In case you haven’t heard, Cycles is the new experimental rendering engine for Blender. It is a physically accurate ray-tracer that integrates seamlessly into the Blender viewport. As you edit the scene, it will continually update the rendering, progressively refining the image for as long as you allow it.
This almost interactive method of rendering already allows the artist to work much faster than before, since they no longer have to wait for the entire image to render to see the result. Even better, Cycles can take full advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA GPU acceleration. This means that lucky owners of top-of-the-line graphic cards can now enjoy a non-stop 16 hour work day. No more rendering-breaks!
All of the image in this post is rendered on a Geforce GTX 570 video card at 1920×1200. Rendering time never exceeded 5 minutes for each frame, which is phenomenal considering the quality.
The source Blender file of the car model is available for download here. You’ll need a Cycles-enabled build of Blender to render it.
Some one told me that this car will be shown at FMX Germany in the next few days. So check it out if you are near by.
Actually, you don’t even need a top-of-the-line GPU for CUDA. nvidia has been selling CUDA-enabled GPUs for at least two years now, and even their mobile GPUs support it.
only fermi architecture cards really speed up your rendering, the fact that older cards support cuda doesnt mean they do it fast. most of the time they are actually slower than the CPUs
Exactly. My laptop supposedly runs CADA apps (G210), but it’s slower than the 1.7Ghz Core 2 Duo. So when I say top-of-the-ling, i meant that’s what you need to actually get some benefit from it.
Could you please share the exact name of your GTX 570?
Different companies makes them, but there is really only one model as far as I know: http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-570-us.html
So I guess it’s a reference model. Great that means with my preferred non-reference card I should get even faster results :)!
My bad, I am using a Zotac version actually. Nvidia doesn’t make reference cards anymore I thin.
Awesome pictures Mike. Blender is getting better and better.
I’m having troubles to install blender with Cycles. Can you explain in a post how you installed it?
Sorry, i forgot to say thanks!
Cycles build can be found on graphicall.org. Building it yourself is a huge headache due to all the dependencies you have to link in.
There is no installation, just extract the blender file and run. You will need an up-to-date nvidia driver to use CUDA GPU acceleration.
Thanks Mike for the info!
thanks mike,
whene I render with cycles , i get a picture not very clean and smooth can you help me .