4 Easy Ways to Speed Up Cycles
Blender Guru explains how to optimise your use of Cycles.
The Blender Internal rendering engine is looking to be headed the way of the dodo. Development has ceased and is now focused solely on Cycles.
Some users don’t like Cycles due to it’s heavy rendertimes (which is understandable). But if you know how to tweak it, Cycles can be fast. Competitively fast in fact.
So I’ve compiled this list of 4 Easy Ways to Speed Up Cycles.
Actually, I hope that the blender internal won’t, at some point be discontinued, I rather like it, as well as the newer cycles render engine,,,its nice to have both!
Agreed.
Sometimes you just want a quick render and sometimes the Blender Internal renderer is enough for that. Even though Cycles is getting faster, sometimes I just need a quick render. I esp. use it for pre-production planning work and rendering base compositions that I’ll use as photo plates to paint over in Photoshop. It’s also quicker to set up my materials for LuxRender renders by getting my base settings done with the Blender Internal first and then converting them for LuxRender. I don’t get why make something that’s useful as obsolete. I like having both.
Even if it is discontinued, BI’s a pretty mature rendering engine. The only reason to stop using it is if it cant do what you need any more.
Agreed. I don’t mind that development has halted, and it’s understandable why. Though, I just hope it doesn’t get needlessly booted–at least not before some greater improvements to Cycles is done. I still find the Blender Internal renderer quite useful, esp. for things like quick renders and quickly setting up LuxRender materials. I like having both BI and Cycles as rendering options.
Thank you, Andrew (and the commenters on your site) for these suggestions. To be honest, I’ve been feeling pessimistic about Cycles because my work environment and render farm is all-CPU and I do not want “realistic” renders most of the time.
Thanks to these tips, I’ve learned how to get what I want out of Cycles at speeds I never thought possible on a CPU.
Another tip: Use the presets under the Light Paths section to quickly manage these settings. :)
i sure hope they dont let it go. for those of us who dont have an envidia card still need a good renderer.even though cycles is good, i still get way to much niose with light shining through glass. and just noise in general. a problem i dont have with the blender internal. so until cycles supports other cards b i works just fine.
I’d say best way is, to build a farm :) hehehe .
I wish they remove the blender internal for good, effective immediately. This way, it will force us to improve Cycles with more purpose and urgency.
Why? Is it in your way? Why should we just remove something that’s already complete and still rather useful? I don’t understand that logic. You don’t have to remove the Blender Internal just to improve on Cycles. They’re already developing it with more purpose and urgency. If you haven’t noticed, there hasn’t been a new development for the Blender Internal for quite a good while, but we’ve been seeing Cycles continuing steady and strong in development.
Agreed.
They cant even remove it, because the GE is hooked to it.
Some great tips nuzzled in there among the obvious ones. Bounces was a good reminder, and the tile size one was an eye opener. Some great extra tips in the comments, too. I’ve found that the one about turning caustics off when I have nothing transparent in the scene, is a great help for no real cost.
Thanks for another great post, Andrew!
I think using Cycles will be a no-brainer once AMD pull their finger out and make OpenCL a usable option for the Blender devs.On most of the graphics card benchmarks I’ve seen, the AMD Radeons’ compute capability is vastly ahead of nVidia cards, so Cycles on OpenCL could really decimate render times.