Blender Cycles render engine

[cekuhnen]

McNeel is developing a plug-in for Rhino using Blender Foundation's Cycles GPU render engine.

Cycles offers the same fucntionality like Keyshot but just faster and with a dramatically more mature and powerful material node system.

Rendering in Fusion with the build-in plug-in is incredible slow even on my 8 core MacPro.

Cycles with the GPU does the same image nearly in few seconds.

BTW Cycles engine is also open source.

[cekuhnen]

what futher comments do you need?

speed comparision? workflows?

I know from Altair that for SolidThinking they evaluated Keyshot but decided to use Thea which offers CPU and GPU rendering and much more compact and powerful material engine.

I know Keyshot is easy but I feel with todays GPU rendering CPU solutions are just outperformed quite easily.

And with McNeel implementing Cycles which is a CPU GPU OSS engine also the cost factor is different and you have access to the code.

[dgorsman]

Just dipping in here...

How does GPU rendering fit in with the "360" -ness of the program?  ie. using the cloud to access remote servers so users *don't* have to have excessive hardware?  Or did I miss something?

Open source software does have some benefits but is frequently held at arms length by more traditional developers for a couple of reasons.  The code base could pivot on very short notice, taking it away from the needs of the users here.  Attempting to correct that in the open source code base could result in a public relations nightmare, being cast as Evil Big Business attempting to bully others to get its way.  Products which incorporate open source code have some additional legal obligations, which may be at cross purposes or otherwise expose a more traditional developer such as AutoDesk to an unacceptable level of risk.

[cekuhnen]

Maybe because there are already OSS and commercial cloud CPU / GPU animation and rendering services?

Besides Cycles which is OSS and heavily developed and unlike Gimp or such a pro tool there are also commercial

products such as Thea or Octane.

All three products offer a better render and material experience as Hypershot which in my honest opinion is an extremely

overprices fire and forget engine which is called fast but in reality is pretty slow when you do the finale rendering.

Keyshot unlike Octane for example does not offer render farm or online rendering, while from theo to Cycles you can

already use online CPU / GPU rendering and with Octane you even have in the cloud animation system.

[roambotics_scott]

I don't quite get the «360ness» comment but OpenCL is perfectly «360» and could do GPU rendering on most devices.

It seems to me that plugging into Blender would be a trivial / «over the weekend» project if the phantom API ever materialized 🙂

[cekuhnen]

openCL however seems not to have the same power for 3D render engines as CUDA not because of the hardware but how ATI sofar only supported driver wise openCl.

CUDA has it's own down sides, but I found for what we do product renderings, using CPUs is silly because the GPU is drastically better at the math for the shaders / render tools I would only use as a product designer.

The interesting thing about Blender / Cycles is that the engine is being developed as a stand alone now so you can use it like Octane VRay or Thea and implement it. No need to use Blender if you do not desirer.

[Anonymous]

It just strikes me as odd that there was a plugin for Keyshot, plus Fusions limited internal renderer when Autodesk has so many texturers and renderers already in it's corporate arsenal. Max, Maya, Inventor, VRed, Alias, Showcase, MentalRay, PowerShape etc, etc...  Surely one of these can be plugged in easily enough. Why even look outside? Sure, Cycles is good but really, why bother with so much at hand already? 

Sometimes reinventing the wheel just adds lumps.

[cekuhnen]

Smeggy

I guess the go with Keyshot if thats what they use internally because it is so popular.

But there is a difference between what 3DMax uses (internal + Mental Ray) or Alias compared to engines such as Thea which SolidThinking included instead of Keyshot or Cycles.

As much as I enhoyed working with Mental Ray it is not very fast. And Keyshots fast speed is because it uses a simplified approach for the preview and in finale rendering it tanks.

Thea or Cycles can use GPU and then you nearly have instant real GI results compared to what Showcase tried to simulate via openGL GLSL tricks.

[colin.smith]

I'm archiving this due to a lack of votes.  That said, if the folks at Blender wanted to make a plugin for Fusion we would not be opposed.  We have an API and partner program available for 3rd parties to do this.