What do you use internal for? I get its workflow is a tad quicker than Cycles, but still…
Cycles is great, especially for what it’s aimed at, primarily photorealism. Render times are obscene for me and I’d like to see a selective gaussian blur (like in GIMP) node for the compositor - seem’s like a no-brainer to me it’s so good for noise.
But yeah, you said workflow and I agree with that, also it lacks a lot of artistic freedom that comes with biased rendering. For example, I wanted to try and get a comic book look, here is the best I could do with cycles:
(That weird sort of cross shaped shadow on the floor? Not a clue)
Here is what I managed with Internal:
Sure it’s not everyones cup of tea but you just can’t really venture outside of photorealism (at least not far) with cycles. That’s why I liked both. I really hope I can make that with EEVEE too. I have my doubts and it’ll probably be a lot more work too. This is purely speculation though.
I do still use cycles a lot, some of my realistic stuff has come out really nicely and I could never get it that good with internal.
Another comic style shot just because I like them 
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looks like your Cycles render is one ramp node away from the other renders.
I personally think the Cycles one looks waaaay better, has a real inky tone.
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Isn’t the trick with getting the cycles renderer to calculate fewer light bounces to speed up render times? It’s worked for me at least on my models.
Blender Guru has a video about speeding up cycles.
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This is exactly what I was remembering. Just drop your bounces from Max 12 to like 2 and Min 1. Setting both to 0 looks awful imho.
Yeah, loads of things that can help, but indoor renders are notoriously difficult/slow especially when you have few and small sources of light. For my comic style I have 0 bounces, but my realistic renders I needed 2 bounces and took upwards of 5 hours each and still had noise (970, not the best card I know).
This was a problem for me because I was not doing a single shot - I wanted to make backgrounds for a game and so might have 8 different camera angles for one room. My scenes have upwards of 1mil triangles each, sometimes going up to 5mil. You can use 1 light bounce, turn off reflective caustics and refractive cuastics and whack up filter glossy - still noisy.
With regards to my look, personal preference so fair enough - I did try applying a color ramp to cycles but this has limitations. You can’t do it in the material like you do in internal. You have to do it in the compositor.
You can’t have different colors for different objects - one set of ramps for the entire produced image (and splitting things into separate render layers to get round this is not an option in cycles since the stuff missing is going to effect the lighting).
Also since it’s affecting the entire image you have to separate out the specular parts and add that in the compositor too, since I want that unaffected. Also can’t achieve the same specular look in cycles - hard pronounced and colour of my choice.
Since I’m essentially creating bands of colour if you have any noise at all you get horrible out of place pixels around the edges of the bands.
For my particular style cycles posed another problem - you can’t specify (and also see in the editor) lights to only work within a specific radius. Can mess with falloff in the node editor but it becomes guesswork.
Don’t get me wrong though, I love cycles and how easy it is to make more realistic renders. I use it a lot and before I went down a more stylized route I did use cycles for that same hall:
I only adopted this comic like look because working alone I can’t create more than a handful of these within my lifetime.
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well there’s your problem.
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Heh, sometimes I get a bit carried away when trying to make a fancy 1st class staircase
1.3mil triangles and there’s another 3 floors to go!
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lo poly mesh over the walls, bake normals and possibly height/depth. reduce the subsurfs on the rail further away, possible the diagonal one also. you could bake AO to save more time.
there are loads of ways to speed up your workflow.
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I’m aware. It would improve my render time (somewhat) but increase my workload which was why I ditched realism. Not that it matters at the moment since I am working on Internal right now.
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Going a bit OCD with information/debugging. The image shows a “window manager” state with menu that keeps track of open draggable windows, makes use of Penner Easing for minimize/maximize functions (super-easy with Lemur Tweens) and progressbar value changes, etc, and probably another ten things I cant remember.
This is basically the GUI creation part of development. One of 14 modules (and counting) thus far. 
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Lemur desktop environment for linux when?
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I’ve been wanting a Java-based Linux DE for a long time now, sooo…
heh, im very much a functional designer, not really the artsy type, but it does use an external palette for theming. i feel my part as the programmer has been done.
i dont really mind sharing stuff. most people dont really take to pulling from git much, though. a bridge too far i guess…
in practice many windows cause a fuss, button popups and static custom controls for some things will always be a staple diet.
a poor mans version would just be attaching a draggable event to a rollup panel if all you wanted was a collapsable container to move around. e.g. a debug control.
sorry for the grammar. damn mobile devices.
The colors fit the scene nicely.
I’ve been playing around trying to make a reactive rope bridge, and I’ve finally managed to get things working enough that it appears at least somewhat realistic - and most importantly it works for multiplayer.
It could still use some polishing and some further tweaking to make it more physically accurate, but for now I’m satisfied that it works well enough that players can cross the bridge without any spots they can fall through or ‘break’ the bridge’s physics shapes.
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Very nice!!
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Thanks !
Cool, the part with the jumps is something I would expect from Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner 
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