I couldn’t resist and downloaded the Cycles build (that means, a test version of Blender that includes an all new unbiased modern render engine). I am all for Blender internal renderer mainly because I have too little time to switch between software and waiting for long rendering times. And I like the results I’m beginning to get with Blender Internal! So I will not go to the fancy external renderer but if the fancy renderer will come  to me fully integrated in Blender I won’t mind it so much.

Unbiased renders are a delight to look at but they take a long time to get a neat enough image. In architectural visualisation you can use something like this for those dreaded interior renderings, the results are very realistic. It seems this rendering engines are becoming more usable and more fast. They take better advantage of the computer resources, not only CPU but video card also and are becoming really fast. I had already planned to upgrade my old video card when reading about Octane renderer, Cycles would make it even more tempting!

As I was just setting up the scene for my “practice project” (copying an interior scene from a photograph)  I tried it a bit in Cycles. I didn’t try too hard and didn’t get too spectacular results, but I felt it would be nice to use when it will be fully developed. I used Indigo some while ago before it going commercial and I loved to watch how the light fills the scene. In Blender you can actually see this real time in a viewport with a “rendered” option in viewport shading. My scene was at first black then I understood I have to go through all the materials and the world settings, set them to nodes and fiddle a couple of settings. I didn’t use nodes materials much until now so I stopped here. I don’t think it makes any use of existing material settings right now, and here is my first question, when released, will Cycles integration be complete or will I have to set all materials differently for Cycles? I’m thinking especially at my emerging furniture library, will it be obsolete materials wise? I will try to read the blender forums in search of more information, only the Cycles discussion right now seems to be more about hardware or special effects and animation.

Here is my quick test. The nice image in the upper-left corner is the photograph I’m using as reference, don’t have a heart attack thinking it is the rendered result 🙂

I also wish I knew if cycles will be able to use other types of texture mapping than UV mapping, like generated or object (wich I hope will be kept and improved)

Back to work now in Blender Internal, that scene needs a lot of detail still!