Cycles-X
TheMysteryIsThePoint
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Dreaming of Daz would implement Cycles into Daz Studio
Pixar's Renderman for Blender is coming soon as well. Exciting times...
Really? Wow, that's awesome! Exciting times indeed.
But I see it will not work with opencl at least at first. That again means nvidia only, or stay with 2.93 LTS until Cycles X supports amd.
Perhaps graphics cards will become affordable again by the time Cycles X is released......one can dream....
Couldn't care less for Renderman but Cycles-X getting love to come closer to being on par with other modern engines sounds exciting. Currently using Kcycles to make up in performance. Now if Cycles-X manages to include Light Linking by end of 2021, I'll die from happiness.
Renderman for Blender had light linking years ago, just sayin'
Just started messing with k-cycles lol. It's like e-cycles, but not retarded expensive. Haven't really had time to put it through any real paces, but it seems even faster than e-cycles so far. And now this x-cycles stuff looks like it might even blow k-cycles out of the water. Just skip it and go straight to z-cycles, renders so fast, it's done rendering before you even finish built the scene :P
That's because the speed improvement in both K and E cycles is working off Lukas Stockner's scrambling distance patch. E-cycles added more features with many of them again being implemented from other peoples public work. Both K & E optimize this further. The difference is, K charges a modest premium for doing this legwork. The guy behind E has lost his mind and is pretending he's developed an entirely new render engine by himself and charges a hefty price for it. Incredibly shady dude.
Just wanted to mention that E-Cycles Lite can be had for $1 now.
https://blendermarket.com/products/e-cycles
Never tried "a-z cycles" myself. What I can say is if you use cycles with low iterations and the denoiser, that's what the denoiser is for, then it seems blazing fast already to me. As for "scrambling" I see Brecht explains that's incompatible with the denoiser so not going to happen ..
I'm not sure what the denoiser compatibility discussion means but I use the compositor denoiser with no difference in quality between vanilla and E/K 99% of the time. The other 1% you just set the scrambling distance default value back up to 1, making it essentially vanilla. Some of my initial comparisons between vanilla/K is posted on Blenderartists here. Utilizing scrambling distance definitely feels a bit "hacky" but rendering 50-100% faster without any noticeable differences in most cases is a big deal. Definitely worth the consideration especially if you grab the $1 E-cycles version.
K-cycles also sped up my viewport render by up to 2x in some cases which was also pretty exciting.
Theres already a version of blender with scrambling distance and light groups thats free
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/qsbbbc/
I built 3.0.0 Alpha from source because they said Cycles-X had been merged to master and the time I tried it, multi-GPU had not been implemented yet. Well, now it has, and let's put it this way: I was going to do an actual benchmark, but decided "what the heck for?" because Cycles-X is STUPID FAST! The difference is like night and day. Especially in the viewport, where you can basically navigate around and rotate just like you used to do but in Solid Mode. Well, now my electric bill is going to go through the roof because I'm basically in Rendered Mode ALL THE TIME now.
I can't even imagine what it's going to be like with next gen hardware, as I'm still on my 2080tis...
Old 1060 here, since eevee doesn't support rtx raytracing yet .. I will probably upgrade my rig when they'll get it.
I`m using low and old 860 GTX in my laptop , and indeed Alpha with Cycles X faster than previous release up to 2 - 4 times . Rendering with CPU also have same speed boost . The only problem is Diffeo Cycles conversion still give me "Silver Overlay skin". Luckily there are plenty great skin material out there , although you still need doing manual change for each surfaces .
I guess Thomas will address 3.0 and cyclex issues when it comes at least to beta .. since fixing an alpha makes little sense.
I've got to download the latest 3.0 then as when I tried it a few months ago when it was first available, Cycles X was slower than in 2.93 for me with the exact same scene. Maybe it was the scene I was doing, I don't know, but I've got a 3090 so I was surprised that it wasn't blazing through it. I'll have to give it a whirl next week and see how it's changed!
I'd be really interested in seeing your results. I think quite a bit of work was done and it seems rock solid so far, especially the multi GPU that was added.
I noticed with the experimental builds, things broke all the time depending on which exp build it was. With the latest merge to master on 3.0 Alpha, it's absolutely and consistently significantly faster than 2.93 in both overall render speeds as well as viewport.
I've been doing all of my work in 3.0 alpha now and so far no bugs (knocks on wood).
Holy Crap.
So, I had gotten into the habit of just updating the blender source tree every other day or so and rebuilding. Now that 3.0.0 is in bcon3, the devs tagged 3.1, which I just updated and built. I was not expecting much, but I did have to upgrade the Optix SDK from 7.1 to 7.3, and... wow. Just wow.
The viewport performance is CRAZY. It seems like even things like reflections work while you're tumbling. It's definitely Alpha software, but apparently what we got with the 3.0.0 Alpha was not the whole plan.
Just wanted to say that Renderman for Blender is not much fun to use. It's really unstable, slow and hard to use. If you've never used Renderman before, but want to, because "Pixar", don't get too disappointed. It can render gorgeous pictures, but the path there is filled with crashes and waiting and then more crashes. It's really built for industry use, not the hobbyist.
Cycles X runs in circles around it.
I've spent many hours playing with Renderman and it is impressive. Now after reading the article below, Cycles may be getting the bump it needs to improve character renders which is AWESOME!
http://www.cgchannel.com/2021/12/see-facebook-reality-labs-work-on-blenders-cycles-renderer/
According to the blog post, the work has improved rendering of subsurface scattering effects via the addition of an anisotropic phase function to better simulate the way that light interacts with human skin.
Future work may include a native USD procedural
The developers now aim to improve the rendering of eyes inside Cycles, with an upcoming patch for manifold next event estimation intended to accelerate the convergence of caustic effects.
Real caustics is arriving in 3.1
https://blenderartists.org/t/blender-3-1-cycles-with-real-caustics/1345869
So thank you Facebook for pushing some caustics into cycles .. it was about time.