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Comment by darkteflon | Hacker News Reader

I listened to an interesting interview[1] this week with Blender’s creator (and current foundation chairman) Ton Roosendaal.

He thought that one of Blender’s major challenges was recent developments in the real-time rendering space - notably Unreal Engine.

They’re not direct competitors, of course (and Epic has donated to the foundation) but it does speak to how impressive UE’s render pipeline is.

Again, it’s not a direct comparison, but it’s remarkable what UE5 can do at 60fps on a mid-range Nvidia 30 series card (even without DLSS) versus how long it takes Cycles to render a single frame.

I’ve no doubt Blender will be a future innovator in this space too.

[1] https://overcast.fm/+mSOZes2FM

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Blender has a realtime renderer. it is known as eevee.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/intro...

Yes, I’m aware of eevee. Would you say that eevee produces output of a comparable quality to Cycles or UE5 with Lumen?

I have no idea, I only use blender rarely and almost never render. eevee is intended to be compatible with cycles, I would guess that if your scene does not depend on the advanced lighting that a forward renderer like cycles enables it could replace cycles. I also expect it to be as good, if not better than ue5 as it does not have to hit the framerates that ue5 has to achieve.

Yes, eevee can look great with the right settings. I guess the devil in the detail is what we respectively mean by "great", and "better". Context is crucial: what you're trying to do, where you're doing it and with what constraints, etc.

I guess I would just then reiterate the context of my original comment, which is that the creator of Blender and current foundation chairman is looking at UE's real-time render pipeline and coming away very impressed, even to the extent that he thinks it should influence the future direction of Blender's own real-time pipeline.

There's an Eevee update in the works that includes some Lumen ideas, real emissive materials for instance (iirc). Even for now, you can dive into the options and enable some stuff like refraction that defaults to off for the folks with less GPU.

yeah. they are wildly different approaches to rendering, with the realtime stuff taking shortcuts in the name of performance, whereas the non-realtime stuff isn't making the same choices. accuracy rules with path tracers like Cycles.

realtime 3D engines have gotten extremely good at approximation, though, and they get better all the time.

around the time they perfect it, hardware will be able to do pathtracing in real time, meaning the shortcut path and the long path to the goal of photorealism were about the same length, just through wildly different terrain.

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