Introduction to Cycles

Welcome to Cycles!

Cycles is a brand new rendering engine built right into blender.

It’s flexible, fast and above all else: produces more realistic results. Forget everything you know about lighting and rendering in Blender… the game has officially changed

In this tutorial you will discover:

The difference between the internal renderer and Cycles
Some of the cool features of Cycles
How to create your very first Cycles render
Using lights, materials, textures and bump mapping
How I made the donut scene

Finished Result

Mmm no calories

More shots at BlenderArtists.org

At a Glance

Screenshots from the video:

Further Inspiration

Here’s some inspiring works from the Blender community using Cycles:

Further Links

FAQ by Thomas Dinges (developer)
Bedroom Cycles File

Cycles is big news for Blender and I can’t wait to see what works come out of it.

Post any Cycles images you create in the comments below

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)

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http://www.facebook.com/mariegoodwyn Marie Goodwyn

This is a good tutorial as usual. Taking it slowly being new at Blender. I have cycle but cannot find “device” in the render menu. Are there different versions of Cycle? I have the latest Blender version.
Anonymous

I have still some speckles. Turned off Caustics, scaled everything 10 times and nothing works. Black dots are messing around.
http://www.facebook.com/ricardomartinezco Ricardo Martinez

thanks andrew for upload this video, I follow you until 15:54 and I took the picture, but it seems like I have a problem with the pixels, could you tell me what I am doing wrong?

this is the link of my picture http://i.imgur.com/UopY8p7.jpg?1

please mi e-mail is ricardomartinezco@yahoo.com
thanks

PeterPan

On Ubuntu – or Linux generally:

1) Go to Blender.org webside

2) Download Blender from there.

3) Start blender from this folder. (Do NOT use the blender version from repo!!! ((at least not for CUDA support)))

4) Go to preferences (File -> User Preferences -> System) in Blender and Voila there you can activate CUDA. But then you still have to use Cycles and in the Render Options you again have to switch then to GPU instead of CPU. (Render -> Render -> Device)
Thats it. Have fun!

Jt Laurente

Can you Render this in the normal render, so we can see the difference?
mtxvfx

is it possible to import videos to use it as image plane in cycles Renderer ?
Yugal Mehra

Hey dear

My PC is having NVIDIA GeForce 7025
but no CUDA option coming in blender user preference…

plz help ….. what is the problem.?

Rodolfo

Thats an old onboard graphics no Cuda. Cuda is only supported from GF 8200 and above… And for blender make sure your Nvidia GPU has Cuda 1.3 or above.

rico

can you be my textmate?
rico

fuck you
ntonino

Please Andrey, can you put the settings to make chocolate covered with fluids? Thanks.

Dan0092

Yeah, I’m hoping for the same.

http://www.facebook.com/Dan0092 Danial Arif

This changes everything. Everything’s much easier with the cycles engine.

Could someone maybe give me a bit more detailed tutorial on how to make the donuts? Maybe what settings I should keep for the domain and the chocolate fluid torus? I’m trying to apply the frosting but there always seems to be excess chocolate slipping around the donuts.

Thanks!

http://www.facebook.com/Dan0092 Danial Arif

Anyone? :<

http://www.facebook.com/john.steicke John Steicke

It would be awesome if you made your videos downloadable as I often find myself looking through specific videos after a key bit of info when I can’t remember how to do some simple tasks and I find it to be a pain to have to wait for video buffing all the time, if I had a .mov or .avi I could just scan through the video with ease at my leasure, just a thought^^
bob

how do i render options from CPU to GPU? its not there

#1fan

I have the same problem!

http://www.facebook.com/andrew.nevskiy Andrew Nevskiy

Guys! just go to file -> user preferences -> System & take a look at the bottom left corner. You will find this settings right there [CPU| CUDA]

http://www.facebook.com/wilman.darnasutisna Wilman Darnasutisna

why cycles render cannot support with my ATI radeon? so sad
i hope Blender can compatible with my gpu

rico

so what fuck

simon3d

i can’t run cycles’s gpu option with my ati radeon 5670 ..what’s the problem…

RayZ fox

You need a nvidia card. They are working on opencl for ati though.
AJ

DOWNLOAD CYCLES HERE
http://www.2shared.com/file/SINVPb7z/Blender_Cycles_Files.html

Akairyuu

Wow! Those doughnuts look amazing ! I want to eat one lol.

