Potentially BIG News for Cycles4D

#1

Please feel free to ignore all or some of this post if you feel triggered.

B*****r has just announced Cycles X a complete ground up redesign of Cycles to bring massive performance gains and additional rendering features. This will of course could be extremely good news for Cycles4D users and C4D users in general if Insydium continue to bridge Cycles to C4D and why wouldn’t they? Obviously wait for official confirmation before making plans.

I have tested the experimental build which supports 1 GPU at present and it’s much faster than both GPUs running previous versions of Cycles. It was so fast in the viewport I didn’t realise it was working. On Ampere the previous version of Cycles was comparable in speed to Redshift so if the numbers being quoted could potentially mean enormous performance gains in the more complex interior scenes and Cycles4D could become the fastest renderer for C4D for many use cases. Time will obviously tell with all the usual caveats applied.

Tangent Animation has also recently announced their plans to create a render delegate version of Cycles for USD so any DCC fully supporting USD will have access to Cycles as a free renderer. I can’t wait for this in Houdini!

Currently Cycles-X supports CUDA and OptiX but the developers are working with AMD and Intel (possibly also Apple) to support their GPUs via an unnamed new API. Cycles also continues supports the CPU and is optimised for modern high core count CPUs as well.

Apparently this is the fruits of a two months of development into a six month research project to improve Cycles and make the foundation modern so it can easily support modern sampling techniques, APIs and hardware in the future. More rendering features like volume rendering with a completely new high performance volume sampler to come.

This is not just huge news for B*****r, Cycles4D users but with the USD support this is big news for the whole of 3D. Indeed, 3D for the real World.

More information can be found here,

There was also a live announcement on the B*****r Youtube channel which can be watched at your leisure.

An early test build can be found here second from bottom,

#2

I love Cycles 4D for C4D and Cycles for Blender! You can use C4D Noises with it, geometric shapes like spirals are easy, gorgeous photorealism is possible, and there are gobs of tutorials out there. I have a tons of example files if anyone is trying to learn it and I’d be glad to share them.
Thanks for posting!

#3

Is there any direct comparison between RS and Cycles4d ?
I’ve seen comparisons between RS and Cycles BUT I don’t know if it’s the same.

#4

They are very similar but they are definitely different. Learning Redshift is easy for me because I know Cycles pretty well. I am making a spreadsheet right now comparing nodes of each.

#5

That’s very kind of you.
I was expecting a comparison between render times and render quality but that will be helpful too.

#6

I can do that too. They are both M1 native so they should be really good.

#7

I have been using Redshift for many years and for a long time (before the Maxon acquisition) it was the most exciting renderer, the comparative speed benefit was off the charts. In the intervening years the other renderers have caught up with in terms of speed so so speed alone is no longer the unique selling point it once was.

With all renderers offering a similar performance then things like image quality and power of the shader node tree become far more relevant to choosing a renderer. Personally, I’ve always found that Redshift had a game engine look about it and you had to spend a lot of time and nodes overcoming that where the likes of Arnold and Octane looked sweet with only basic node setups.

Anyway, I’m a fairly recent convert to Cycles (Cycles4D) and I had overlooked it because it really was quite slow at the time when I was testing options. There has been a lot of development of Cycles with additions such as adaptive sampling and AI denoisers which have dramatically reduced render times often by many factors. Cycles-X is yet another huge step change in performance.

I have tested a couple of recent jobs I rendered with it and on a single GPU it is much faster than previous Cycles using dual GPUs. I’m seeing something of the order 2-3x speedups in motion graphics scenes but the big speed ups were aimed at archviz and many lights type situations.

If/when Cycles-X comes to Cycles4D people should take another look, the shader tree is one of the most powerful I’ve ever used, being an unbiased renderer there’s no surprises to see in renders and the speed ups I’ve seen with 1 GPU at such an early stage suggest it could easily be the fastest GPU based renderer with multi-GPU support.

The beauty is that there’s a plethora of B*****r Cycles training on Youtube which will be directly applicable for Cycles4D.

