My Approach to Rendering in Blender Cycles

You asked, and I'm delivering! See my way of dealing with Cycles, my approach to photorealistic rendering in Blender, Cycles, and how I'm trying to achieve a mysterious "Redshift Look". And I answered a couple of questions as I promised!
This is not a tutorial, nor a piece of high education, just me, a Blender fanboy talking about stuff that interests me, and which I'm passionate about. That's my introduction, and I'm happy to meet you!
Thank you for your time, and have a great day.
Support me and steal my projects here:
/ sonachine69
Let's talk:
Instagram: / sonatine69
Twitter: / sonachine69
Behance: www.behance.net/sonachine69
Linktree: linktr.ee/sonatine69
Please, share your thought in the comments, and interact with the video how you want, I will be extremely happy for any feedback. More things coming. Love:)
tags: #3d, #3dart, #blender, #cycles, rendering, photorealism, photorealistic renders

[@ahmetmusaates7534]

that white blender ui is nightmare inducing

[@sonachine69]

Haha, I hear it too often. What about Windows 98 Blender theme?;)

[@jaijiu]

@@sonachine69 i want that theme!!!

[@sonachine69]

@@jaijiu eeent-official.gumroad.com/l/RyZfJ 🌷

[@MuslimComputerTuts]

I laughed so hard at that 🤣🤣🤣

[@Rom_3d_dem]

You're such a talented artist! I was looking for the type of work i want to do in 3d, i tried animation, environment, modeling, but when i saw your works i realized that this is type of stuff i want to do! Im probably gonna check your patreon, and thank you so much!

[@sonachine69]

So glad you liked it! Thank you for your interest and kind words. Yeah, I had the same experience, jumping from one field to other. But at the end of the day - I think you need to try it all to find things that you truly passionate about. I started out by rendering random weird things, then tried to squish myself into one of the traditional niches, and after some time got back to rendering random weird things. And It was my best decision ever :)

[@matchdance]

This channel is a hidden gem!

[@sonachine69]

Thanks! Happy that you like it

[@user-sj6br4ti4j]

Спочатку дивлюся і думаю, шось субтитри занадто вумно перекладаються. Глянув, а це не автопереклад, а додані вручну😳. Неймовірно приємна несподіванка Марку! Відео імба, це повноцінна люто угарна короткометражка під філософським соусом. Ще й так вчасно, вже тиждень танцюю навколо рендерів наручного годинника, і курва того куклеса постійно якась габела з якістю, не дивлячись на мінімальні показники денойзера, формату, чи роздільної здатності(я втомився, бос). Ти мегахарош, бажаю успіхів з каналом!

[@landgrenwilliam]

I very much enjoyed this gem of a video :)

[@sonachine69]

Thank you, so glad that you liked it! And I enjoyed your work as well. Your last short film is simply outstanding, and your talk with Ash Thorp was amazing. Keep up the good work!

[@delta911turbo]

Wonderful job! Thank you for all this. Please continue

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! I surely will :)

[@goujjon]

this really stood out from other tutorials, really fresh entertaining presentation and great perspectives!! thank you for sharing :)

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! I always approach 3DCG in a pretty playful and amateur manner, so I think this is the reason video turned out like this. KZbin is really saturated with super techy and serious 3DCG educational content, but I wanted to make something more light-hearted and silly. Glad you liked it!

[@taimurcgi]

This was such an informative and high quality video! You should definitely make more blender videos, I'm sure many people would benefit from these and I see you becoming one of the bigger blender content creators in the space.

[@sonachine69]

Thank you, glad you like it! Haha, there are enough cool Blender people around here who post consistently. I loved recording this video, but I don't think that I will spend too much time on KZbin stuff for now. I still have a lot to learn, and this is my main priority for the next years. But, I will surely upload something interesting from time to time!

[@paulwang6844]

Thank You, Mark! Great tutorial!

[@sonachine69]

Thank you!

[@guno6596]

Your video gave me a lot of impressions! thank you 😊🙏

[@sonachine69]

Thank you too! Really glad you liked it!

[@ch0nc]

Superb video really well explained and really interesting all the way through, I wish you would made more videos like this in the future, your work it's incredible!

[@zaki_reg]

the best video I've seen this week

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! Really glad that you liked it

[@grvtian]

this is an amazing video. you have a natural talent brother. 👍🏽

[@sonachine69]

Man, thank you so much for the kind words!

[@jakebaine]

Saw your work on Reddit and have been following since. This stuff is awesome!

