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About Render Engines
🕑 Added 2020-08-11 03:51:14 +0000 UTCFigured I’d do a bit of a behind the scenes post for anyone interested in how the proverbial sausage is made.
Above are examples of the two rendering engines I typically use.
The one on the left is called Cycles, and it’s what’s called a “raytracing” engine. It simulates beams of light bouncing around and colliding with objects. As a result, it’s super accurate and can be used to create photorealistic renders. Everyone from Pixar to Marvel uses similar engines to this one. But it’s slow. Like, 10-20 minutes per frame of animation is not unusual. Often it’s way more.
Now multiply 10 mins per frame * 24 frames per second * 60 seconds in a minute * 90 minutes in a feature film... it’s slow. This is why Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks have massive, multi-million dollar rendering farms, made up of hundreds or even thousands of servers to cut that render time way down.
Sadly, I don’t own a render farm...
But there is hope!
The image on the right is rendered with a brand new rendering engine called EVEE. It’s what’s known as a “real-time” engine — Basically, a game engine like Unreal or Unity.
With all the settings cranked up, it’s definitely not “real-time.” Not even on my RTX Titan card. But it does render about one frame every 10 seconds... vs 10-20 minutes. So it’s 60-120x faster than raytracing.
And that’s why I only use EEVEE for animation work. The two renders look noticeably different but neither one looks objectively worse. And yet one actually allows me to render animations in less than a day, while the other would take weeks.
Anyway, that’s all for today! If you have any questions, feel free to ask! If these sorts of posts end up being popular, I’m happy to do more!
Look out for an animated version of this image coming within the next week or so! I’m working on that as we speak!
Comments
Ziggy
Not with EEVEE, as that doesn’t have any raytracing components. It does help with Cycles, though. Nvidia recently invested a ton of money to give Cycles RTX support, and the render times definitely went down a bunch. Having said that, it’s still nowhere close to real- time. I have the RTX Titan card, which is as RTX-y as you can get, and I shaved like 30% off my render times with RTX on. Now, what I REALLY want is for them to make EEVEE a sort of hybrid engine like what you see with Battlefield - where the shadows and reflections are raytraced but the rest is still rasterized. That would give you the best of both worlds. Accurate shadows/reflections and fast rendering.
I know there's some ray-tracing hardware like the nVidia RTX series. Would such a graphics card improve your rendering rate with EVEE?
