number of sample per pass (say 100). Then Cycles would render all the frames with 100 samples, at the end of the animation it goes again for another 100 samples, and so on until either the maximal number of samples is reach or the user stops it. It would then be possible to do the same with still images.
Thank you for the help, which I appreciate 
if this is on a few images… (or a few more), an alternative solution is to render smaller image at around where this happen lets say 50 pixels by 50… then put that small image stream over your movie with the problem, reposition it in compositor, and play it over your exif /png movie stream. combined it in squencer.
Personally I never use progressive rendering, i dont like it, because its not realy clear what was needed to render it again like that.
And rendering to much beyond visible change is a waste of CPU time, and power consumption.
I do believe though that there already exists a python script that does like what you want.
Some people created as an alternative to render the same movie with different seed settings.
The script was created in the hope to reduce render time (i dont think that worked), but still it was popular for some.
In the end de streams had to be combined, averaged… to get (well i think) equal render quality. At cost of more disk IO time
It kinda made possible progressive rendering for movies.
Wow this time i even remind the addon : http://blenderaddonlist.blogspot.nl/2013/11/addon-progressive-animation-render.html
For features:
- Light groups
- Better combined net rendering options to have slaves working on the same frame
For fixes:
- Please, PLEASE!! fix the antialiassing problems with the layers when you do composition, it’s totally wrong at the moment when you want to have ID masks and depth passes.
- A Cad in blender. 2) A gallery of materials. 3) at least OpenGL 3.0
Dreaming does not cost anything.
@cusa123 are you reacting to moony in your post?
If so:
- what has point number one to do with CAD??? AFAIK he is talking about physicall corectness of the cycles renderer which is always a good thing (as cycles primary goal is being photorealistic renderer)
- not really?
- why? really why?
Either you are reacting to something else (in that case please update it with reference as to what you react to) or being completely off?
take a look at this video @ blender guru: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-baking-cycles/
You will see how you can improve looks in your BGE projects with cycles prebaked lighting… I suspect the Unreal Engine Demo you posted uses similar trics to achieve that level of realism (lot of the realism you see is pre baked)
This is my list of top want-to-have features:
- Propper implementation of IES profiles for lamps (!). Currently it is possible to use an addon for that but it does not work well and you have no visual representation of the rotation of the lamp.
- Tonemapping in viewport render
- Lightgroups
There I was hoping this was an announcement of an official road map of future cycles development but oh no it’s yet another unsolicited feature request thread.
Since we are all asking for things that will never be implemented I would like to request a render pink unicorn watermark feature. Everybody knows pink unicorns make all renders instantly awesome so this feature will basically add a faint pink unicorn watermark to all Cycles renders.
So my hard working minions:cool:…(cough cough I meant to say awesome devs, no really I did) when do you think you can implement my awesome request.
Also my vote for IES lighting implementation. ArchiVis is quite popular in Blender (improved a lot with recent Light Portals addition… thanks for that)… what i miss in terms of ArchiVis and Cycles is only IES
LightGroups could be usefull too but not so critical like IES for me personally
I’m sure the developers read this forum and many times they are interested in some things that users propose.
Indeed, if you read the link of the first message of this thread, Lukas Stockner is working on an idea that came from an BA forum user.
Agree on these. 1 and 2 probably explained better than I could :).
- We even had 4D noise back then (I wasn’t Imagine user back on the Amiga though). So although I would like more diversity in terms of types of generators and their options (especially Voronoi is lacking severely), I would like to see options for 1D (faster, but more uniform - often this is sufficient), and 4D (slower, but can be animated/evolved by “moving” the 4th input resulting in a changing but not moving texture (good for volume mapped textures, useful for UV maps also to get rid of seams but then not animated).
Other points:
-
More generators. Just look at pretty much any other software.
-
Fix the Musgrave so it produces results in the visible range. Maybe add a “normalize” button that samples results and automatically adjusts multiply and add controls within its gui.