[@sonachine69]

Thank you, really appreciate it!

[@travisyee7278]

Great vid, also your Blender theme is a war crime.

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! (bring me to Hague court, i will never turn back to the default Blender theme)

[@NefaraVFX]

I almost never comment but man, these renders are masterpiece, Wow

[@Gester143]

Enjoying this video with my morning coffee, learning so much. :edit - really appreciated that end portion in terms of how we shouldn't limit ourselves.

[@sonachine69]

Good morning to you, man. Glad you enjoyed 🙌

[@MaatStile]

wow, i remember founding your work on reddit and being blown away

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! I'm so glad that you enjoyed it

[@maxparker4150]

WE WANT A TUTORIAL 😢❤

[@sonachine69]

Haha, everything is possible in a distant future

[@andyranimations]

This is a good video! Subscribed

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! I appreciate it🙌

[@punmije]

Amazing video ! You put into a video every point I was frustrated with. In achieving realism my workaround using both luxcore and cycles for specific needs. Both are amazing in their own domains and both are free. Luxcore is probably the most underrated engine which is compatible with cycles almost like eevee.

[@sonachine69]

Thank you, really glad it resonated! Yeah, whenever I work with a lot of translucency and optics - I will use Luxcore without a doubt. Thank God it works silky smooth with Blender.

[@pnksmigge5324]

Nice video, however as often as people say that Cycles is the "easy" engine, Octane and especially Redshift aren't really harder, but still look better out of the box. It's quick alright, but can't really bring myself to love it :D still you had great tweaks in here, thanks!

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! Yeah, I know what you mean. I have this love-hate relationship with Cycles. I love it, but sometimes it drives you crazy (don't make me bring up caustics again)

[@EMNM66]

Well done brother:)

[@sonachine69]

Thanks! Glad you liked it

[@rahulpaul.3d]

Even tho Your channel is kinda new in yt space, this is still better content than most ones out there

[@sonachine69]

Thank you, so glad that you enjoyed it. I will keep up the good work !

[@nickydeduck255]

this is fucking dope, hell yeah for an S Tier content brother

[@sonachine69]

No, you are an S Tier actually😎 Thank you, glad you enjoyed💐

[@lennarthummer7307]

The subtitles are gold

[@sonachine69]

[@ramennoodleenjoyer]

MAKE MORE VIDEOS YOURE SO GOOD MAN

[@bitlong4669]

Subscribed for your extensive knowledge of render engines. Now spill the beans…. Commence knowledge transfer lol

[@IrakliEsiava]

this is fucking movie lol I gethered snacks for watching this masterpice of a video

[@sonachine69]

Bon appetit, my friend, and thank you so much. Glad you enjoyed it

[@GaryParris]

welcome to Blender community! :O)

[@sonachine69]

[@Nizo1]

"i expiremented with nodes and failed quickly" very relatable 💀

[@govnolord]

Дуже круте відео блін прикольно прикольне

[@bblacktetriss]

🔥🔥🔥

[@sonachine69]

[@GustavoStroke]

this is poetic as fuck, art on art, thanks for that, it was a pleasure to watch, I've always believed in that philosophy, that it's not the tool that makes the artist. Your content is quality, respect!

[@sonachine69]

So happy that you liked it, man. I will keep up the good work, and come back with more rambling in the future 🥴

[@gregvisualfx]

for me cycles, being plug and play fast set up is a deal breaker. I love how I can just start working with it from the get go, and I always do some post proccesing in AE os PS so stuff like contrast is not really important to me straight out of the render. I probably will start shift to redshift since I'm switching slowly to houdini but I'll see how that goes, it's also different for animation and VFX since I need fast renders of multiple frames.

[@Bloctus456]

Great video that covered so much in a short amount of time. I'm currently in the process of learning Blender, Houdini/Redshift, and other skillsets to make film,vfx, and art and this mix of method and design showcase really encourages me to do more in how i make things.

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! I'm trying to get into Houdini/Redshift too. Really tough sometimes, but extremely fun to learn.

