** it's been 2 years , I think an updating video on this one will be very useful because we can also see and compare the amount of improvement and changes they had sins this video. **

redshift looked the best to me here, i mean look at the wood textures, in redshift u can see the details of the wood texture while in the other render engines its sorta blurred out

For the blender denoising issues, have you got animated noise turned on? Because in my experience that is what causes most of the flickering like the floor in your scene. If you are using OPTIX denoise I would recommend turning animated noise off so you can retain the same noise pattern between frames. This will massively help with your flickering.

Redshift one is the best looking while showing most of the texture details, leather shine and realistic light rays going everywhere.

Wow! The amount of work you must have put into this.. Awesome work and really nice and balanced!

Thank you for taking the time to make these videos.

Check out the scene for yourself gumroad.com/l/vHrvz and don't forget that active Patrons get a 50% discount, and Patrons of 6 months or longer get it free!

I just built a desktop with an RTX3070 card and finally have enough horsepower to actually render bad animations with annoying fireflies in them. I was frustrated with my lack of info but this video makes me realize how difficult these issues are to overcome completely with the current Cycles in some setups. This is an excellent tutorial and the first time in about a year that I've bothered to read You Tube comments - everyone is contributing excellent thoughtful information and our host is doing a great job replying. Subscribed. Thanks!

This was a very informative video. Subbed instantly!

Redshift show some highlight on the shelf supports, the ones near the corner of the room. Why is thta?

That was a massive amount of work you put into this, thanks man really appreciated the info. Peace out.

For blender, are you using sRGB or Filmic colourspace?

which gpu was used to render this? or Did u use CPU to render?

wow there were some quite surprising informations in this one! Thanks for the work! I actually like certain aspects of every image, so I can't really say that one is better than the other. Blender had some significant updates since this video and I guess the other softwares aswell, so I'm wondering how much changes since then.

Rather than increasing the sample count, I would increase the image resolution to fight aliasing. Then you do the compositing on the high resolution and finally scale it down - noise and aliasing goes away.

Wonderful! Thank you!

Redshift looks really crisp like it always does, has some slight AA issues on some edges but the speed alone and the low amount of hassle to go through to make it work should be reason enough to use it over the other two. Renderman will most likely get a big boost when XPU gets production ready, but that could very well be a few years off. Been waiting for XPU since 2018 and if Pixar is bad at one thing it is the speed at which they roll out things.

thanks for this videi! it was super informative. I'm on the border of using blenders Cycles or sticking to my maya workflow and just getting a Redshift subscription

Interesting test. Thanks for sharing. I have production experience using Renderman (Reyes), Mental Ray, VRay, Arnold, Redshift, 3Delight, and even Maxwell. I just wanted to point out that I've never worked at a studio that actually used post process denoisers. Is this commonplace with using RIS? Even when I use redshift, these types of denoisers typically introduce artifacts in animations. Is there a new use case for them that I'm not aware of...

I've noticed some bad aliasing in redshift. I've never seen any jaggies in cycles, it just gets a little blurrier with lower resolution

Did you use bump to roughness in renderman? I think that really improves the surface details. Also renderman being available in Blender now is fantastic

Thanks for this!

great video. very helpful thank you

4:56 Those sample numbers seem small to me. I’m accustomed to specifying several times that to get good-quality renders out of Cycles.

A detailed and enjoyable video. Need new version of it, just for eye candy.

Any tips on how to get rid of those fireflies? My biggest issue and its so damn annoying.

very in depht and a lot of effort, thx mate!

I have the same problem with Blender, by increasing resolution you eliminate that effect

Very insightful video. One can see that you put a lot of effort into it. If I may ask how much time did it take you to make it?

At the end of the day, the image is the product. The tools you use will change depending on the job and what it requires. You can do all kinds of machinations to try to get certain results from certain software, but that's not efficient if you know of a better tool. You can usually tell who the noobs and amateurs in the room are when they go apoplectic about software choices ("Blender isn't used by professionals!!") ... while the pros realize that the software used can either make the job harder or easier (depending on the job) - but the end result is the image ... and yes, the chances of finding jobs that use your ffffavorite software might be good or bad, depending ... but also be wary of places that demand software loyalty. Pixar, for example, lets their modelers use whatever they want - as long as the output can port to their pipeline. For fireflies, try playing around with the Clamping settings in Blender. You can also set up geometry to cast shadows, but not be considered for GI bounces, etc - but you are correct in that Blender's portal lights are a bit weird (compared to Arnold and Redshift). I've used a lot of different software (starting with Crystal 3d on SGI) and a lot of different renderers (like 10+) over the past 29 years. They all have weaknesses or things they just suck at - and in those cases you have to work around the limitations or possibly composite in a fix - again, the image is the product. Thanks for putting this together - very informative. It would be nice to see the comparison if you get the fireflies under control (again, clamping is your friend - as are tiny adjustments in Roughness and watching if you're getting too much Specular vs Metallic overlap). Cycles is still evolving, and it's actually nice to see that even though it's got some holes (cough - caustics - cough) it's not THAT far behind. I use it every day to make a living ;)

Would love to see this revisited with Cycles 3.x and Intel OpenInageDenoise. Such a good denoiser

You could have made the walls and just disconnect the bsdf Shader so they appear black and reflect no color

I'd love to hear your take on Luxcore!

newbie here, what exactly happens when you increase the sample rate? what extra calculations are being done?

Why dont the blinds cast shadows through the portal? Great video nonetheless. How did the adaptive sampling turn out?

Is Cycles still this flickering in animation?

With Cycles you have to have under control your albedos and your speculars as you mention in the pinned comment, but you have to have control over other things, like light intensity, clamping and exposure all together. Also the denoise result you are getting is not the best one you can extract, you can use an advanced denoise technique with the compositor using passes and you will be amazed one how much texture detail you will recover :) Keep in mind that 0.6 in value is white, not 0.8, 0.8 means white snow, so SUPER HIGH Albedo, also with specularity, the usual value should be around 0.2 and 0.5 as much, 0.8 is veeeeeeeeeery bright. But your glasses are metallic I think (I may be wrong), you shoul NOT be using Specular value at all, it should be at 0.0 and Metallic at 1.0, not sure if that's what you have there, just wanted to mention. If you want some help with Cycles and some collaboration, just tell me, I'll be glad to help if you think I may be of help :) BTW Caustics are not the only thing that can cause fireflyes, we use them, but there are ways to "diffuse" them if you need too, there is a value in Cycles precisely for that, but Caustics are needed if you want proper light behaviour, otherwise you are cutting up one big part of the light trip :)

Blender use a colour profile by default called Filmic, not sRGB so that could be why the colour shift is different in Blender/Cycles.

Great video! I tend to prefer Altus as a denoiser though. Results are much crisper and without much in the way of flickering, even with lower sample rates. Optix produces mushy garbage results in my opinion. But everyone has their own way of working. I’m sure you also have RT option ticked on in the experimental options tab too. That can make a huge difference on some scenes. I also find better results using brute force for primary and secondary GI which seem to render better results in my experience than irradiance cache which can contribute to flickering renders. I bounce back and forth between Redshift , Octane and Cycles4D depending on the project but for a few years Redshift has become my go renderer.

9:54 Compare the wood grain on the lower drawer, and also some of the detail in the painting on the wall -- there is a definite softness when you go down to 128 samples.

They all seem to have problems with low samples. How many samples are usually used Big CGI production?

Hi! Can you share that how to do the post effect? I mean how to do the volumetric lighting in compositing. I am a redshift user and I know render the volumetric will take a lots of time. BTW This is very good comparison. Thanks for the sharing!

This test was done before the release of CyclesX which got a whole kernal update and now cycles has features like path guiding.

You did great! Did this stuff a few times, never easy. I prefer Renderman, because its a noise free animation. Next please add Octan..

Interesting analisys, still the redshift render has a bad aliasing on some very bright edges, this is a problem I often encounter too

2:42 I’ve never used RenderMan, but I recognize the same sort of denoising blotchiness from Blender Cycles.

Redshift in this shot looks way better than renderman which is surprising to me, I really thought since Renderman was a Pixar thing it would be the best .

nice information thank u

Make a tutorial on those god rays and the conplete compositing

Is this cycles? or Cycles X?

RedshiftRT is out now :D

Omg I can't even assimilate what all these configs do, imagine nailing them

quetion : why pixar copany and grand movies make it with renderman only ?

on the Bcon 22 the talk about how & why blender struggle ....I think it could the talk about the new upcoming Bsdf or the talk about importend light sampling or the talk about path guiding that had the topic ...sry I know it not exactly...to much good interesting talks this year... maybe you can talk about that in the future again... p.s. thx..

18:20 Another option that can help with simple cases is the Despeckle filter in Blender’s compositor.

the chsir could be desaturated because it is not linear by default

The main issue in your approach to Redshift was treating it like Renderman in sample settings. Instead of cranking up the scene samples during the test, you only needed to increase the Brute Force ray count. A min/max samples of 4/16 would've covered all geometry related aliasing, and any blurred reflection noise could've been controlled with the overall reflection samples. Also trying the 'auto samples' feature would've been worth the trouble. The other was using Optix. Optix is amazing for WIP rendering and generally terrible for final quality rendering. A better test would've been a dual Altus approach. You can use low sample counts without the issue you saw on the wallpaper appearing even with low samples. When PRman gets fully ported to the GPU it will once again be worth considering for smaller studios. Until that time, it's just not worth the investment in the additional hardware that's required to get through frames.

