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
another great tut jonathan, you make it look so simple to use. yaynstuff
Haven’t watched this yet, but thank you. Lots of interest I have had in this.
Oh, really cool. I’ve been wondering if you guys were going to do another cycles video.
Also, it’s a great honor to be first
shoot, not so much
First
This works on a ATI graphic card?
I’m having a runtime error, which version should I download: AMD 64 bits + AMD Graphic card?
It sure does. It uses your CPU by default but it can also make use of your graphics card. The Cuda implementation for Nvidia cards is mostly working but the Open CL for ATI cards is still in development.
-Jonathan
ok, thanks.
Really great render engine.
As if there weren’t enough cycles tutorials already.
If there’s a specific topic you’d like to see we always take tutorial requests! http://cgcookie.com/blender/tutorial-request-form/
-Jonathan
Actually i never found many Cycles tutorials man, i don’t know why you even say that.
What are you talking about? There are hardly any cycles resources yet. This is great stuff.
great overview. really have to check cycles out.
one question: can you save materials for cycles and materials for blender internal into the same model? or would i have to create two copies of my models (one for use with BI and one for cylcles)?
would be cool, if i could setup both in one and simply switch between.
I imported an old BI type model, and it still had the material, although you can’t use Nodes and/or edit it in the Cycles Render Engine. I would have two materials, one for BI and one for cycles, they are *very* different.
Not sure on your video card model, but the reason you can’t use OpenCL for you gpu is because it requires OCL v1.1 or newer. You can check your max version here: http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus
So if your card maxes out at v1.0, you won’t be able to use it. Also, some of the older cards that do support v1.1 have a wrong version string and that will be fixed later.
Always wanted to render a realistic vase filled with blood…
Great overview! This is something blender really needs. Very exciting! Really should have gone with an Nvidia card again on my current build. Well, that can be changed…
Cycles won’t be in an official 2.5 build, it’s slated for currently for the second 2.6 release.
Nice tut! Got a question, how do I render strands in cycle? Can’t find it anywhere.
It may not be in your Build yet…
You made two mistakes:
1) You said that it’s going to be added to 2.5 . It’s 2.6
2) You said that it’s going to be by default. But actually it’s going to be an alternative.
1) good catch.
2) actually it will be included by default, it simply won’t be the default render engine. You’ll have to switch to it if you want, but it will still be bundled with 2.6.
-Jonathan
In my understanding, saying that something is going to be added by default means “Something that is selected for you as you turn blender on for the first time”
And as “Default renderer” means “Main renderer”.
But, well… If you interpret it as basically “In trunk”, then nevermind.
Thank you for your hard work on these tuts and good luck.
3) You said that the nodes represent the material panel, but it’s actually the other way around.
4) You said that shaders are materials. No they are not, they are material properties.
He’s a human being…
Sure he is.
And I have nothing against it.
However, missinformation should not be spread by such high quality tutorials.
The magic of video editing can fix these little things.
Hi there,
You’re correct, my mistake. However, from a users perspective coming from Blender Internal they are much the same thing. If you consider the node system in Cycles in comparison to the old Material nodes then “Shader” and “Material” are basically one and the same. Granted, you are still correct that technically they are not; my apologies for the slip up during the tutorial
-Jonathan
Shaders in Cycles are more like seperate properties such as “Specularity, Diffuse, Reflectivity, etc in BI. The difference is that these are currently only physically based, and of course – they are mixed in nodes.
It’s just a matter of time till we get a “Specularity” or “Single color” shader nodes
The reason I am explaining this is that people on the forums go like:
“Why does Cycles have so many material types, while BI has only one material type that is very flexible?”.
Cheers.
I must say I’m really looking forward to the day we get Specular shaders
-Jonathan
wow!!!!
this is awesome!!!!!
i just created a new character based on my little brother and this will help a lot!!!!!!!!!!
thank you soooooooo much jonathan williamson!!!!!!!!!!
Hi Jonathan,
thanks for the tutorial. As you already pointed out yourself, you explanation
of why you see more reflection as the glass bends away from you is indeed quite
poor. So, to return the favour of all the things you have tought me about blender,
I’ll babble about physics for a while.
It does in fact not have to do with the thickness of the glass, but directly with
the angle of incidence. The reflectivity at the interface between air and glass
depends on two things: 1) the difference in IOR, the higher the difference, the
higher the reflectivity. 2) the angle of incidence. The more head on, the lower
the reflection, the smaller the reflection, the more grazing the angle, the higher
the reflection. In fact, this also depends on the polarization of the light,
but cycles is (afaik) not physically correct enough to take polarization into account.
