3D Rendering

Cycles – physically based production renderer

Cycles is an physically based production renderer developed by the Blender project. It is designed to provide physically based results out-of-the-box, with artistic control and flexible shading nodes for production needs.

The renderer provides unidirectional path tracing with multiple importance sampling, multi-core CPU rendering with SIMD acceleration, and GPU rendering with NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX & AMD OpenCL. There’s also multi-GPU support, and a unified rendering kernel for CPU and GPU.

This is free and open source software.

  • Core Features:
    • Unidirectional path tracing with multiple importance sampling.
    • Multi-core CPU rendering with SIMD acceleration.
    • GPU rendering with NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX & AMD OpenCL.
    • Multi-GPU support.
    • Unified rendering kernel 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.
    • Shadow catcher.
    • Holdout mattes.
    • Denoising.
  • Geometry:
    • Meshes.
    • Hair curves.
    • Volumes.
    • Instancing.
    • Multi-core BVH build.
    • Fast BVH refit updates.
  • Subdivision and Displacement:
    • Adaptive subdivision.
    • Catmull-Clark and linear schemes.
    • Displacement.
    • Bump mapping.
  • Camera:
    • Perspective and orthographic cameras.
    • Panoramic and fisheye cameras.
    • Stereoscopic rendering.
    • Depth of field.
  • Motion Blur:
    • Cameras.
    • Object transforms.
    • Meshes and hair curves.
  • Shading:
    • Physically based.
    • Node based shaders and lights.
    • Principled BSDF.
    • Production tricks.
    • Open Shading Language (CPU only).
  • Volumes:
    • Absorption, scattering and emission.
    • Smoke and fire.
    • Subsurface scattering.
    • Homogeneous and heterogeneous.
    • Principled Volume.
  • Lighting:
    • Global illumination.
    • Point, sun, spot and area lights.
    • Mesh lights.
    • Environment light.
    • Sky model.
    • Light portals.
  • Textures:
    • Image textures.
    • Environment textures.
    • Procedural textures.
    • Bump and normal maps.
  • Cross Platform: runs under Linux, macOS, and Windows. It’s optimized for x86-64 and ARM architectures.

Website: www.cycles-renderer.org
Support: User Manual
Developer: Blender Foundation
License: Apache License version 2.0

Cycles

Cycles is written in C++ and C. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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