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Videotutorial: 'Learn Cycles'

13

Greg Zaal from BlenderNerd.com has published a 20-minute videotutorial on Cycles.

Greg Zaal writes:

You’ve probably heard of the new renderer being developed, Cycles. I’ve always been interested in realism and so this new renderer is really good news for me.

It’s currently in pre-alpha stage (despite what I accidentally say in the video) which means that there are tonnes of bugs and little integration with most functions of Blender, so don’t expect it to work like a charm.

However, it’s perfectly capable of creating something decent. The image on the right is just something I made to test out cycles and find whatever major bugs there might be. Surprisingly, there are not so many serious bugs that stop you from doing what you want – despite a few crashes every now and then (mostly when playing with nodes too much and testing things you know probably won’t work) Cycles has definitely got a very large future in Blender.

You could think of it as a brother of Luxrender. It has GPU rendering (my favourite feature!) and a similar material system.Be warned though, it takes getting used to and there is very little documentation on it. But, if you’re like me and you like to play with stuff that technically hasn’t been released yet, then go ahead and download Cycles!

Watch this video to find out how to use some of the key features of Cycles including materials, lighting and camera effects.

13 Comments

  1. I've been also toying with it lately, and the best feature in my opinion is the realtime rendering.
    My little "technique" for it: Make a small 3D view e.g. in the upper-right corner, set it to render, then go on editing anything and get the results nearly immediately. I just love it :)

  2. Nice video tutorial.
    I'd love to see one video tutorial focused on the node based materials.
    (For me is the harder part to grasp in Cycles.)

  3. I find the picture of the audi isn't realist, i don't know if it is the lighting, modeling or even the materials but actual render can do better than that...
    but thank you greg for sharing this ! ;-)

  4. "You could think of it as a brother of Luxrender"

    or a rip off of octane.
    LOL jk jk im kidding.

    Yeah cycles is pretty good, it really takes advantage of what hard ware it is using.
    It is a big help when im on my schools computers, photo realism on a motherboard that has a cpu and gpu built in it.

  5. If I understood correctly you just referred viewport rendering as GPU rendering in that video. That's not correct. 'Rendered' view is selectable wether you're using CPU or GPU. If you don't have the dropdown menu for GPU, your build probably doesn't support it at all.

  6. @Notacet
    Thanks, I was just told by someone else as well. Looks like we all learnt something today :)
    Apparently there is no GPU rendering available for windows yet.

  7. @Greg Zaal

    Sure there is GPU rendering for windows - you just need an nVidia card (fairly modern) and the latest nVidia drivers. It only supports CUDA currently which is nVidia technology. Latest dev meeting notes suggest that Brecht is working on OpenCL which is supported by ATI and older nVidia cards.

  8. Yeah he's definately using CPU for his viewport render. With gpu it's much faster almost instantaneous with a gts450 that was less than 100 bucks.

    Also in the video he says he doesn't understand the exposure settings and says they are lenses. Many of you probably know they are brands of film. A long time ago before cameras were built into cell phones, they used film, and different brands and types rendered colors and contrast differently. This is a representation/simulation of that.

  9. An exposure setting is not a brand of film. It is more like the amount of time the shutter is allowed to stay open. longer = more light, but more apparent motion blur if your subject moves while the shutter is open.

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