Sintel Lite - Cycles Material Walkthrough

Submitted by metalliandy on September 13, 2011 - 8:13am
Eat 3D Blog

Australian 3d artist Ben Dansie has made an informative 16 minute overview tutorial on Blenders WIP Cycles rendering engine!

The tutorial goes over some of the main features and is really worth a watch if you want to pick up some nice material based ttips and ricks Laughing out loud

Quote:

A video walkthrough of some of the new Cycles renderer material node / closure concepts. If you have already picked up Cycles fairly easily you won't learn much.

This is aimed primarily for users who are used to the Blender Internal renderer and are having some difficulties getting started with Cycles.

Hopefully I explain some of the basics at a reasonable pace for people, feel free to ask questions. Keep in mind I'm learning too! Smiling

 

What is Cycles?

Quote:

In May, I’m starting to work for the Blender Institute again. Besides maintenance, bug fixing, release work, etc, my big target will be modernizing the shading and render system. We haven’t worked out the exact plans, but this is roughly what I have in mind:

First, there is the need for an improved shading system. Such a system should be node based, to give full flexibility to artists, and to make it possible for external render engines to extend it by adding their own nodes. On the other hand, we should make it physically based, to simplify materials and support global illumination. There are also issues like UV mapping and texturing workflow that need to be addressed. To get the design right, we intend to work out a design over the coming months, with help from blender users and developers working on external engines.

There is also the problem that the internal render engine is showing its age. Before and during the Sintel project, I have worked on refactoring and improving it, but found it simply too hard to get it where I think a modern render engine should be.

I do think there’s still a place for a “small studio” production render engine, that sits between a render engine with a focus on complete realism, and a totally programmable and customizable Renderman style engine. Over the past months, I’ve been working on a new engine called (codename Cycles), that I hope will fit that space. Here’s a sneak peek:

Cycles source code will be released in a week or two. Much work remains to be done, it’s going to take time before this will be integrated and full featured. Cycles is currently working as an external engine addon, but needs a heavily modified Blender.

There are many active open source render engines like LuxRender, Aqsis, Yafaray, Mitshuba, and we can do a lot still on the Blender side to make it possible to integrate these better. These other render engines will benefit from the work that will be done on the shading system and the render API.

There may of course be developers that want to continue developing Blender Internal, and the intention is not to drop it immediately.

Anyway, I’m happy to be back, exciting times ahead :)

Brecht.

 

Learn more about Cycles  HERE and grab a build HERE

Check out Ben's video on Vimeo



This Post needs Your Comment!

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
Are you human?