Thank you, again, Andrew for putting them in the Cycles Museum.
I really am very excited that you’ve started working in Cycles and addressing the new engine in BlenderGuru. It gives me a whole new reason to camp out at the BlenderGuru site early in the morning on Wednesdays wondering “Well, what time is it in Australia?!”
I hope we’ll be seeing a lot of Cycles work at BG.
And I know that, now that you’re into it, a lot of people who have never bothered with Cycles will be excitedly trying Cycles for the first time, and getting less confused by it because of what they learn from you.
Thank you again for everything you do for the community.
EDIT Update:
This Cycles test took a turn for the surreal: http://bit.ly/rMtkSh What did I just watch?
-Andrew from Twitter.
You’re too much. LMAO! Thank you for tweeting that. I did find it interesting that that thing got about a hundred new hits overnight.
At any rate, I guess you sort of inspired that in the first place. I was playing with your “Sizzling Logo” tutorial, and things … well, they sort of just got a little out of hand…
I think a lot of people will make that grammatical error, hell I had to just look up what you were talking about to see if it was even true, which of course, it is apparently… but still… kinda pointless mentioning it here… almost as pointless as me replying
When I first started with Blender 4+ years ago ppl didn’t quibble about lighting and/or rendering nuances. Andrew, and Cycles, clearly illustrated that Blender/Cycles has come a long and impressive way!
The yummy doughnuts made me watch the tutorial which as always is well explained - and then I was able to test Cycles on my own work. Cycles is cool indeed. What I think Andrew forgets to mention in his enthusiastic presentation is that you need extreme powerful machines to use it in production work, at this point at least. The render time to get a clear image on my scene should have been like two hours compared to 5 minutes in BI. And that said, the example he gives of a “scene rendered with BI - look how crap it looks” it’s manipulated to suit the cause, that scene can be done much better just with BI - something the Guru knows, as in many tutorials he has faked nicely GI with BI. I don’t mean to speak badly of Cycles, it is great and I’m sure it will get better (maybe a future Blender version will have the ability to automatically translate blender materials into node materials to cut a bit of the trouble?) and I loved unbiased rendering since I was trying to use Indigo long time ago. But I think the shortcomings were not well pointed out, and a beginner in Blender could get discouraged soon if he is bluntly told he can’t do a decent scene in BI and then Cycles is too slow for his needs - he will more than likely go to another software…
Oanav, what hardware do you have? And what integrator were you using during your Cycles experiment?
There are so many variables and factors that can be controlled in Cycles to speed rendering and change the look of the scene that “it renders too slow” doesn’t have a lot of meaning.
And no, BI would not be able to match this. Among other things. Just getting the reflections on the glazing of the doughnuts to approximate the way it does here would cause a BI render to take much longer. And, as you pointed out, faking in a scene like this with BI would add a large amount of time on setup that you aren’t even taking into account.
It’s apples and oranges to compare an expert level of experience in BI to a novice level approach to Cycles. A person who really knows how to get something done in Cycles can shave off just as much time in Cycles as a BI expert, if not more.
And I spent $100 on my nVidia card. I have the same one Andrew does. Do you consider that “expensive rendering equipment”?
Besides, Cycles has experienced a significant speedup in the past couple of weeks, thanks to Brecht. It will get faster, too. It’s still a baby.
Honestly, before you give up on it, go to the Cycles Tests thread, post a basic test scene, and ask: “So how do I get this to render faster? Or is Cycles just pokey crap?!”
I promise, you’ll have some ridiculously talented Cyclists coming out of the woodwork to show you how to set up your scene and nodes to scream through a render.
