Blender cycles does some impressive rendering!
Here is an intro by Jonathan Williamson at Blender Cookie:
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/09/16/blender-introduction-to-the-cycles-render-engine/
If you go to graphicall.org you can download a development build with Cycles.
~John
Is there an official version of Cycles anywhere?
Cycles is not yet in an official blender release, so no.
The first official release of blender with an early version of cycles will be in 2.61 though, and that’s two months away.
However, since Blender is open source, you can download blender builds or compile them yourself at any point of it’s development.
People upload builds at www.graphicall.org
You can find builds with cycles (And other not yet trunk features) there too.
Appreciate it, thank you.
If it is only 2 months I can wait…
Are they really that close with the release of 2.6?
2.6 is comming very soon. It’s at its final stages.
2.61 - Two months.
2.62 - ~Four months (High chance of it being able to do N-Gons and finnaly have new modern modeling tools)
Even better is that Cycles will be merged into trunk before the end of the month :buttrock:
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2011-October/033766.html
I am really keen to import scenes from other apps and making Blender/Cycles a part of our pipeline, so am looking foward to early graphical builds after the merge. Currently cycles builds have import functions excluded.
You can turn the import/export functions on by going to User Preferences and clicking on the Add-Ons tab.
Here’s the current 2.6 road map. Currently cycles is scheduled for integration in 2.61 scheduled for a December release. BMesh currently hasn’t got a scheduled release date. http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-260/
@ Wolfmanyoda, cheers but there is still no option for Collada import, at least on the builds I have used. Looking forward to the new and improved Collada in 2.60 and impending Cycles in 2.61.
Of course I could import using Collada into a current non-cycles build and then export a blend file into a Cycles build. Just waiting for all the pieces to fall into place, which is happening at a stunning rate 
Come to think about it, will Cycles replace the default render engine?
Or is it just as a supplement…?
Ngons will be sweet, really difficult to do simplified hands in Blender as of this moment…
Aha cool. 
Gonna be interesting to see what Cycles is all about in the upcoming Blender update.
If you don’t know what Cycles is all about, I suggest just downloading a Cycles build and trying it out.
The main goal of cycles is making a renderer somewhere between a renderman type renderer and a luxrender type. Extremely flexible, with node based materials.
Currently Cycles has only realistic shaders, and that’s what you’ll get on the December release.
Yea that is gonna be sweet, thanks for the info. I am currently messing around with nodes on materials, ususally I use hue to blend the colors better in the scene.
Reason why I’m waiting for the official release is because I feel it is unstable enough as it is with the updates on Blender.org.
Everything appears to be on track…
[Developer Meeting Notes - 13/11/11](http://www.blendernation.com/2011/11/14/developer-meeting-notes-november-13-2011/#utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Blendernation+%28BlenderNation%29)
The dev team are currently at [BCon3](http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Projects). :)Cool thanks.
I really look forward to Bmesh aswell so I hope it is not gonna take too long to add that feature.
Does the Ngon mean that I can have a face in between faces with 6 sides and with the outer faces with only 4 sides? I know what it does to one surface but what I wondering is if it is supporting variated surfaces?
Damn! Cycles was quite different from the internal render, gonna need mileage with this. Downloaded the testbuild from blender.org…
Is cycles not capable of render particles? Been doing some experiments but it is impossible to render particles, snif. I hope that will function with the 2.61 version…?
Are any of you guys experimenting with Cycles? I finally started to understand the possibility to add specular using mix shader and glossy properties. Some things do feels unnecessary at the moment, might be that I am not entirely comfort with the engine as of yet…
I wonder though; how basic this setting is at the moment? and what kind of changes that will be made next coming update, anyone of you know?
Here’s something I made for the speed modeling…