#8

I am a real fan of anything Insydium and I have been really impressed with the logicality and beauty of Cycles 4D (and I go nuts over XP). I can’t wait to see how both run with the M1 chip. I also use Blender and have used lots of the Blender and Cycles training videos for Cycles 4D learning. It’s amazing how much is out there.
Unfortunately, I seem to be one of the very few using Cycles 4D. I hope it gets more popular because it is great! Redshift will be my main world now with the integration into C4D and so far from my vast experience with it (before I even install it for the first time!) it looks pretty wonderful too.

#9

In these times of great GPU scarcity which appears to have no end in sight, it has become increasingly important to me that a renderer supports both CPU and GPU. When nVidia themselves say this is going to carry on until well into 2022 and if the BTC price keeps on going and dragging all the shitcoins with it any renderer which is GPU only is a dead end for professional work.

I haven’t seen a GPU for sale let alone at anything close to MSRP and the only way to guarantee getting one is to buy a pre-built system and they limit you to 1 GPU. I planned to buy a new multi GPU workstation at the beginning of the year for work now I’m looking at building a couple of 64 core Threadripper workstations for CPU rendering and splitting the 2 GPUs in my current WS between them.

I understand why people choose Redshift over Cycles4D I was one of them the performance differential was far too great to ignore. That differential is no longer there with the current Cycles and with Cycles-X the differential could swing a long way the other way. Redshift is very slow with many lights i.e Archviz type situations. I know they’ve promised to fix this but like random walk SSS and Toon rendering they’ve been promising stuff that hasn’t turned up for 4 years now.

#10

I have a license for Cycles 4D, hardly ever touched it.

Totally get what you’re saying about Redshift having a game engine look, whereas out of the box Octane looks instantly gorgeous - its aesthetic and way it deals with light is just more visually pleasing to me.

Is Cycles4D in the same league as Octane in terms of its beauty? Can you get that lovely cinematic look that Octane delivers with ease but Redshift struggles with? I usually end up doing a LOT of post on my Redshift renders, with Octane I hardly have to bother. Its output just looks great.

#11

^^ @vel0city I agree with you about the Redshift “look.” I don’t know if it is because it is a biased renderer or not but they never look as sexy as Octane or Arnold renders right out of the box.

For the past year I’ve been using Blender Cycles for all my final renders and couldn’t be happier. Also Arnold with it’s GPU option is another great rendering engine. I’m sure it is nowhere near the speed of Redshift but it looks soooo much nicer!

#12

There is absolutely no doubt that with very little effort Octane can spit out really good looking renders. Whether that’s due to the core of the renderer or that a lot of work went into their default settings in their nodes I don’t know. I think most fair minded people rate the out of the box look of Octane.

I used Redshift for 3-4 years and thought it was great up to a point but that game engine look takes a lot of work to overcome. You can’t just expect to plug a few images into their Uber shader and be done, you have to do a lot with multiple fresnel nodes, mix nodes and your shader trees can end up being really quite enormous networks. I just never got very satisfying images without a lot of post production.

As far as Cycles is concerned I prefer the functionality of the shader node system and the look of the renderer to Redshift. However, I don’t use Cycles for photorealistic work at all. I use it for stylised and NPR renders of data almost FUI style renderers. I like the vast array of mapping options and the powerful node trees to create highly stylised renders. I comp and do post on the renders in a compositor. I’ve seen some absolutely stunning archviz renders with Cycles that are indistinguishable from photos so in the hands of a better artist than me it can look superb. The B*****r community tends to be more focussed on Anime/NPR rendering such is the association with Anime studios but checking out blenderartists gallery will often have some superb examples of photoreal work.

I have been using Cycles as a stop gap and have really been waiting for Renderman 24 to release to see if it would be better for stylised work, it should’ve been released already but I suppose covid has caused delays. It’s a similar price to Redshift but with a plethora of NPR specific features.

#13

I think you’re right, Redshift’s biased engine is its USP and also its downfall. Its output looks so flat compared to other engines. Fast, but underwhelming. Arnold is great no doubt and I love its stability and look, just need the budget to farm the final output.