The reason this is called Fresnel. is that the coefficients that describe the transmisivity and reflectivity of light from an interface between two media are
called Fresnel coefficients after the French physicist who derived them.
In fact, the behaviour of the reflection is even more pronounced when light is
reflecting from the other direction (so the beam is propagating trough the
glass and hitting the interface to air). In that situation, there is an angle
above which all the light is reflected. This is the so called ATR (angle of total
reflection).
Awesome! This is part of what I love about doing tutorials, learning from my blabbering when others correct me
Thanks for that, excellent description.
-Jonathan
Even more learning, it’s pronounced “fray-nel”. Blame the French.
Hey that was a awsome tutorial it was brilliant, thanks, just one question not relating to this, I’m really interested in sculpting and painting and I’m not sure which software to use 3D coat or Zbrush. Which one is better at sculpting and painting, thanks for your time guys. I’m interested in sculpting because of johnothans sculpting tutorial, so ya I want to master it, thanks
-from Himal
I suggest using blender.
It’s good for sculpting and painting.
Try the Onion branch for even improved sculpt and paint.
Ok, really people blender has sculpting there is no difference in between Zbrush and blender for sculpting you can use the same brushes and matdata inside blender.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?174790-ZBrush-matcap-in-Blender
also check out cgmasters.com, katsbits.com also a great site blenderdiplom.com,blendtuts.com is the site that will bever make you lust for zbrush again this guy is a master of sculpting with blender bake normals from high poly mesh and everything. I have no need for zbrush now thanks to this guy tried it played with it but since this guy why switch software if i can do it in blender only thing I want now is octane.
Very very cool. I can’t wait for this to be part of the main package. I can see so many possibilities here. I’d love to see more depth on the various settings
Dave (Mach Crit)
Wow, nice intro tutorial, thanks for covering the materials a bit. Much appreciated and keep up the great work!
Sweet overview. Thanks, Jonathan!
I love how cycles is integrated so there is no hassle with trying to set it up. I haven’t managed to get Luxrender set up successfully after 2.49 so it is great to just download it and get up and running instantly.
Wasn’t this done 3.14^1/0 times before?
Hey, thanks a lot Jonathan – great tutorial. I personally haven’t touched cycles before, but after watching this, I downloaded it, and.. Im loving it!
Really nice detail aswell – thanks for explaining the materials a bit more 
Thanks again,
Tweediez
Can you do a tutorial on how to handle multiple cameras?
As in changing cameras during an animation?
-Jonathan
Jonathan, got a fast question for you.
Were you able, or did you even try to get one of the Cycles build running with the
3dConnexion navigator ?
best regards
Lukasz
Actually I haven’t. I will have to try that though, could be interesting.
-Jonathan
That’s cool, i have a intel core2 duo e8400 3Ghz Processor and a NVIDIA 8800 GT 512 Mo video card. My GPU is Twice faster than my cpu for rendring. But if i use GPU (+CUDA) My Computer becomes very slow.
@Bakery
First of all remember that your GPU is used for displaying your UI, so as the developers say, when Cycles renders using GPU, they can’t guaranty that your PC will be responsive.
BTW Got the most recent build running on MBP with GF 320M, the only problem now is 256MB which is not enough for rendering a more complex scene
If you’re really wanting to take full advantage of GPU rendering, you really need to run with 2 video cards, this goes for pretty much any cuda or opencl enabled application.
One card will be used for display, the other used for all the GPU calculations.
Damn ! 2 video cards you are hard on my wallet. I hope they will optimize it so it will be able to run faster with only one video card.
Let’s Dream.
TBH, I don’t think it’s about number of cards… i don’t think that you are specifying what amount of resources renderer should take – unless it allows you to do so. So as I see it at this moment Cycles doesn’t manage the load on graphic card or at this stage it’s not optimized to do so, and therefor you may end up with 2 GPUs that are used in the same way that one is, and so you’ll have the same situation – choppy desktop and nice rendering speed.
I would say that you can get nice results with even one GPU it’s more about how it’s utilized.
Second thing is that if you are rendering complicated scene on CPU and working on the same machine and you go out of ram, you will experience slowness as well as your machine will start using page file on hdd.
My point is that I really don’t think it’s just the amount of GPUs that matters
I may be wrong though.
Great video on cycles. Love the way it gives instant feedback on lighting.
But I am unable to save the rendered image. Via Image… Save as image, Naming… Save As Image: Blender simply states Error! Couldn’t write image: C:\Untitled.png (using Windows 7). Anyone able to save? Any ideas?
Do you have right to write to the location? I’m not sure about permissions on Windows 7 – you can try to start blender as administrator and see if something changed or you can save the image to your personal folder in c://users/…..
