Cycles isnât complete. Thatâs why weâre not shipping it as the production renderer in Rhino. It is good enough to power a raytraced display mode, though.
What this means is that should Cycles development by the original developers end, any other group of people - including our team - can continue to develop the software with full access to the source code. Also, if we decide that the direction the development of the âmainâ Cycles is taking is not to our taste, we can decide to go our own way.
Note that âToucanâ is the name of the raytracing engine that powers the V4, V5 and V6 RhinoRenderer.
None of those things is the case. In fact, Toucan is an extremely well implemented raytracer designed on the basis of the state-of-the-art 15 years ago. This means:
- A shading pipeline based on the traditional non-physlcally correct ON_Material definition.
- CPU only design.
- Non progressive.
- Monolithic shader design (built for local optimization on the CPU)
While itâs possible to add new features to Toucan, itâs getting harder and harder. This is mainly because many of the features that users have wanted over the past few years were never part of its original design. Skylighting, for example, was very much bolted on and is neither fast nor high quality. Glossy reflections are much the same.
We still have all of the original developers - including, of course, Mikko and Jeff. Over the years, many people have had their fingers in there - including me. We all know how to maintain it.
About 4 years ago, I decided that I wanted to focus our in-house rendering efforts on usability. I wanted some particular features from the renderer - and these included:
- Immediate feedback on settings changes.
- Predictable and easily understood material performance.
- Great performance on scenes that use the new defaults (skylit, imperfect reflections etc).
None of these things could be provided by Toucan without a total re-write. Cycles, on the other hand, was clearly going in that direction. And whatâs more, we had a Blender developer locally who would clearly be an excellent fit for the project.
We are about half way through the project to re-base all of our rendering tools around the new strategy. In the meantime, we have a hybrid solution that keeps Toucan and the old material definition. For V7 the plan is to abandon all of that and base everything around a physically correct material definition based on the Disney BSDF.
SoâŚthat explains the thinking. This is what Cycles will be able to do that Toucan would never have been able to do:
- GPU acceleration. We expect Cycles to render at least 10x faster than Toucan on the same system when development is complete. Right now, if you have an nVidia card that has a modern number of Cuda cores, you will already be seeing that. And we also expect GPU acceleration to improve much quicker than CPU speeds.
- Modern physically correct shading - meaning that light does pretty much what youâd expect when it hits objects.
- Modular shading pipeline - meaning that new components can be developed and pieced together using - say Grasshopper.
- Progressive rendering - which means you can see your material and setup changes immediately when you make them - and we can use it to create a working display mode. It also means that noisy effects donât hang the preview.
Those are the big four. There are are others - the open development model is a really big deal too, and I think it will become more and more important over the next few years.