[@ajtatosmano2]

Interesting. I always thought of Redshift as another Cycles: easy to tweak but not realistic. I've had problems with Cycles photorealism, so I've made a custom Principled shader (just a node group based on a few different videos), switched my color management to AgX and everything looks 2 times better out of the box. You still need post processing but I think that's a given with every render. I am sticking to Cycles for the same reason as you: it's so easy to work with. Luxcore's system is easy to grasp, however the viewport performance drives me crazy. For simple scenes I like to use it, but when I have to tweak a bunch of things I've just gave up on it. Nothing compares to the Cycles viewport. Radeon ProRender isn't better than Cycles, so there is no reason to use it and Renderman doesn't work for me, crashes all the time, I couldn't finish my simple test scene with it. Lastly, we have Octane, which is by far the best option with blender, however I still get some crashes and you have to learn more than with the other engines. I've considered switching but what made me sta with Cycles is the huge number of addons and assets which makes it easy to use. It's soo much easier to just import an asset through blenderkit than go online, find one on sketchfab, 3dsky etc.. download, build the materials from the maps and use it after that. You can build an asset library yourself, but it's still more convenient to use Cycles. What I am dreaming of is Corona for blender. Extremely easy to use and great images out of the box. In C4D it's pretty stable as well. I know there is an old version available, but it's basically unusable.

[@sonachine69]

Oh yeah, Corona for Blender is a dream of mine too. The biggest problem with external renderers is poor optimization and port to Blender. Octane and Redshift work PERFECT with C4D or Houdini, but with Blender - nah. So trying to improve your Cycles is a more trouble-free option for now, I think. And of course, Agx or ACES is a gamechanger, It's a shame I forgot to mention this in my video.

[@rajendrameena150]

I think fstorm guy should consider this to make whole archviz and photorealistic-lovers shift to blender. It is currently have the best and optimised algorithm for GPU renderering. So easy and fast but unfortunately available for 3ds max only. Even octane filed a case against them for stealing their code as fstorm is developed by the guy who worked for octane core but fortunately fstorm win the case, this shows that it can beat octane easily if ported to other CG softwares

[@fastlearner292]

What videos did you watch?

[@Mix3Design]

Cycles was always the super easy to use render engine just turn it on and render but if you are a nerd you need to learn how to make cycles know what you are doing like where is the main subject where is lights and shadows ....etc and also there is a hidden things to discover that will make cycles the best render engine in the world , cycles free not heavy and easy. This is why i love it .

[@sonachine69]

Yes, and I absolutely love it. You have so many ways to deal with the different problems. Blender and Cycles is just unmatched, if we talk about flexibility and transparency.

[@Nacreous01]

AgX helps a lot, i feel everyone should switch from filmic to AgX

[@sonachine69]

Agreed. Such a shame I forgot to talk about this. AgX is a game changer for sure.

[@Nacreous01]

@@sonachine69 definitely and also the upcoming Principled V2 which will fix the energy conservation problem, fix transmission, fix sheen, add dispersion, iridescence and much more, super hyped for it.

[@Grimstore]

Great video, thank you. Is there a course (even paid) you would recommend to learn the fundamentals of lighting or UV unwrapping ?

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! If I was you, I'd start with a Lighting Course by Blender Guru. Pretty standard and trivial choice, but It's incredibly useful in my opinion. If you on the other hand is SERIOUS (really serious) about learning lighting, definitely check out Chris Brejon's website. There is a lot of useful information about film stuff and specifically about light. After you learned your fundamentals, check out Derek Elliott and Wenbo Zhao for more practical and applicable tutorials. I wouldn't recommend you spend money on Lighting Courses. With lighting, I think it's a thing that you need to master by repetition and practice, to make your brain recognize when it looks good and when it's not. If you are willing to invest money into learning - I strongly recommend you to just subscribe to some cool 3DCG people on Patreon, so you can gain access to their BTS footage\Project Breakdowns\Source Files. And then just analyze what techniques they use to light their scenes and their overall approach to these problems. My pick with this is Ross Mason. He is working with C4D, but his Patreon is an entire knowledge vault. I admire his lighting skills, I learned a lot from him, and maybe you will be interested too. But about UV - sorry, I'm not a very good advisor for this stuff :>

[@rajendrameena150]

I think fstorm guy should consider making it for blender to make whole archviz and photorealistic-lovers shift to blender. It is currently have the best and optimised algorithm for GPU renderering. So easy and fast but unfortunately available for 3ds max only. Even octane filed a case against them for stealing their code as fstorm is developed by the guy who worked for octane core but fortunately fstorm win the case, this shows that it can beat octane easily if ported to other CG softwares. I used corona for most of my work but fstorm is just amazing out of the box even cut render time about 5 times than corona. I use corona just because of lightmix features. Fstorm very precisely convert scenes from other renders as well.