I’m deffo trying this tutorial later on when I have more time
Actually, I was wondering how would you make a scene with dull lighting (Say a night time scene or something) but without much noise? I was making a scene like that earlier but even though I turned my integrator sampling up quite high, it was still quite noisy. Is there anyway, I can work around dark scenes without having to keep turning the sampling up?
Thanks
http://www.facebook.com/marcos.lluberes Marcos Antonio Lluberes Consta

well this can sound as kind retarded, but can I make animations in blender cycles??

Mork 3D

Yeah, you can, in fact the Cycles are very good with animations too!

http://www.facebook.com/Zyck.Chang Yeikov Zarate Chang

Hello, I got a problem with the image texture aplied to the diffuse material, it doesn’t show in the rendered mode but it does in the material mode.
http://www.facebook.com/adrian.belen Adrian Carpio Belen

no
Memduh

Hello, I really love this tutorial but I seem to be having a problem with Cycles, in rendered mode it always appears to be quite grainy and stops rendering after about ten seconds, since my cpu and gpu arent very fast this isnt enough time for good quality, what should I do?

hoizheisler

Hi,

Do you still have the same problem? Or did you manage it?

Maybe you are able to tell me what you did because i have the same problem;)

Simon Høgh

You have to set up the “preview” count. You can do that by going to the “render” tab (the little camera icon) and then in that tab, find the “integrator” values. The amount which you set it to controls how much much time blender will take to make a good image, you could start with about 50. That will take some time to render if you don’t have a very fast computer, but the result will be worth it. (you could also try to set it to 0 , so that it will never stop rendering)

fergus

yes, I’ve set it to 5000 before.

http://mitchschenk.wordpress.com Mitchell Schenk

Check out the jeep I rendered in Cycles http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/jeep-wrangler-test-3/
http://nokeyuitza.wordpress.com/ Noke

Aloha! I was working a little bit yesterday on how to improve the donuts, and here it is the result! (At least, by the moment ) Hope you enjoy some Good morning and suset donuts!

http://nokeyuitza.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/good-morning-and-sunset-donuts/
Tom

hey folks.. i found somethin about cycles. Currently, only Nvidia is completely supported, ATI and other graphics card owners have to wait until they add full support. But for now, you can enable GPU rendering by selecting OpenCL where it says Compute Device in user preferences, on the system tab. Once you select it, save as default, then where normally you would select CPU or GPU like Andrew shows in the video, choose EXPERIMENTAL, then you have the option of CPU/GPU. Although, I won’t be using it, the results are crappy at best. With a single pink colored emitter, the ground plane was basically a pixelized rainbow, and the Monkey head i used looked cartoonish. Which is sad, since my graphics card is a very good one. I sure hope they get on the ball soon.. (sighs and clicks CPU render and waits… and waits… and waits….)

http://nokeyuitza.wordpress.com/ Noke

Aloha Tom, I don’t find it… I’m in User Pref/ System/ Compute Device but no way to choose OpenCL or Experimental there. Theres a button that says “None” and a menu that just allows me to select CPU. But when I’m using Cycles, in Properties/ Render I can choose in “Feature set:” between Supported and Experiental.

(I’m using: Mac OS X Snow Leopard and ATI)

Bradlye

I still don’t under stand how the donut icing was made, could someone please explain?

http://nokeinthecloud.wordpress.com/ Noke

Do you mean the Couverture chocolate? Using Fluid Simulation. And for the sprinkles, using Particle Simulation.

http://www.facebook.com/Dan0092 Danial Arif

I can’t get the icing to look any good, there’s always lots of icing and it slips around the donut! Even if I’ve selected no slip or partial slip, it doesn’t work.

http://nokeinthecloud.wordpress.com/ Noke

Aloha! Still learning and working on them, but here they are! These are my donuts in cycles:

http://nokeinthecloud.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/3-donuts-con-cobertura-de-chocolate-y-3-donetes-normales/
http://www.youtube.com/user/CroHack97 CroHack97

This is my 3D Parkur and Action Flying game Sick !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1XhYp-P32Y
Caleb

To change the render from CPU to GPU- ya mine doesn’t have that. Is it because of the new Blender? Or is it because I use a Mac?

http://www.synapsecreativedesign.co.uk Alput

Its cos you use a mac. The setting is tucked away in User Preferences. User Preferences > System > Compute Device. Click on the OpenCL tab and select your graphics card. If you hover over the OpenCL tab it explains its function for you.