Back OT - been playing with Cycles4D all night and am hugely impressed. I’m getting looks comparable to Octane with very little effort, it’s fast and very user friendly - I’m already thinking about doing my next client job in Cycles instead of redshift. I’m rendering on the CPU and it’s way, way faster and more responsive than C4DtoA.

#14

Chromatic Aberation as a post effect - very, very nice!

#15

I hope you guys are wrong about the quality of Redshift renders. Do you really finesse the nodes or just stay in the basic RS material? Joel uses RS and his work is SO beautiful at the cellular level. I am a real Cycles 4D fanboy and I have had great results using it. But I am hoping my work will look as good in RS.

#16

It’s been requested of me project after project to use Redshift. I can’t go against what a company wants, but I have learned to adapt.

With a little push in the right direction, it’s a beautiful engine. Not quite VRay for interior or archviz, but a great choice for it’s speed and versatility.

Not to disagree with you in an unfriendly way Infograph, but I find the shaders quite powerful and disagree that renders look game engine like.

Attaching a recent render of mine, that shows that I can match all of that which I did before in Octane/VRay/Corona etc.

Chiron_Slope_C
Chiron_Slope_C.jpg3840x2160 2.54 MB

And some very recent projects that used Redshift exclusively. Judge for yourself of course…

https://www.behance.net/gallery/113040657/Air
https://www.behance.net/gallery/117731025/Fields-V3
https://www.behance.net/gallery/117732589/Fields-V4-Patterns
https://www.behance.net/gallery/115318345/Cyborg-1-Day-Project
https://www.behance.net/gallery/114908781/Stalker-1-Day-Project

#17

Really great work, @ThePriest

@teknow - Redshift is a great renderer, you will love it. For most jobs its my goto engine and I enjoy a lot about it. It’s a personal, subjective thing for sure, but the aesthetic of Redshift’s output and the way it handles lighting just doesn’t butter my parsnips in the way that Octane does.

All renderers have their pros and cons, it’s just how you find the features, how you use them and how satisfied you are with the output that matters. For some jobs I even use C4Ds standard renderer - everything is valid and has its uses.

#18

@ThePriest Really beautiful! Thanks so much for your input. That’s what I was hoping to hear.

#19

@ThePriest

I try and speak from experience and I understand my experience is very narrowly focussed on visualising rather dry scientific or financial data in artistic ways. My experience is not the same as someone producing hyper realistic photoreal renders of interiors. Those were my opinions and not ‘facts’. I understand others will have different opinions.

One thing I learned from a very experienced archviz artist was how they use extremely detailed normal maps to affect the light falloff on complex materials e.g. for spiral polishing scratches in car paint lacquer or woven composite materials. There is a technical name for this which escapes me right now, something like Speculo-reflective. I believe this is why Octane pushes more buttons for people than Redshift it considers the normal maps more in renders.

I’m not at all saying Redshift is a bad renderer, I’m saying it takes a lot more work to remove the ‘game engine’ base look. If you don’t make complex material networks Redshift can easily look like an OpenGL render with ray tracing.

Anyway, I was attracted to Redshift primarily for its speed, stability and their promise of GPU based Toon Rendering back in circa 2016. I thought it would be an ideal replacement for C4D’s SketchnToon but I see Toon Rendering is a coming soon item despite promising every single year at GTC. This is my biggest criticism with Redshift the over promise and under delivery in features and eventually why I gave up waiting and moved on.

The point of the original post was to highlight the fact huge speed improvements are on the way for Cycles4D and people might like to give it a second look because I think many will find it a joy to use like I do.

Edit.
I remembered the term, it’s Retroreflective.

#20

Not very encouraging to see even NVIDIA not trying to put a brave face/spin on the GPU “situation”.

Particularly since they have just rolled out their “Omniverse” U.S.D. base collaboration platform that is completely non functional for anyone not using a mid range RTX card from NVIDIA.

Many had hoped that the bitcoin mining craze would have run its course like the mortgage back securities or even the “tulip bubble” but sadly this NFT bollucks has helped to keep the market inflated even longer from what I have read on the subject.:roll_eyes: