Combining Eevee and cycles with Crowdrender

Eevee has speed and some impressive features, such as the recent SSGI inclusion allowing some form of global illumination. Cycles is a path tracing engine, able to simulate the physics of light giving pleasing results for very little effort.

Sometimes its nice to have the best of both worlds, if you can get away with it, rendering with eevee is fast! Cycles is convenient, and can give the accuracy needed where non physical engines like eevee can't.

So its nice to know that we've just been testing V0.3.0, our latest release, and it can use both engines in the same project. All you need to do is to setup two scenes in your project and each can be rendered with the engine of your choice. We tested rendering multiple scenes (thats a multiple of 2!) in Blender 2.91 and rendered one with eevee and the other with cycles.

We setup a compositing node network to mix the results of the two scenes together. Crowdrender rendered both scenes using two computers, a client and one render node. The render node was a PC supplied from Mwave in Sydney, and has a Ryzen 9 3950X CPU and Gigabyte RTX2070 Super GPU.

What this shows is that its possible to render projects really fast now since you can both distribute rendering across multiple machines, whilst taking advantage of the speed of eevee where its possible to use it, and falling back to cycles where you need the extra accuracy.

EDIT! After a bit more playing around, we noticed that there appears to be maybe a bug in blender. Using multiples scenes without Crowdrender involved, animations are only rendering one of the two scenes, the duplicated one in fact. So we're digging a bit to find out why this is and if there's something we missed, or if its a genuine bug. However, this only appears to be an issue prior to Blender 2.92, with the current beta able to render animations in this way perfectly :)

Anyhoo, watch the video to see it in action and maybe give it a try, supporters of our dev fund have access to V0.3.0 right now, if you'd like to support development of our project, you can do that here.