BTW great turtorial I hope there will be more in depth continue
– always pleasure to watch your tutorials Jonathan
In Windows 7 the root directory (C:\) is protected as well as the \Program Files directory. It is better to save in your Documents folder where you have all Read/Write permissions.
lovin’ it dude, i just hope cycles gets developed quicklier so we can use it in animation production, renders look awesome already but grainy and slow enough that isn’t really that useable, i tried setting up to get any type of quality render under 2 mins per frame with no grain, but didn’t happen, if you got any tips on that i would appreciate it!.
CHEERS!
same experience as you describe.
my machine is a imac 3.4 quad ada card
write back to my email to give feed back
Cant we see the material without rendering? There should be a preview panel like in blender internal.
Wow! ive seen so many great renderings being post using cycles, unfortunately for me, I tried using cycles and it crashes, I guess I will have to wait until it is finally included with the new version of blender 2.6
Hi I don’t know why i can’t get the video on my side to play
it just display only a black screen Please help me get the video tutorials thanks
It’s not FREZ-nel… the “S” is silent. Fre-nel… learn
Otherwise, good lesson!
I’ve always called it freZnel too. A lot of folks too.
I just reviewed your tutorial on my blog. Nice work! http://andreucabre.blogspot.com/2011/09/introduction-to-cycles-render-engine-by.html
Awesome. I’m thinking I might wait until 2.6 to dive into Cycles as there’s so many other subjects about Blender to consume my time, but your description of the composting nodes was extremely helpful. I’ve seen other tuts that blaze through it so seeing something small and basic really helped out.
Great tutorial!
caustics are posible with direct lightning, and this scene would look very identical to pathtracing, because of the area lights.
The Gpu is already way faster than the Cpu, I guess your gfx card is a bit slow.
I guess you should increase the raydepth. 8 bounces are usually not much I recommend about 15 for glass.
But great tutorial
Am I blind or is there no Windows 64 bit version with Cycles? I see nice Linux and OS X versions but not Windows.
Try out the Windows 32bit for now: http://www.graphicall.org/375
Oh that’s what I’m planning to do. Just making sure that’s all there was.
“.7z” ? how the heck do you open that file type?
It is an archive file you. You can open it with things like PeaZip, maybe WinRar and a number of other unarchive applications.
http://www.7-zip.org
.7z files from Graphicall are much smaller in size. Generally the .7z file is about 17MB where as the occasional .zip file will be about 32MB. It’s the same data, just compressed better. Plus 7-zip is free open-source and handles all sorts of other formats as well.
Ahhh! Thank you for pointing out that Version Jonathan! It is a big improvement over the last build I tried.(where each successive sample pass made the image MORE grainy NOT less! lol) Man I wish they had kept Cycles a secret because I can’t wait to see how much better it’s gonna be at trunk time. So does anyone know if they are gonna give us a filter that will blend out fireflies within separate objects during the final pass?? Something like that would make me wet my pants.
It was said that luxrender and cycles are different types of renderers.
Can you tell me what is the difference between them?
Glass with an IoR of 4?
Somewhere, right now, there’s a physicist crying.
Uh oh, did I really say that? I hope not.. but if so it was supposed to be 1.45…
-Jonathan
Very cool Jonathan! Do you think you could do an introduction to freestyle in blender?
It’s on my to-do list actually!
-Jonathan
Hurray!
The word you’re looking for for the effect when the edge of the water touches the glass is “meniscus”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meniscus
here is my trial:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=181759781902994&set=a.178860575526248.45913.132831550129151&type=1&theater
Thank you Mr. Jonathan. This was a great tutorial and i was able to make a cool image following you. Cheers !!!
Can anyone tell me how to get rid of the dark spots in the glass? You can see it in the video too, around the rim of the bottle. I have a glass and it shows up really bad.
Could it be my lighting? I’ll post a pic later today somewhere.
Hey nice tutorial ^^, BUT i have a question.
SSS in Cycles, how do i do it?
Pls reply if someone knows
Sadly, there is no SSS shader node yet, but there is a solution.
Hint: You can combine passes from BI with Cycles using the Compositor.
Why don’t they build Blender with Lux render built straight in?
Am a citzen member. How can I download source files
Whats the usual amount of samples you should use when rending in cycles? Sorry im just starting to get into cycles.
ok so i downloaded the new Blender 2.61, and i cant find this scene with the suzannes,
Hi David,
This scene is no longer default, or included in Blender I believe. Were you needing something from it?
-Jonathan
i didnt necesarily need it i only wanted to follow allong with the tutorial but that is ok,
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.