Mike

I need a new graphics card! Any suggestions? Not to expensive lol. Want to use cycles but without a better graphics card rate is same as blender render

Someone

nVidia GT630 maybe? The newest architecture is implemented inside, also cheap.

Peter

So as i understand there is no use for us mac users with a ATI card of putting energy in learning cycles as long as the GPU support is not implemented. So my question is , is there an other render engine that can do all these thing what cycles is supposed to do, like this luxrender thing e.g……..
http://none Mike T

Hey Andrew! Looks like some serious Tutorials to bootstrap in Cycles rendering is going to be required. I know just enough to follow along. The differences between Cycles and Blender Rendering as it pertains to Textures and materials is really very different. There isn’t a whole lot of material out there on the topic. I have used some of your tips to get things moving but I am still not satisfied with my understanding of putting textures on objects. The nodes are a nightmare…I am sure I will get it eventually. The concept of color maps and bump maps and normals has my head swimming in confusion. As always the above tutorial is awesome but a few selections in the setup under the system tab need to be checks so that Blender actually looks for the GPU or CUDA options. Its a easy thing to over look but HUGE if your just getting started. the Blender wiki is nearly useless on Cycles. There are a few others sources out there that I have found. But will list one topic while they get lost on the dirty details that obscure the stated objective of the tutorial. Please help us…I am so certain just from reading your posts I am not the only one.
ettore

Hi Andrews, thanks for your video. I follow all your step, but there are 2 differents and I don’t know why. ( i’m super beginner ):
1. When I press ” smooth ” for monkey, my monkeys is not ” smooth ” like yours.
2. When I see your render ” live ” ( always in the monkey’s scene ), you have few grain. what’s your setting ? I think they are the same as mine, but have much more grain.
Can u help me ?

Always thanks and sorry for my bad English

Ett (ubuntuwer)

Didier

For your first question, to get is ‘smooth’ you first need to set your subsurf modifier (it’s in the propertie panel (the tab with world sttings, physics, materials etc.)) and the divisions to something like 2 or 3.

For the second question, in your render settings (were you can click the render button instead of f12), somewhere you can find preview render and in that part there is ‘samples’ set it to a higher number or 0 (0 will let it render until either your computer crashes or you make blender stop rendering)

I hope this helped you.

charls

I have a problem. Im using a nvidia gtx 570 super overclock card. In blender 6.2 and 6.3 versions. In any project using cycles i got a very noisy images. I uploaded a capture screen of my pc.
http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/2912/cyclesy.jpg

http://none Mike T

you are still in CPU compute mode not GPU mode.

BetMora

Hello Andrew, i have a question for you.. how did you make monkey’ head so smooth before applying smooth shading? Your monkey head got like 3 time more polygons than mine =|

Didier

I don’t know his shortcut but it’s a modifier (in the properties panel)
http://www.synapsecreativedesign.co.uk Alput

It’s Properties > Add modifier > subdivision Surface. Not sure how Andrew applied it so quickly though? Perhaps, if he reads this – or anyone else who knows, he can share his short cut with us?

tank

for beginners, a .blender file to focus on cycles and not modeling would be great
steven shearing

Hi Andrew , I’m trying to light a scene which has old fashion candle.
I seem to have a issue getting it to light the scene because of glass, and in need of help.

My lamp is basically a candle enclosed in a box which has 6 glass panels, the candle fuse is a low poly mesh and its Material is Emission, no matter what i try the scene won’t light correctly.

The candle is pretty much the only viable thing the render which is is wrong because it should light what’s around it, there will be around 3 of these lamps in the room and one outside the room.
Just to get it to brighten the room i have to put its strength to 30000(yes that’ right) which then leaves lots of white dots in my image.
The glass is solid and is not a plane. however i have tried it as a plane and its the same result..

Please help what am i doing wrong ?
Thordur

Hi, I have been trying to figure out how you did this donut but I just can’t seem to get it right, I set the donut under physics to obstacle and the chocolate or what ever i want it to be to domain, am I missing something ? thank you in advance

Didier

Sorry if someone else has already gave you tye answer but rhe choclate must be fluid and the cube in wich the physics behave must be domain.

http://www.youtube.com/user/CroHack97 Leon

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HARDCORE OCE – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXyduIa82l4
Romario T.

