Cycles Renderer Alternatives

Cycles Renderer

Cycles is Blender’s ray-trace based production render engine and in development since 2011. It was originally developed by Brecht van Lommel, and is maintained by an active team of developers today. Since its release as Apache 2.0 (permissive open source), it’s also in use by other 3D tools, such as Poser and Rhino.

Features

CORE SPECIFICATIONS
Unidirectional path tracing with multiple importance sampling
Branched path tracing
Multi-core CPU Rendering with SIMD acceleration
GPU rendering with NVidia CUDA & AMD OpenCL
Multi-GPU support
Unified kernel code for CPU and GPU

INTERACTIVITY
Designed for interactive updates
Fast object, shader, light changes
Tiled and progressive rendering

LAYERS & PASSES
Render layers for decomposing the scene
Render passes for geometry and lighting
Holdout mattes

GEOMETRY
Instancing
Hair curves
Volumes
Multi-core BVH build

CAMERA
Perspective and orthographic cameras
Panoramic and fisheye cameras
Stereoscopic rendering
Depth of field

MOTION BLUR
Cameras
Object transforms
Meshes and curves

SHADING
Physically based
Node based shaders and lights
Production tricks
Open Shading Language (CPU only)

VOLUMES
Absorption
Scattering and emission
Smoke and fire
Subsurface scattering

LIGHTING
Global illumination
Point, Sun, Spot and Area lights
Mesh lights
World background
Sky model
Light portals for indoor scenes

TEXTURES
Image textures
Environment maps
Procedural textures (noise, voronoi, checker…)
Bump and normal maps