K-Cycles Ulitimate Performance only $49
Eric Klein writes:
We are proud to introduce K-Cycles the Ultimate Performance for Cycles:
3 reasons why you should consider K-Cycles:
- Two to four times faster than Cycles.
- The custom Cycles build that also speeds up your viewport as well.
- Push button simplicity. Just choose your desired quality and press render.
A bad copy of E-Cycles ….
I disapprove.
It is not. The UI is very different. The performance is different specially in the viewport rendering. It is healthy competition in the custom build market that Blender has not have and give customers alternatives.
Unlike those who disapprove, I have actually used K-Cycles, and have found it to be amazing. The viewport performance alone is worth the price, and is something E-cycles does not do.
Check the graphs, K-Cycles outperforms in speed render tests. Furthermore, Eric is known by many to be both an expert artist and terrific C programmer, not to mention an all around great guy.
I understand. If I had paid $300 for something that can be accomplished faster for only $49, I would dissaprove as well.
Ahaha ! Legit !
Your’e an affiliate.
Don’t try to hide the fact that you want to make a quick buck out of this.
Yes, I am happy to help Eric promote his fine product. Compared to my dozen or so other products, the affiliate money I make off of K-Cycles is nominal.
Have a great day.
Wow. Just wow.
A content producer shaming a potential customer who’s demonstrated willingness to plunk $300 down on a Blender product, because they’re unhappy about a product you’re affiliated with having identical functionality, yet only changed one letter of the name?
Somehow I bet you’d disagree with the assessment of “healthy competition” if someone were to release a suite of products called Qit Ops, Quik Shot, Sketchy Style, and Chalky Style for $19.
I trust you don’t need a tutorial to model a bigger shovel for the hole you’ve dug.
Don’t respond. You’ll only dig deeper.
Chip Walters can have his opinion. As can you. But I must say you come across poorly.
I think you should mention you’re an affiliate when sharing your opinions about this add-on, as you have a financial incentive for it to get sales.
As for bashing E-Cycles. I have both E-Cycles and K-Cycles and in my experience, E-Cycles is still faster and easier to use. K-Cycles is only comparable speed when it uses huge 1080×1080 pixels tiles, which makes it impossible for you to see how fast your render will be done.
Not to mention that E-Cycles now has an option that costs 1 dollar….
To clarify, this message was meant for Chipp, not for Eric. The charts shown by Eric are fair, the harsh comparison about viewport speed by Chipp is not, however.
D370,
The benchmark chart on viewport performance are fair. I maximized the viewport window, set viewport samples 500, turn off denoiser and timed until rendering stop.
Another user did a very detail analysis of the viewport performance see:
https://blenderartists.org/t/k-cycles-speed-up-your-cycles-rendering-2x-and-more/1295008/7
Yes, I agree, I can definitely see how they are fair (as I said in the message above). I also think it’s a reasonably fair way of comparing the add-ons, easily traceable with scenes anyone can download, no objections there. In some K-Cycles is faster in others E-Cycles, of course both being quite a bit faster than normal Cycles, which is great!
I was just commenting on the comments made by Chipp that K-Cycles is per definition faster than E-Cycles and therefore a better purchase decision, and claiming that E-Cycles would not offer viewport render advantages. Also making a jab at people that bought it at it’s full price.
You say E-cycles is faster and you have both. Perhaps you can prove it with a side to side comparison?
Sure, when rendering the same scene I get the following results:
Default Cycles – Auto tile size: around 2min35s, I don’t remember exactly
K-Cycles – Auto tile size – HQ setting: 1min35s (auto chosen tile amount was 1 tile, making it impossible to see how long the render will take)
E-Cycles – Auto tile size – HQ setting: 1min31s (auto chosen tile amount was around 12 tiles, still a bit big, but you get an estimation of how long it will take)
K-Cycles – Custom tilesize – HQ setting: around 2 minutes (I turned off auto tilesize, so I could get an estimation of rendertime, but as you can see it drastically increased rendertime. I should note that the settings resulted in about 30-40 tiles, so it’s not a totally fair comparison)
4 second difference is of course negligible, but still technically faster and it is mainly the tilesize which I’m not a huge fan of.