Be interesting to see how things have changed in a couple months time

Redshift kind of looking good right now

In Blender for the portal light, the walls you would have added you could have changed their ray visibility to have them not add bounces. Would have prefered this video without any denoising. I hate denoisers most of the time. They look so mushy and especially in this scene. Perhaps youtube compression is adding to that. Would have loved to see to 2048 sample render with no denoise out of curiosity. Thanks for sharing. More of a denoiser comparison even though each is optix than a renderer comp it felt. Also would have loved to see an Eevee version using the Eevee G.I. addon. Noticed the chrome on the chair legs in Renderman looks nasty, is that a rust texture?

El hdri es de Guanajuato?

But, after all, I can't understand - why image (textures and details) are soo different between all three? 😵

You should use SID for denoising in Cycles.

Cycles caustics are useless. They always have to be turned off because they cause fireflies.

9:13 Seems like you really want to be able to render different parts of your scene at different sample rates.

Comrade in the first segment you mentioned that it took you 3 days to render ,,,, but when you talk about redman and redshift at the end you don't mention how long it took you to render help us on that ....

Thanks for sharing this info, though imo, the anti-noise thing masks all your efforts to show the real picture. Also, the image suffers from it, its better to have some noise but with all the details.

13:30 I think there is a setting called Portals in blender cycles. 6：44 in this video kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bs2DrKih2ZqRZmQ.html

This can be done with Eevee, right? And try clamping caustics in Cycles.

14:05 If you made those extra walls 100% black, you wouldn’t get any light bouncing off them.

you should try luxcore render

Think colors in Blender cycles would be closer if you use ACEScg color space 🙂

Redshift for sure

❤❤❤ RenderMan

That's why you don't use optix for production... I can't believe they are actually removing the default denoiser.

Redshift FTW

I think blender's denoiser needs more resolution than samples, and i think redshift is the best for time

You need to learn to use the altus denoiser. optix sucks and requires much more samples to function correctly... Altus is slightly tedious at first, but you can gauge it to work at even terrible sample-rates very fast.

19:23 I’m thinking, at this point, things might look better without denoising.

funny, in cycles you put 3 in the total, that means nothing will go above 3 even if you put 6 in transmission

please dont use optix for animation. you can get clean render with 128 samples in redshift and altus denoiser.

Try this again with cycles x

Im interested how LuxCore would handle the task, should be great imo

Octane where

update it for cycles x

Hey this Video should be updated, it is currently popping up in the youtube algorythm...

Redshift takes easily the cake. The other 2 are fine, but far from great.

cant wait until Pixar gets their XPU released. My gpu cluster will wipe my cpu cluster out easy

sound like a podcast

at 512 samples you're getting negligible benefits in Redshift, but you can see the stepping antialiasing on all the specular highlights (desk drawer handle is egregiously stepped) and that's when you reduce the threshold amount to 0.0001 to try to address it. There is no control specifically for antialiasing specular highlights in RS and there should be, as its method for resolving burned-out pixels is useless compared to a spectral renderer with floating point color precision. Antialiasing in Redshift is wack and Optix is wack and it's these two things that makes me switch to octane at the start of projects

Idk, this not convinced me at 100%... It seems that Redshift Is the absolutely winner in term of quality/time overall... In Renderman and In Blender a lot of textures are gone. Imho with some different texture setting and some lighst adjustment other render engine can reach the same quality. It's strange that the cycles denoiser destroyed so much the wood texture. And looking at the images i noticed that cycles have more texture in the Wall wood and less in the desk, th opposite in Redshift. So i can Say that the problems are because of the settings

boss lvl mic

So... why would anyone use Renderman?

mm blender is not that bad, cool!

Better lights but bad shiny reflects (cycles), better quality of details but artifacts on diagonal lines (redshift), better fluid image but too flat (Renderman).

Renderman is the best.

In Blender I’ve gotten better results with NLM denoiser for final renders

for anyone having trouble with artifacts and noise in blender render at 4k with 100-200 samples and it'll start looking much better =)

Looks like all renders were made with Unreal Engine.

E-Cycles is better than the strandard Cycles and have since 2.93 version a new AI denoiser based on intel denoiser and it's really great with 16 samples ;) Good video to see the comparaison.