[@whitesnow2201]

І бурі й шторми - то дитячий лепіт, То відчайдушний виклик німоті, То безнадійний крик у безконечнім склепі І непокірність вічній самоті.

[@sonachine69]

[@nico-wc6ms]

that's a great vid! could I get the white theme? 👉👈

[@sonachine69]

Thank you! Here you go: eeent-official.gumroad.com/l/RyZfJ The white - white one is actually built in Blender by default, and called something like "Print Friendly". ps. It probably sound weird, but are you by any chance ni:ko, the guy I've been following for a loong time on Twitter?

[@nico-wc6ms]

@@sonachine69no no, that's 100% not me haha, and thanks!

[@MaatStile]

where should i look to get a proper insight i post processing?

[@sonachine69]

I don't know any particular resources for that, but there are a lot of very informative and useful videos on KZbin by real photographers. Just type in "photo post-processing" and you will find a bunch of videos to learn from. Also, I recommend you learn post-processing in Blender Compositor. It's super easy, just do some research on Blender Render Layers, render something, and mess around with every node in Compositor. If you are stuck or don't understand something - open up Blender Documentation, this is a real infinite vault of knowledge.

[@MaatStile]

@@sonachine69 damn you are a true treasure, thanks for your response, first thing tomorrow morning is deep diving into this subject, wish you the best

[@Abc-765_q0]

I think you should change the thumbnail it will get you more views

[@sonachine69]

Yeah? There is something off-putting about it? Your feedback will be appreciated!

[@shravak.shakya.803]

​@@sonachine69 if I didn't read the title I'd have no clue what the video was about and would have skipped it. Not visually appealing, doesn't grab attention

[@jamesbourbon5129]

Use Aces , folks

[@Growth13]

Відео дуже якісне , мені сподобалося, до кінця глянув , єдине що рекомендую то це в субтитрах терміни писати англійською, звичайно ради прикола норм , але якщо будеш гайди робити то це буде плутати)

[@sonachine69]

Дякую, радий, що сподобалося! Терміни - в наступний раз буду з цим обережніше☝

[@PhilFlock]

I always struggle with photo realism in blender. Do you have some tips for me?

[@sonachine69]

I would recommend you to get really deep into lighting, I believe that the good light and shadows can turn any scene in something more realistic and visually appealing. Then, good realistic shaders. Check out Cornelius Dämmrich, he has an extremely useful videos on his KZbin channel, with his uncut and unedited WIP footage. There you can basically steal everything he knows and uses, and even if he uses C4D - you can apply the same techniques in your Blender.

[@PhilFlock]

@@sonachine69 didn't expect such a in depth answer. Thank you very much! If you wanna take a peek into my recent reels and let me know what you think that'd be amazing!

[@kenttimothy]

why do you use pre 2.8 blender 😅

[@sonachine69]

It's just an optical illusion:> I used Windows 98 Theme for my Blender. Feels and looks good to me🙌

[@Nizo1]

looking at those reddit comments i can understand where that instagram post came from 😂

[@stempyx]

Отаке відео: 👍👍

[@sonachine69]

Дякую🖤 А ти ще більш 👍👍👍

[@Artem-so2ni]

Мужик, це дуже круто. Дуже непросто знайти тутори по рендерам. Будь ласка, дай хоч нормальні субтитри українською. Ще було б цікаво послухати який саме cycles ти юзаеш (типу k-cycles, як варіант)

[@sonachine69]

Дякую, дуже радий, що зайшло! А що з субтитрами, щось поломилось? Я юзав k-cycles, але частіше всього просто твікаю рідний CyclesX під свої потреби 🙌

[@Artem-so2ni]

@@sonachine69 дякую) з субтитрами дійсно все ок, це я шось натупив

[@seff6374]

а я видел как ты рендеры в сайклсе занижал в качестве хех специально, что бы корона получше выглядела на фоне то)

[@EdLrandom]

Ukrainian artists rise up! Can't really switch to cycles after Eevee is a thing, you can just fake every effect

[@sonachine69]

Haha, thank you! Yeah, I can understand. It was especially hard for me when I was forced to work on my 670 GTX. Eevee was my only hope🥲

[@petedoe6872]

Great video, could be the start of a cool channel! But I would still sacrifice my 4090 to study a blend file with one of your cables 🥲

[@sonachine69]

Thank you so much, really glad you liked it! I uploaded all of my source files for this project and several others on Patreon, so you can grab it there:>