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Rendering and Beyond

Blender comes with a powerful unbiased rendering engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering.

Cycles

Cycles is Blender’s ray-trace based production render engine.

Unidirectional path tracing with multiple importance sampling
Multi-core CPU rendering with SIMD acceleration
GPU rendering with:
- NVIDIA: CUDA, OptiX
- AMD: HIP
- Intel: OneAPI
- Apple: Metal
Multi-GPU support
Unified rendering kernel for CPU and GPU

Cycles Geometry

Meshes
Hair curves
Volumes
Instancing
Multi-core BVH build
Fast BVH refit updates

Cycles Subdivision and Displacement

Adaptive subdivision
Catmull-Clark and linear schemes
Displacement
Bump mapping

Cycles Shading

PBR – Physically Based Rendering
Node based shaders and lights
Principled BSDF
Production tricks
Open Shading Language on CPU and OptiX-enabled GPUs

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Cycles Lighting

Global illumination
Point, sun, spot and area lights
Mesh lights
Environment light
Sky model
Light portals

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Cycles Interactivity

Designed for interactive updates
Fast object, shader, light changes
Tiled and progressive rendering

Cycles Layers & Passes

Render layers for decomposing the scene
Render passes for geometry and lighting
Shadow catcher
Holdout mattes
Denoising

Cycles Camera & Effects

Perspective and orthographic cameras
Panoramic and fisheye cameras
Stereoscopic rendering
Depth of field with support for anamorphic bokeh

Cycles Motion Blur

Cameras
Object transforms
Meshes and hair curves

Cycles Volumes

Absorption, scattering and emission
Smoke and fire
Subsurface scattering
Homogeneous and heterogeneous

Cycles Textures

Image textures
Environment maps
Procedural textures
Bump and normal maps

FreeStyle

FreeStyle is an edge- and line-based non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine. It relies on mesh data and z-depth information to draw lines on selected edge types. Various line styles can be added to produce artistic (“hand drawn”, “painted”, etc.) or technical (hard line) looks.

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Real Time

Thanks to the EEVEE engine, the gap between offline and real-time rendering is being bridged! Previsualize Cycles shading with great accuracy in real time, in the viewport, and significantly speed up the shading and texturing process.