-
Cycles has very limited ways to expose material gui to the user. I’d like to see checkboxes, dropdowns, integers, path and texture fields, radio buttons, and of course tooltips and textual notes. And a builtin way to adjust sensitivity of exposed sliders (I’m hooking up bump strength prior to hooking up the actual exposed control to avoid having it oversensitive).
-
More generalized way of handling math. Dropdown in mathnode and other relevant ones to select number of channels (1-4), where unsupported inputs and outputs doesn’t get removed (i.e. outputs 2-4 in 3ch normalization input) but indicated with a red/strikethrough that output will not produce any output. This to avoid having sockets disconnected. A lot of vector math (distance, magnitude, scalar multiply) and useful functions (isInside, lerp, stepfunctions, polar/spherical<->cartesian conversion, boolean tests and other simple flow mechanics - not talking about loops and iteration here) are missing. Is Cycles the only one that doesn’t have a builtin function for atan2?
-
Improved way of handling overbright surfaces (like emission surfaces). I’m aware of the reasons behind the aliasing problems, but ways should be there to handle it (even if just locally oversampling it rather than oversampling the whole render and reducing it in post in LDR). Does it look that horrendous in other renderers?
-
Coordinate system conversion outside the texture map node. Cycles is forcing us to deal with UV unwrapping everything (takes me far too much time), when most things are not needed (unanimated/shape changing props), and painted detail maps UV’s might require a lot less attention.
-
Anisotropic shading to take into account face smoothing when dealing with UV maps to define tangent over a UV seam. Currently it breaks, and devs have come up with a “fix” to paint it or add geometry to hide/smooth it. Not a very elegant solution when you want to get things done quickly.
Edit: 8) Toggle switch on generators to make them seamless repeat at 1 in all inputs. Should not impact scale input though. If on, both small scale and large scale noise would give the same output at 0.1 and 1.1 if you know what I mean.
Yes, I’m aware of the “overhead problem” which is probably going to limit all of these But still, can dream can’t we? 
super excited for OpenVDB. While OT - ALEMBIC IO PLEASE!!! Nobody likes a shutin!
Awesome news looks like we will indeed have the IES lighting as a node to the strength input of lamp… https://developer.blender.org/D1543
@Lukas Stockner: Where can I send some “Thank you”
Two things I would like to see:
1. Out-of-the-box physically-based shading. As it stands now one must put a lot of work into creating PBR materials. Cycles has the power, but we have to create crazy custom node setups to harness it.
2. Something comparable to Renderman’s Denoiser. Noise is the killer of quality renders in Cycles, especially when considering that many people starting out with Blender don’t have access to fancy render farms. It is impractical for most of us to simply crank up the sample count, especially with animations - it takes a friggin’ long time to get high-quality renders. Currently I can’t realistically afford (in time) to render higher than 250 samples per frame for an animation, even though 2000 or more is usually required to look good. Bilateral Blur and Clamp Indirect are not cutting it - we need a better way to kill the noise.
Technically speaking, every Cycles material is PBR (physically based), since it’s made of physically based BSDFs (unless you violate energy conservation etc.). What you mean is an Ubershader where you simply set some parameters and the shader’s finished, kind of like it was in Blender Internal. That’s referred to as PBR in the context of Game engines and other real-time stuff since for those, it’s a new(ish) concept to use physically based shaders at all, but for Cycles that’s always been the case.
That aside (sorry for that, but that PBR buzzword hype is annoying me a lot), having such a BSDF in Cycles would imho make sense, the obvious candidate is the Disney Principled BSDF (https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_disney_brdf_notes_v2.pdf)
More procedural like in Blender Internal
Faster Rendering
Clear noise in dark areas
Shadow catcher
Ueber Shader
Dedicated PBR Shader
PBR for the 3D viewport would be great to preview that in Cycles Render and not in Blender Internal.
Otherwise I am pretty happy with how it work and what Cycles offers.