Hello and welcome to this Blender Cycles Render Engine Introduction!
In this video tutorial we introduce you to the new Blender Cycles render engine that is now available for Blender 2.6. Cycles offers a much more realistic, interactive rendering workflow than the current Blender Internal engine and is a lot of fun to work with.
What you’ll learn
This Blender Cycles tutorials will introduce you to the basics of using Cycles including how to set up your lighting, creating materials with the shader node system, adjusting the environment, and finally how to render a very nice glass bottle filled with red liquid.
Update: since releasing this tutorial Cycles is now included with all versions of Blender. You can download the latest Blender version http://blender.org
What Next?
If you loved this tutorial and are eager for more then be sure to check out our tutorial on creating incredible, realistic wood barrels and rendering them in Cycles. View Wood Barrels Tutorial
Will there be an updated version of this tutorial for the version that comes loaded with Blender 2.61? I just downloaded it, and tried rendering a basic scene (Suzanne, a camera and a few lights on a plane) in Cycles, and the image looked grainy compared to the standard Blender render. The video wasn’t much help, since some of the elements seem to be different.
I hope the problem is just that I don’t have something set right. It looks like a really cool thing to work in, but not if the final image quality sucks.
I’ve tried rendering water with Cycles and LuxRender, and LuxRender got me those water caustics, but cycles didn’t. (BTW: I rendered LuxRender for about 6 hours and Cycles for about 5. Doesn’t really matter but just if any one wanted to know). I would like to use Cycles for water and stuff like that (because my LuxRender isn’t wanting to work with 2.61). Can anyone help me?
Could someone explain how to stop and save the render using cycle render?
In order to save out the render you need to first press F12 to start an actual render (rather than viewport preview) and then you can press F3 from the UV/Image Editor to save out the render to an image file.
-Jonathan
I love watching you work. This is about the third tutorial I’ve posted a comment on and I can’t thank you enough for the screencasting addon+calling out certain commands like P for separate selection.
There’s so much to this program and while its not very.. hmm.. its well documented but the documentation is so immersive. It’s like trying to read the Encyclopedia Britannica set, alphabetically of course, to find out whether zebras have black stripes or white stripes.
Tutorials on other sites make me laugh a little bit, because the very first thing you get users doing is using keyboard shortcuts for the most common tasks and other sites will say “Now just go over here and click scale and…” and I have to laugh a little bit.
Just wanted to thank you again for the incredible tutorials and never assuming your audience understands how to do everything you’re doing.
It takes a very long long time to render in cycles. Is it practical to use it in animation?
It depends on the animation. Since Cycles is still quite new the speed will definitely improve a lot. In fact the current development build is already quite a bit faster at removing some noise. You can download recent builds from http://graphicall.org
Is this cycles in blender yet? i must know.
yes it is, it is in the latest version 2.61
on the very top header of Blender there is an option for Blender Render
or Cycles.
very nice tutorial, a little fast perhaps, but nice.
Hey Guys, i actually have a problem which i cant solved although i searched the web for a solution for 2 days now. I did a tutorial to do a photorealistic kitchen, the guy there actually uses yafaray but i think i could do it in cycles too. But know that i tried to render the scene with a light and a camera first it looks pretty cool during the render. but as soon it finishes the last light path calculation and render stops the finished pic stands still for a sec and then it changes in a black screen. found some posts that something would be wrong with cuda but im using windows xp. I reinstalled blender 2.61 once and tried other versions and when i just let the default scene render it works fine. just not for my kitchen -.-
please could someone tell me what im doing wrong? light must be right too, works fine in blender internal engine. and as i said before rendering finishes everything looks cool as it should.
Blendfile (maybe you can just try for yourself)
https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=6D651859F5666397&id=6D651859F5666397!104
thx so much im quite desperate..took me two nights to modell.
Which IRC channels are you parousing?
I am having a problem using mix nodes in 2.62 where only the first shader input is used and not the second one. So I can’t really do anything special with the shaders, thanks for any info I can get.
Hi Jason, what is the mix value set at? If it’s 1.000 then that means it’s taking 100% of one input and 0% of the other.
I have just recently found the problem to be OpenCL, after changing it to Cuda my blender was working as expected. Thankyou for the help
I am having a problem with applying multiple materials to an object. In BI I would select vertices and apply the new material to that. When I try in cycles, the material gets assigned to the whole object unless I separate out each piece to a new object. Will assigning parts to a vertex group work here? While I wait for an answer, I will try that and see.
Thanks for the tut.
Hi Gary,
Assigning multiple materials to objects works the same way in Cycles as the Blender Internal. If you’re not familiar with multiple materials for meshes then you can check out my tip on the subject here: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/06/15/tip-adding-multiple-materials-to-a-single-object/
That helped. I thought I was doing that, but I forgot to set the second material slot.
Thanks again. I am trying to create my own accessories for the cycles course. I wanted a little more challenge than pulling models from BlendSwap, so it will take ma a leetle bit longer. But, I will learn more.
You say that you downloaded textures from 3docean.com, but it should be 3docean.net!
Just to have something to complain about
You’re right! Thanks for the correction
Jonathan
Cycles confuses me in the way that hair renders. Hair particles will not render in preview or final render. I tried to google it but I can’t seem to get a good answer. If anyone knows their way around it, or would make a quick tip, I would be grateful.
What version of blender is this because in blender 2.62, there isn’t gpu options!!!
Hi there,
What video card does your system have?
One of the things that is done in this tut is removing the inner glass faces, at the surface where there is ‘wine’. I was wondering how this problem should be approached in a simulation movie of filling up the bottle. Any ideas?
It doesnt matter which Nvidia I use, which laptop or PC, still it is the same sh|t. Blender Cycles is a total mistake, unless you have 20 hours to render or more. I don’t so bye bye graphics.
I am new to Blender… so forgive me for asking the following: But how do I know which version of an external renderer to use for Blender 2.66? Will 2.66 support previous versions of Yafray for instance?