Don’t get me wrong, I like K-Cycles, I just thought it was a bit unfair to make some of those claims in your post, especially about viewport render performance
Not entirely sure if i like the idea of people selling Blender even if they added something good.
A long time ago, at the start of Blender Market, I wrote a little post about how Blender licenses and paid add-ons could cause trouble. It would only be a matter of time before someone would make a competing or copied add-on for a lower price or for free and all hell would break loose.
How predictable.
This discussion is so ridiculous considering the whole philosophy behind Blender (yeah, heckle me if you must). I like supporting developers and creators with a little cash, but I couldn’t give a rats behind for either or any of these ‘amazing products’, especially when this type of discussion is the result.
Meaning to say that I agree with you Kurt!
The idea of supporting the developers and creators in their efforts isn’t a bad idea in itself. This is what a lot of people do for Blender as well (donations of course).
But as soon as people start to talk about ‘products’ in this regard, something is going off the rails.
They need to take a long hard look at what they’re doing with Blender and maybe start developing for Adobe, Autodesk, Maya or whatever.
Indeed Taurelius,
I have nothing against developers creating add-ons, they expand the use of Blender vastly so i am all for devs making a buck there.
However, when the creator of Blender explicitly states Blender will always be free i can’t but frown upon people doing so. Where will this end even.. selling subscriptions to special branch Blenders pulling it back in line with the other moneyhungry shareholder companies ? I thought the whole idea was to get away from that entirely.
When something gains popularity it also attracts opportunism, it’s in our nature.
With all due respect i’d say sell add-ons but not Blender.
This is an old and tired argument– and it’s been hashed out ad nauseum with literally thousands of posts on BA and other places. It boils down to If you don’t like it, then don’t support it by purchasing the product. FWIW, there is no way to create an addon that changes how the Cycles engine performs at it’s core level.
Sure, you can discount years of work by this and other developers all you want, but the simple fact is Blender does not want to include these changes. It’s already been discussed over and over. In fact much of the code to make Cycles faster is already well known and freely available, just not in a production version of Blender.
Just like the thousands of other rants, you’ll surely have those who agree with you and those who think you’re silly bringing this up yet again, thinking what you say will make a bit of difference to anyone.
Hi Chipp,
Old argument or not i’m thinking “don’t sell Blender”.
If they don’t want it then don’t force it on them.
If Eric wants to change things then he can make it freely available and try to help cycles development instead of creating a paid spinoff confusing the community.
The attempt to undercut e-cycles clearly shows this is about making cash out of Blender and code that is made freely available. I’d say create your own renderer addon and sell that instead.
This is not a rant, it’s about decency and common sense.
I wasn’t planning on elaborating on this but there ya go i guess.
Cheers.
Chipp, you’re entitled to your opinion that it’s ‘an old and tired argument’, but the fact that this still raises issues and discussions by many Blender contributors and enthusiasts means it’s apparently not tired.
Second, your argument that ‘if you don’t like it, then don’t buy it’ is simplistic. I remember the Foundation trying to stop foreign companies from ‘repackaging’ Blender and selling it as a commercial product. Were those variations or forks of the product? When is a fork acceptable? How many are acceptable? These so-called ‘products’ risk polluting the eco-system around Blender and it’s core philosophy. Developers should be considering this much more carefully. Plain and simple.
I wholeheartedly agree with Kurt. I have supported many, many add-on developers (including you, Chipp) and have no problem with that. What I’m mostly commenting on is the way too commercially driven (and rather childish) discussion going on about competing products mentioned here. And believe me, this will not be the last time.
Related to that, is my third point: please take a look in the mirror Chipp. Call me silly, but I still consider ‘the people who rant’ coming from a very different place than people who continuously promote products for their own personal gain.
Personal attacks have no place here.
It’s unfortunate you would see this as a personal attack, because it is intended as constructive criticism. It would be nice if some of the arguments would be considered more carefully, instead of them being disregarded immediately because they may not align with personal objectives.
I chose my words carefully when I suggest: “These so-called ‘products’ risk polluting the eco-system around Blender and it’s core philosophy. Developers should be considering this much more carefully.”
I’m speaking of ‘risk’ and ‘consideration’.
Nothing more, nothing definitive.
Your statement: “…the simple fact is Blender does not want to include these changes. It’s already been discussed over and over” is somewhat definitive, imho. The Blender Foundation has actually made many changes suggested by members of the community in the past.