I got a weird problem with Cycles…

When I see my scene preview with cycles sees a lot different from the final render.

and looks like the render doesn’t recognize the HDR images – only the preview… that means the preview looks good, but the “final render” a lot dark.

Do you have any idea how to solve that?
Dominik K.

To enable GPU rendering, go into the User Preferences, and under System tab, select the Compute Device(s) to use. Next, for each scene you can configure to use CPU or GPU rendering in the Render properties.

Mario

Why there are no compute devices in my system preferences of Blender 2.62, CPU only?

I have in my PC a Nvidia 6200 card.

sid

node editor scares me.

Daniel

it is that one part of blender that Im afraid to go to. there are monsters in the hidden menus of the “node editor”

Francisco Martinez

It might be scary at first.
But once you get the hang of it, you realize that nodes are your best friends

Specially when compositing
;D

http://guilhermem4rtins.deviantart.com Guilherme Martins

Thank you very much for this tutorial was the first time i learn how to work with cycles and made all my latest work’s possible

some examples:
http://fav.me/d4rc245
http://fav.me/d4rliqv
http://fav.me/d4sft6f
http://fav.me/d4snmkn
sid

i have a mac, i don’t have a gpu.
Samuel

Hello.
I have a blender in 2.62 version and I have small problem.
I don’t have option to select to render by GPU not CPU.
In this same place I have only options like: Supported and Experimental.
What should I do to render by GPU?
JP

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the intro to cycles.

If anyone needs a list of which Nvidia based graphics cards can be used with the Cycles render engine in Blender 2.6+ there’s a table on the Wikipedia page for CUDA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

CUDA Compute Capability Version 1.0 cards will not work at all (my Nvidia 9600GT for example – I so need a new video card now. lol). From what I read elsewhere, a version 1.3 card is supposedly the minimum, and probably won’t outdo the CPU much, if at all. Version 2.0 and 2.1 cards should all work very well, such as the GTX 470 and up.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003406455436 Hamza

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Lorenzo

I can’t recreate a good looking donut, I’have tried to reproduce the donut like in the video but i have ugly results with the fluid simulator, is possible to have more detail about the creation of the donut?
kyle

I tryed to get blender 2.62 and it didn’t work. it was something with the python i think. i could only grab vertices and switch to edit mode. do you have this problem? if not thats o.k.
Mike

hey helpful tutorial, the only thing it’s that i can’t find the gpu acceleration button in the render tab, and that´s driving me crazy cuz of the time to render of mi cpu, any help?

louisb

I first have problems as well. but u need the richt graphics card. It is in the user prefences untherneed the system tab. have luc
http://none Mike T

I had the very same problem. I have a pretty good graphics card so I was persistent. You have to go into the Blender system set up to make sure Blender knows about the graphics card. Then be very sure that your main menu bar has the render type to cycles not Blender.

sauce

What do you mean, set up? How?

Didier

You need to go in ‘user preferances’ wich you can find in your upper bar, i tought it was when you hover over the file button. From their i believe their was something in the ‘system’ tab, you can see stuff that blender uses like the way GLSL behaves and you can see something about your GPU

Max

Hey great tutorial bro, really helpful for me and my small team. Were starting some projects now and i have a question, is it possible to render animated scenes with cycles and not just still images?
It would be awesome if we could use cycles for our short films.
Sorry im a newbie and im still learning, please reply, its very important to me!
Thanks
Max

Anthony

you can it works the same way as blender internal except it renders like an image, so you have to set the end sample for each individual frame…. so its a little weird because it can look grainy if you don’t set it high enough but if its too high it will take a very long time to render
hope this helped!

http://alsonohomepage@example.com mee

Hi, great tutorial thanks for the nice explanation … but how did you do the sprinkles? Probably cylinders distributed with the particle system, still I cant figure out how to place them easily nicely distributed on top of other surfaces. Most likely there are lots of ways to do awesome stuff with that … any tutorials ?

Matt

Use vertex groups, Go to vertex weight paint, top of doughnut (or whatever) paint where you want sprinkles, in the particle system, select your vertex group (should be called “Group” unless you’ve changed it) and voila! Reply if you need clarification.

Welcome to Cycles!

Finished Result

At a Glance

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About Andrew Price

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Introduction to Cycles

Welcome to Cycles!

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