I haven’t upgraded my computer yet but having a bit of time on my hands I was tempted again to test Cycles.
The new BETA official 2.61 release shows a friendlier Cycles but I’m still a bit confused with material and even light settings.

From the previous version I had tested, the new update shows more input for materials outside the dreaded node editor but I didn’t get the right bump yet.

I was also sad when I tried to adjust the tree image (just a picture on a plane, I hoped to change it’s brightness etc) and didn’t find a way to do it, not even in the node editor – though I’m sure it’s possible as everyone in the know loves Cycles material complexity.

One more problem I stumbled upon was sunlight through window panes. As you can see, my starter scene has no glass at the moment. With glass, in default settings light from outside would not get through, with shadow disabled for the glass in the object panel, light did enter but I got light specks all over the render that would not go away with more passes. I tried disabling some more stuff but didn’t work. I used for this render (1000 passes -40 min) an emitter object but later discovered now you can use a sun lamp that is set rather like an emitter object. The shadows don’t look the same though, and specks-through-glass-lit-scene problem still appears.

I got a fair amount of crashing, something never happened in previous releases, and other thing that could be improved was I had to switch between edit and object mode or wireframe-rendering mode to make some changes to the model reflect in the viewport rendering.

I am also sad because gennerated mapping does ot work in cube mode, nor does it use texture space, so I had to unwrap the walls for such simple mapping.

But I know this is still beta and I’m starting to get a feel of Cycles in spite of disliking the material system change.

I’ll work some more on the scene details and post in Blender artists to get some help 🙂