A walk with the new Cycles

I wanted to try the new Cycles render engine that is getting implemented into Blender. I used the same scene i rendered here using Yafaray. Well, I’ve been trying it in the past, but I never used one of the realistic scenes I’ve already rendered in Yafaray.

I had no intention to write a review, neither I expected to get two identical images from such different engines. I just wanted to try and see whether I could get a photorealistic image from that scene.

I used Blender 2.60.8 for 64bit for Windows (r42571) from GraphicAll.org.

I loaded the old (made in Blender 2.49) .blend file and I saved as a new one. Then I tried to use the same hdr image and arealighs as light sources, and I tried to replicate the same colors and behaviours in the material settings. I had to use very high values (80000 and 20000) for the “strength” of the 2 arealights.

The most difficult thing (because I didn’t knew how to do!) was to find the right settings for the plastic case. It is nor diffuse neither glossy, so… I thought to use a mix shader.

The settings for the white plastic material

Almost the same settings were been used for the cable:

The settings for the cable material

For the rendering I made just a few tests, I’m sure that there are better settings than these:

Settings for the rendering

The final image is showed below. I only adjusted the colors in Gimp, because the rendering was a little warmer than the one I got in Yafaray.

Not bad, guys! Keep going with the development! 🙂

The final rendering