Mathieu Menuet has announced the latest version of E-Cycles and E-Cycles RTX, his accelerated version of Blender’s rendering engine. The RTX version promises speed boosts of up to 4 times compared with native Cycles. A purchase includes both versions, the standard release that uses the original Cycles CUDA backend , and the new RTX version that uses the OptiX backend introduced in Blender 2.81. E-Cycles costs €99, find out more on Gumroad.
E-Cycles and E-Cycles RTX announced
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Too expensive for something that is a modification of something that is entirely free… reconsider pricing
ok… Why pay for an air conditioner when the “modified” air that passes through is totally free… LoL 😛
I wonder why pay 99€ for this when you can download from GraphicAll optix rtx blender build which is also 4times faster (if you got nvidia rtx gpu) and you can download it for free. Why pay 99€ from this? I don’t get it.
E-Cycles is an optimized version of vanilla Cycles, they’re not the same thing. With E-Cycles users can get about 2.5 times faster renders than the regular Cycles that comes with Blender. Most likely, the same applies to the RTX version (I haven’t personally tested it as I don’t own RTX GPUs).
I used to use the regular Cycles and I was struggling to see the benefits of going with Cycles as I also use Redshift (and, apparently, Redshift will become finally available for Blender too). Each test I did comparing Cycles to Redshift I always got faster results with Redshift.
With E-Cycles this has tremendously changed to the point that now more often than not my renders are faster with E-Cycles.
So, there’s a huge difference between this version and the regular Cycles version, it really changes one’s experience about Blender. On top of that, by supporting E-Cycles the developer is supposed, in time, to share the code with the BF bringing eventually the advantages of E-Cycles to the vanilla version.
Well the bone studio build is free and has the same optimizations!
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/kdbbbc/
Auto tile size may be the only optimization carried over from E-Cycles as far as I know (perhaps dithered sobol too but I’m not sure).
They are not the same thing. E-Cycles’ developer hasn’t released the code yet. For the sake of curiosity, I did some test and the bone studio version takes more than twice the time. In fact, in my tests E-Cycles is about 2.5 times faster. At the moment there’s no free version that can match E-Cycles.
I clarified who where the authors of the patches we have in BlenderArtists, Scramble distance, Dithered Sobol, visible area lights, light groups are patches from Lukas Stockner, Adaptive Sampling, AI Denoiser (OIDN) for Viewport and some new sampling methods are from Stefan Werner.
Please be clear about who is the author of what features, that’s important.
We don’t have auto tile size, what we had (that is now disabled) is Tile Size Safe for renderfarm (to be able to work with GPU, CPU, etc…) so we don’t have any patch from E-Cycles.
With that said, that’s the beauty of Open Source, Cycles is improved in E-Cycles but also in BoneStudio Build, also we have some extra things like the OpenVDB based remesher modifier by Martin Felke (Scorpion81), the good thing is that there are options.
Regarding the code, E-Cycles is OpenSource and GPL, any user can ask for the code at any time, and the ones that have the blender development course have the patches, we have the patches, we don’t use them.
Regarding performance, I’ll leave users to compare it or publish benchmarks or whatever, we don’t compare our build 🙂
when paying then into the blender fund or into programmers that release the code.
What version?! Do you have link?
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/kdbbbc/
Cycles:
UDIM support – IN MASTER!
OIDN CPU Viewport denoise
Viewport Denoiser Example: https://youtu.be/34oEqHFgZqk
Random Per Island, inside “Geometry Info” node – IN MASTER!
Improved equiangular sampling (for area lights and spots)
Improved sphere light sampling – Removed until solving spots problem – REMOVED
Visible area lights (partially working)
Light Groups passes – working for the time being, incompatible with Adaptive Sampling
Light Groups Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXzmReUUU34
Dithered Sobol
Scramble Distance
Adaptive sampling
Renderfarm Safe Tile Size – Auto tile size selection for CPU, CPU+GPU or GPU mode – WIll be back soon – REMOVED
Disable Scramble in Viewport – To disable scramble distance in viewport – WIll be back soon – REMOVED
Optimization for RTX GPU’s using OPTIX- For the time being RTX gpu’s should get better performance using large tiles, it’s not a problem since you cannot use Optix + CPU
Modifiers:
Two new options inside the Remesher modifier:
Voxel: based on OpenVDB, it includes also OpenVDB boolean operations, it includes an option to mesh particles.
Voxel Remesher Example: https://twitter.com/BoneStudioAnim/status/1167577326839877633?s=20
Voxel Remesher more examples: https://youtu.be/34oEqHFgZqk
Metaball: based on Metaballs, ability to mesh both meshes/vertices and particles, a bit slower than Voxel in some cases, but it also carries Motion Blur information for fluids.
The Voxel remesher now brings an option to try to preserve hard edges
I have the same feeling that just for being optimized version of Cycles this is too expensive. Take for example Redshift, it is being developed by the same people that sell it and is not a derived from other product, and its initial price for permanent license is 500$, almost the same as ECycles. Sorry but that, to me, looks like a ripoff and once Redshift comes out for Blender, ECycles would not be even close to competing with Redshift.
Hello, anyone had experience that particles cant be render at e-cycles……?