Has the developer of K-Cycles contacted the Blender Foundation with his suggestions, ideas, plans, etc? Has there been an open discussion about this? Has feedback been gathered from the Foundation or other developers? Do the dozens of amazing developers at the Blender Foundation perhaps have good reasons for not including certain changes? Etc. etc.
I hope I’m mistaken, but I doubt this discussion has taken place.
Blender is and will remain FOSS. And it works exceptionally well this way. Its donation-based model works great. There is a thriving, very open and lively community around it. People are actually able to suggest and make changes, create add-ons, etc. largely due to that fact. For whatever reason, some developers tend to forget this basic idea behind Blender. Other developers really do understand this, that’s what others, including myself, are trying to emphasize.
Too bad not everyone wants to hear it.
As a side note, maybe you could mention your affiliation with a product you are promoting beforehand, however ‘nominal’ your revenue is. As you’ve noticed, it’s regarded as etiquette by many here in the community and would be appreciated.
Once again, please see this as constructive criticism.
Let’s leave it at that.
Happy Easter everyone!
Taurelius, thanks for your comments. I have being very open about the basic core improvements for 2x Cycles and have discuss it publicly. See my thread in Blender Artist: https://blenderartists.org/t/cycles-rendering-up-to-2x-faster-by-using-scrambling-distance-and-optix-high-sampling/1277444?u=eklein
and DevTalk: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/what-happened-to-scrambling-distance-it-s-been-used-in-theory-and-it-will-help-speed-up-rendering/3411/111?u=eklein
Some of the suggestions for performance improvement have being a task on the Cycles development plan for 2 years and yet to be included.
Just like addons can add features, functional or workflows to Blender. The same can said with custom builds, but at a deeper level. Their many features specially in Cycles and Blender that can be added for the benefit of users that required custom build.
Hi Eric,
Thank you for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it.
Yes, I’ve seen your comments on devtalk (and your contributions on developer.blender.org, which are undoubtedly appreciated). I’ve also seen that someone comment that Blender developers have some doubts about this approach. Also, I haven’t seen you mention your intent to develop a(nother) commercial custom build on devtalk, but maybe I missed that.
Just hope you carefully considered the possible consequences of your various choices, especially those that have been commented upon in the posts on this page.
Thanks again. Take care.
I don’t get the discussion. Is there any proof that he stole any of the E-Cycles code?
What’s his track record, career, portfolio etc. ?
What I have to criticise is the name. “K-Cylce”s is almost implying that indeed there is at least a significant reference to E-Cycles.
In the end,
can we at least try to always add proof, and substance to the argument?
Hi Johannes,
If you want to see some of his work, search Blender Artists for EKlein. You’ll see his interiors are unsurpassed in realism. You’ll also see he’s contributed plenty already to the community including one of the best glass shaders for EEVEE.
I met him when I was creating my first course years ago and he was of immense help. He’s always been available to those who seek rendering advice, and all this before K-Cycles.
He’s been working K-Cycles for a couple years off and on. He didn’t steal anyone’s code, and that is an overt lie.
He’s a class guy who doesn’t publicly cause trouble for everyone who disagree with him. That alone puts him up a notch in my book. And that’s also why I decided to help him, too.
Please make a tutorial on how to render correctly Volumetric Light. For example, the sun’s rays from the window and the rays in the fog.
Wonder if it works on CPU or OpenCl, as my Cycles Render Devices say
OptiX
“No compatible GPU’s Found for path tracing. Cycles will render on the CPU.
CUDA
“No compatible GPU’s Found for path tracing. Cycles will render on the CPU.
My CPU is AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon Vega Graphis(not using onboard GPU as that and the discrete one don’t play well together)
My GPU is Radeon RX 570 with 8gb onboard
40 GB Ram and with a 500 GB SSD harddrive.
Would it run faster on the GPU or CPU?
K-Cycles will work with CPU, but with minimal gains. I don’t know if it works with OpenCl. I would expect little difference in performance if it did. The main focus has being in optimizing Nvidia GPU performance both for Cuda and Optix.
Thank you for the prompt response. I had a NVIDIA, but when i upgraded my system, the best avail(for my pocket) was the AMD.