Hello, looking to possibly use Blender for rendering. Unreal seems like too steep of a learning curve, not sure what’s going on with Omniverse. Too bad RL will never improve it’s own renderer so we wouldn’t have to leave the ‘universe’ at all…
So a few questions for you Blender experts out there:
Which renderer is “better” - EEVEE or CYCLES? And how do render times compare between the 2 and also to iClone render times?
Will Blender import ‘landscape’ items/props, such as Terrain, Speed Trees, etc.? I guess it might be easier to ask what it WON’T import…
1 - They are different renderers for different purposes. EEVEE is a ‘real-time’ renderer like a game engine. Cycles is an ‘offline renderer’ with physical lighting and shading. Without getting too technical, Cycles is superior in quality and EEVEE is faster. Speed will also depend on your GPU.
2 - Blender will import any meshes or textures.
3 . Blender uses it’s own physics system, which is better than the one from CC.
I’m no Blender user let alone expert, but I think the question as to render times/speed is difficult to answer, unless someone has actually rendered the same project inside of iClone, with EEVEE and Cylces in Blender and at comparable render/quality settings.
Even if somebody can give a recommendation for their project, that does not mean it would work for you the same way.
I vaguely remember a comparison test between various render engines done some time ago, and, if I recall correctly, it showed that there was no clear overall winner in terms of speed. On one test, renderer A would be fastest on another renderer C. So which one is better/faster? It depends.
What I’m trying to say is: Since Blender is free, why don’t you compare it for yourself with your project and your render settings? Also, only you can decided whether the quality of the output is worth the render time to you. Cycles renders may look better than those made with EEVEE or iClone, but is the additional time worth that increase in visual quality to you? You may also want to consider how much additional time the transfer to, for example, Blender and the set-up of the scene there requires. I understand that the iClone-to-Blender support is pretty good, especially compared to other 3DCC programs, but it will probably take longer than just hitting render inside of iClone.
While I do spend quite a lot of time trying different render settings to find the best compromise between render quality and speed (in my 3DCC of choice, not in iClone), I often find that a difference in quality (for example noise level) that I can only see on stills at 400% zoom may not be worth 2x the render time when the final output is meant for YouTube and will be re-compressed by YT anyway.
It’s also a matter of features. Because they are fundamentally different rendering technologies, an offline renderer like Cycles supports more features than a real-time renderer like EEVEE - especially in terms of shaders, and often the quality of the shader is the difference in final output.
But yes, speed Vs quality and style of the image or animation will obviously vary, but if you want anything approaching photorealism then an offline renderer would be the obvious choice. These days even 4K frames can be rendered relatively quickly on a decent GPU.
My advice ,as a Blender user, is to forget about importing anything from Iclone except a CC4/Iclone characters.
other iclone scene assets are so inferior
compared to just using Blender native scene elements.
Also Blender’s rigid body dynamics are far bette than Iclone
but it cloth physics areonly marginally better some would argue.
