Cycles for C4D

#1

Wow. just seen this

Another renderer for C4D!

#2

Yeah I saw that from Mike Batchelor on LinkedIn… I know nothing of Cycles, is it decent? Fast? GPU or CPU?

#3

Oh my, what a time to be active. And the x-partcles people are kick ass. Apparently they are working on all sorts of goodies.

I can’t remember - does cycles still have problems on AMD hardware? I guess the real question is - is this going to be a viable GPU rendering solution on the mac?

#4

You are sure? These two words ring a different bell for me:P (sorry, couldn’t resist that joke…)

#5

Joke? Uh, I don’t get it.

Anyway Cycles is GPU-accelerated. It’ll be interesting to see how it slots into the C4D workflow, up against the likes of Thea and Octane.

#6

Personally, I wish they’d focus on updating and improving X-Particles…which I’m sure they’re doing, but do we really need another renderer? Unless they’re significantly better than the 8 other renderers that I can think of, is this really a good use of their time? Hopefully it is!

#7

Cycles for C4D should be tightly integrated with XP, which will be nice.

As for GPU stuff, it handles both Nvidia and AMD cards and a pretty wide range of the latter including FirePro cards based on some experience with Blender. Although technically that support may be segmented or walled off from parts of the code base, I have no idea. But AFAIK, it’s not limited to just one part of Blender.

Cycles includes a full-on nodal materials system as well. Exciting.

#8

The renderer itself is open source, which is quite significant in my book - so theoretically we’ll be paying for the bridge only. Quite helpful for Indies who may not have the budget for Arnold or Vray.

#9

of course, we can always use more render engines, especially if they are cheaper.

#10

The cool thing about this project is that they didn’t have to create a render engine from scratch so it’s not likely that it took too much time away from other projects for them. As Blinny pointed out, Cycles supports AMD and Nvidia GPU’s with a node based shading system and it will be sure to work well with X-Particles. Sure there are a ton of other engines coming to Cinema4d but Cycles will cater more to the hobbyists or those who don’t want to keep paying for maintenance on others. Cycles is free so you’ll just be paying for the Cinema4d connectivity plugin which will be a lot cheaper than buying into other engines. That all depends on what they charge but I don’t think it would be as much as a license of Arnold or Octane. :slight_smile:

#11

That’s what I am hoping for. Being a hobby user with “only” Prime (still love Cinema’s Renderer though), I would be happy to pay a few bucks to get access to another toy. Seeing that node editor in this screenshot made be anxious (still am paralyzed by Cinemas reflection channel).

That said, I am also still waiting for that Renderman announcement…

Oh, and one possible stand out feature of Cycles in C4D: shouldn’t this allow for deep python access to the engine?

#12

Another benefit to Cycles is the fact that the Blender community has some great resources already.

Such as… http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/cycles-shader-encyclopedia/

#13

kick.exe - scene.ass :smiley:

#14

Interestingly, Ton Roosendaal stopped over at an Tangent Animation in Toronto during SIGGRAPH, which is making a feature film almost 100% in Blender:

https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/siggraph-2016-report/

He mentions that, “They hired a good team of technical artists and developers to support them. Their Cycles coder is a former Mental-Ray engineer, who will become a frequent contributor to Cycles.”

#15

Posted more than a year ago on wiki.blender.org:
“AMD team who’s working on OSX drivers for El Capitan (OS X 10.11) did really nice work on improving the driver which is now capable of compiling and running OpenCL megakernel.-------
Nothing special is needed for using OpenCL on OSX now, just go to the user preferences and enable OpenCL compute device”

#16

Are there too many renderers on the market, as some say? Maybe so, but the final analysis is always in the sales figures.

I own the latest versions of Octane and VRAY. Love them both…but could see adding Cycles if the value/feature equation is good enough.

If I can achieve a big jump in what I can do with X-Particles…above other renderers…it might make sense just for that. This becomes even more of a consideration with the features that the xplosia acquisition will introduce.

Will wait. Will see.

#17

>Are there too many renderers on the market, as some say? Maybe so, but the final analysis is always in the sales figures.<

I think the more the merrier. It will be interesting to see in a few years, when the dust (or noise) has settled, which engines will still be around or developed.

Not an apples to apples comparison, but from 1896 - 1930, there were 1,800 automobile manufacturers in the United States. Most did not survive.

Back on topic, I’m looking forward to the Cycles- C4d integration.

#18

To correct myself from earlier days: I found out the OpenCL implementation in Cycles is missing quite a lot of functionality compared to CUDA and CPU rendering. So for now, same as it ever was. Still, some support is better than no support; it shows willingness to achieve that goal. Hopefully the CPU performance in Cycles C4D holds its own for live rendering on Mac hardware with AMD GPUs.

I will say the number and type of cards Blender.org supports is impressive. I couldn’t find any sort of roadmap that spelled out future timelines for OpenCL improvements, but I was probably looking in the wrong place. Their dev schedule seems pretty incremental from what I can tell so not holding my breath on big ticket items like robust OpenCL support.

[Ha. One word change in Google search makes the difference. Found it:

Not much going on for OpenCL. 2.78 Cycles dev shows Apple’s OpenGL implementation is still crap.
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.78/Cycles

Because of intrinsic limitation of OpenGL drivers on OSX which doesn’t let to use newer features side-by-side with older ones noise, voronoi and wave textures are not supported on OSX.

Dollars to doughnuts that’s the reason MAXON had to introduce the MESA library for R18. Basically a way to bypass OpenGL for OS X (obviously there are deficiencies beyond the ones noted above) —*then they can run the viewport, including those slick new previewing features on the CPU instead. No driver issue there. Wonder if it takes advantage of multiple CPUs.

Tangent to that, I am curious to hear from MAXON as to whether there is any expected performance hit to running the viewport via MESA. It’s noted as providing “multi-threaded full quality viewport display for times when your GPU doesn’t work properly.” That keeps me a little hopeful. : )

Also curious which version of MESA MAXON adopted for this first use. The version dictates the level of OpenGL support. It won’t be 12 because of how new that version is (and still experimental based on their documentation) but still interested to know what all GL features can be supported, even by third party stuff.]

#19

“Cycles is Blender’s ray-tracing production render engine.” (source)

“Cycles has two GPU rendering modes: CUDA, which is the preferred method for NVIDIA graphics cards; and OpenCL, which supports rendering on AMD graphics cards.” (source)

NVIDIA CUDA is supported for GPU rendering with NVIDIA graphics cards. We support graphics cards starting from GTX 4xx (computing capability 2.0).

OpenCL is supported for GPU rendering with AMD graphics cards. We only support graphics cards with GCN architecture (HD 7xxx and above).

#20

The larger issue here is the reason that CUDA is preferred, which is that the OpenCL support is lacking several features like transparent shadows, sub-surface scattering, volume, smoke, etc. In short, it’s crippled. For now anyway.