So, I’ve been experimenting on Blender with the two render engines and I really don’t know what to stick with. Here’s the pro’s and con’s of what I feel makes this a hard decision.
Cycles: Pros: Good lighting and shadows formed, overall giving it a realistic effect. Cons: Sometimes too bright (e.g example below) + takes forever to render (24 minutes for the simple photo below) Evee: Pros: Good on lowpoly builds and has a lot more features than Cycles (e.g Emission) + fast rendering. Cons: Most likely to have the worse lighting and shading meaning I have to use 3 point lighting + a HRDI (or a sun light)
Here’s the same render but with the two different engines:
Ignore how bad the render and texture is, this was a quick job to ask for support - not seeking for feedback on this 10 minute render - I also used a terrible HRDI
Which one pops more or is better to use?
Eevee’s Render Engine
Cycle’s Render Engine
0voters
It would be more helpful if you told me the reason why the specific render engine is better.
The second one looks really better because not only does people I’ve seen in the graphics community using that but it also fits everything such as the scene much better. Sure cycle render can be a realistic way, but it’s sometimes too bright. My thought is the 2nd one, Eevee.
You can configure the brightness for Cycles and it will look 100x better. He was probably making the lighting in Eevee and that’s why it looks bad in Cycles.
I’d mess around with your HDRI, it’s way too bright. For the highest quality render, Cycles will always be better. For a quick render, Eevee suffices, but the lighting will not look nearly as good.
Cycles render engine is more powerful than evee, I only use cycle if I am taking a render of a single model and not a scenery because it takes a lot of time for it to render, I’ve mostly used evee for GFX, with good lightning and textures it looks decent. If you want to render something quick or want to get an idea of how it will look in cycles use evee.
Cycles is defintely the one if you want good looking lighting w/ shadows and reflections/so on. Here are some example renders I do (I’m a little lazy to link them )
Look in “SHOWCASE” and you’ll find the renders
Eevee should be only used if you’re looking for a quick render for a test OR you don’t really care that much about shadows and small details.
Cycles = More better lighting/slow
Eevee = Okay lighting/fast/quick tests
Plus, you can defintely speed up render times. Just slap on some denoise nodes, turn down samples, lights, etc. Doing these steps mostly takes me 10 minutes on more expensive renders (at times though)
Also I’m very glad you didn’t restrict the poll to artists only, thank you
Another thing, you can utilize composition to get glow on glowing objects. Works perfectly fine and is MUCH more customizable imo.
Cycles is meant to be a “cinematic” rendering engine. takes a bit of resources but gives out a pleasant image. but needs a lot of light adjustments and such.
Eevee is what you can consider something close to unity render engine. more game like. takes less resources and makes a render that is average to say the least. you need to also tweak stuff like environment and lighting to get a better result.
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