Cycles X is a HUGE Step Forward for Blender!

cycles x back in april our jaws collectively dropped as we watched the demonstration for cycles x being shown but what is cycles x and how is it a big step forward for blender but put it simply the thing that i think everyone knows is it's basically a collection of performance improvements for the cycles rendering engine so let's start with that performance one thing you're immediately going to see when using cycles x in blender 3.0 which should be coming at the beginning of december is it's favoring more of a progressive rendering approach rather than a tile-based system so instead of having these kind of ugly blocks that are going to be rendering out your frame you're going to be having the entire frame rendered at the same time and you might think oh well if progressive rendering's so good then why didn't they always do this it's because well depending on the algorithms and the scenes being rendered the tile based system can be a lot faster than progressive rendering and that's the case for current versions of blender but that won't be the case for the cycles x versions coming later now you could always enable progressive rendering in blender but it was slower so there wasn't really any point in doing that that is of course unless you didn't really care about the rendering time and you just wanted to see the frame develop over time for example one good thing you can do progressive rendering is you can put it on with an indefinite number of samples go on holiday come back and you have just the perfect crystal clear pristine frame of your scene you can also stop it at any point during the render and you will always have a complete frame regardless of how noisy it is the problem of having a tiled system is that if you stopped it early you would have these blocks of just no pixels whatsoever so i think with the added speed and the progressive rendering it's going to be more fun for people to preview their scenes and this kind of comes onto the viewport rendering because with these improved algorithms and such viewport rendering is going to be a lot more responsive and a lot more fun to engage with so just to give you a demonstration i've got the same blend file here opening two different versions of blender my current version and the cycles x experimental branch and you can see that as i'm moving this placeholder table object around in the old version other than the outline we can't really see it in the actual frame it's just way too noisy but in the new version you can definitely see the object as i'm moving it around so this is great for real-time previews and rapidly prototyping different aspects of your scene now when they originally announced cycles x they showed the performance improvements for the use of graphs so you know it has to be true showing that you can get up to seven times better performance in certain scenes but then people were allowed to play with the experimental branch then they could test it for themselves so i'm going to show these graphs on the screen well you can see them i can't see them i've got something very different on my screen but that's just an excellent performance improvement much more than i think people would have expected see i think that's going to make people very happy but let's talk about future proofing so one of the things they said they wanted to do was improve the architecture for future development and imagine what this means is probably going back a little bit and rewriting things to make it easier to develop more features for cycles in the future if you've ever worked on a large software project in the past you know the feature creep combined with software that isn't really made to be future proof from the beginning can produce some really bad results and make it just extremely difficult to make things for in the future and we see this a lot in other fields as well especially with the video game industry where shortcuts are made just to make a like minimum viable functional product but then as you try to add new features on top of that you're basically adding new features on top of shortcuts and it becomes a very hacky solution and that works to a certain degree but then it's diminishing returns as the project grows then as you try to add new features on top of those hacky solutions you end up with a bunch of weird errors and anomalies that you don't really understand they're very hard to track down exactly where they come from and it just becomes a buggy mess this is made much more complex if you keep in mind that different aspects of the project are made by different people so if you don't have unified code practices or you don't have great communication between these or they're made at very different points in time with reliabilities on different modules and stuff then the whole thing becomes a mess so with the whole video game idea i'm not going to name any names fallout really dangerous but if you've ever stopped to think oh wow how can these professional companies and professional people who've been paid all this money and spent all this time being educated how to make these things how can i make such a buggy mess well the reason is because software development is very difficult and very complex to try and describe it better way it's probably like trying to squeeze ketchup out of a ketchup bottle you know how makes that kind of really depressive fart noise like like when nothing's coming out now imagine you're a software developer that spent like you know five years and fifty thousand dollars getting like a computer science degree just trying to figure out how to operate this bottle but no matter how much you squeeze and you think you've got the perfect squeezing technique down but nothing's coming out the squeezing technique in this case could be like the perfect code that you've been refining over years and years but you kind of just start to realize that it's not really your fault because all the people who've come before you have kind of squeezed out all the source and like it's kind of been scattered around the bottle in a very weird way so now that when you're coming to do it you're not really getting anything good so you need to try and like clear out and move the source around and try and get the good center of mass so when you do finally get your squeeze you're actually gonna get something out and just as todd comes through the door you finally managed to figure it out and then you get all the sauce coming and it's a momentous occasion and tons happy and suddenly the whole world can rejoice in your success i think that's probably what it's like so remember everyone if you do see a blended developer in real life remember to thank them for giving you the good source and it's at this point i hope that none of them are watching this video so how can you keep up to date on the cycles x project well thank you for asking if you go to developer.blender.org that's where you can keep track of the different projects on there you can find the cycles project and then you can keep track of all the different tasks and it's even like a kind of workboard view i think they call it like a kanban system when it's laid out like that but yeah there's different tasks you can keep track of and one in particular thing you should check out is the cycles x new features and changes because there's a bit of a tick box on there but you see what's being done and they keep that updated as well so if you are interested in keeping your prying eyes on the development of these projects then that's the website you should go to to check that out so to take a bit more of a boring step away let's talk about some of the goals of the system some things they want to do is they want to remove the opencl rendering kernels because they're apparently a bit too difficult to maintain to sum up what a kernel is with my limited knowledge the kona is basically a container for the main kind of loops and routines that the rendering engine actually uses i think it's supposed to be designed to be hyper efficient with regards for memory limitations and compatibility because it's supposed to be used like all the time like the main engine part of the rendering engine apparently they also want to remove branched path tracing they want to focus more on adaptive sampling and light importance techniques and they also want to remove nlm denoising by focusing more on ai de-noising techniques and in particular open image denoise so that should be coming with blender 3.0 at the beginning of december like i said in the last video but remember subject to change and delays as always so what are my personal thoughts well thanks for asking again i think blender has definitely made its name with cycles and eevee having a combination of the path tracing and rasterization engines is definitely something that i think is a bit stand out it's very good i wish they could connect a bit more though i think cycles is way overdue for an upgrade especially since we have products like e-cycles in the community they've been here for quite a while basically just demonstrating the cycles could have been upgraded all this time because no one was bothered to do it for the actual blender foundation i think upgrading cycles now will also set a precedent that other areas of blender that have been neglected for a while can also be upgraded looking at you video sequence editor looking at you compositor speaking about the compositor though i really want that real-time compositing for evie anyway i know what you're thinking curtis did you really just make me watch an entire video about a rendering engine cringe and today i say well no i didn't make you you clicked on my stupid face so thanks for watching everyone make sure to do a little dance around the subscribe button and sign up to my patreon to be forever blessed with productive ketchup squeezes so thanks again have a great day and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 73,328

Keywords: blender, cycles x, performance, improvement, adaptive, progressive, rendering, art, update, 3.0, release, date

Id: TU2cELz88P8

Length: 7min 3sec (423 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/the_Godde]

wow, I already knew a fair bit about cycles x but I gotta say, I still learnt a fair bit from this video and I reckon it was pretty entertaining and easy to watch.

You are incredibly underrated