Cycleing with Cycles

Hey hey all, I meant to get this up sooner but I have been too busy trying out some cool things in blender to do with cycles thanks to my new laptop.

Now then what is cycles...


Well when you start blender you may notice a small tab towards the top which says "Blender Render" this means you are rendering your model or animation out in the normal classic render engine that's in blender, this engine renders the model using your computers CPU and up till now all the stuff I have been uploading on here has been stuff in the internal engine because I could never work with cycles due to technical problems however now! I can, now what makes cycles different well for starters unlike the normal render engine cycles can work with both your CPU and your GPU "Graphics Processing Unit" so if you have a fancy graphics card blender will be able to make use of it in order to give you better looking renders, smoother work flow and decreased render times.

Sadly at the moment there is only built in support for Nvidia cards which luckily I have, if any of you who are reading this have ATI or AMD cards they are working on being integrated into blender, there are a few fans you can search for which should allow it to work however its not official so be warned.

So then what makes cycles so much better? Well because cycles uses a different rendering algorithm to the normal blender render it allows for you work to look more realistic and lifelike it also unlike the normal render engine allows you to edit your work live in real time well its rendering which is pretty amazing so no longer do you have to wait well something renders wrong you can change it well its rendering now that's pretty cool ;)

So here's some lovely renders I have found on the internet that have been made in cycles. Note the realism of some of them its truly amazing....

Wooden Barrels - Johnathan Williamson

Ferrari - Johnathan Williamson

Donuts - Andrew Price

Glass of water and ice - Andrew Price

Water Splash - Gottfried Hofmann

All wonderful and very realistic, make sure to click on them to see them in full view to really admire them :D

And with those firmly in your mind here's the ones I have been working on, thanks to help of internet tutorials as at the start I had no clue how to work with cycles however now I am much more confident.

All in all I think cycles I wonderful thing and I look forward to playing around with it more in the coming months I am working on another cycles thing at the moment to do with Tea hopefully that will be in the next post.

Till next time.

All sources used at the top are not mine they have been created by the credited artist and have been shown to help describe this post better I do not own them at all.

Location of sources:

http://www.blendernation.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/02/blender_cycles_rendering_barrels_feature.png

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/04/06/rendering-a-sports-car-in-blender-cycles-part-01/#!prettyPhoto['gallery']/1/

http://www.blenderguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/donuts9.png

http://www.blenderguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/untitled12.jpg

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/materials/cycles-water-material/

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.