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Description

The scene was inspired by a moment in the movie Southbound (2015).

This project marked a fairly big step forward for me in regards to Blender skills. Ive modeled a full human figure, added rigging, posing, creating clothes, texturing, and animating the figure with a cloth simulation to get more realistic clothes.

You can find the Eevee version here: www.deviantart.com/byron1c/art…

Conversion from Eevee to Cycles and Comparison

I have tried to only change the minimum of settings etc in order to replicate the same image that I rendered in Eevee. I am imagining a workflow where I can do the bulk of the work in Eevee, then finish off and render the final project in Cycles, without having to do much re-work.

Here is what I changed to make this image:

* Fog Density to 0.05 (from 0.15)
* Emergency Sign's neon (white centre) emission from 10,000 to 1,000
* Purple spot lights: 400w to 800w
* Photographer Add on - changed Exposure Value to 12 (from 9.61) (get it here for free: gumroad.com/l/FWQf )
* Changed Point light in front of figure's face to a Spot light, and adjusted its angle

* Increase the blue tint in the Compositing nodes

*The most perplexing issue I had was with the Principle BDSF for the glass in the doors. In Cycles it was acting like tinted glass, despite being set to white, fully transparent, IOR of 1, and working as clear in Eevee (and every other material Ive set up as glass). I think it was something to do with the reflections of the dark environment? (I confirmed it was not any of the textures on the glass either, or the mixing)

Those changes made the non-composited images roughly the same in brightness, fog detail, and overall effect

Then I worked out how many Samples to use in Cycles by checking the detail on the wall to the right of the doors. When the number of samples showed a similar level of detail in the noise texture, as in Eevee, then I rendered the full image at 1080p. I saw how long it was going to take at 4k, so I dropped it from 4000 samples to 3000 samples, and started it rendering on my desktop with a GTX1060 6GB.

This resulted in a 10 hour render @ 3,000 samples in Cycles, compared to 30 minutes to bake the Indirect Lighting and a 6 minute render in Eevee @ 256 samples (on the same machine)

OBSERVATIONS (Some of course are IMHO):

* Both renders DO NOT use the Denoise filter. Using this washed out all of the noise detail on the walls in both render engines

* The overall colour tone is not the same in the Cycles render, despite compositing initially being exactly the same. After increasing the blue tint in the mid range, it was better, but still not as I intended.

* Of course there is a trade-off between Eevee and Cycles. The much longer render looks more detailed and the shadows and reflections are more realistic.

* The wall/building texture is more generally detailed looking in Cycles (despite losing some quality dues to reduced samples)

* the ground texture has too much reflection / brightness to it and not very nice.

* The blurring for the DOF effect is better in Cycles.

* Fog / Volumetrics is much easier to set up and faster to render in Eevee.

* The Fog effect looks better in Cycles

* There was a sacrifice of some quality when rendering with Cycles. As noted above, the extremely long render time meant cutting back on samples

*** The MOST TELLING thing is that after so many test renders in Cycles (including just rendering the box selected problem areas with reduced samples), I still did not have the lights and colour right for the interior and figure, but after all that time I do not want to do another render. Maybe its my patience that's wearing thin... Do other people get to this point and power through? Or do they say "that's close enough" and call it a day on a project?

Description

The scene was inspired by a moment in the movie Southbound (2015).

This project marked a fairly big step forward for me in regards to Blender skills. Ive modeled a full human figure, added rigging, posing, creating clothes, texturing, and animating the figure with a cloth simulation to get more realistic clothes.

You can find the Eevee version here: www.deviantart.com/byron1c/art…

Conversion from Eevee to Cycles and Comparison

I have tried to only change the minimum of settings etc in order to replicate the same image that I rendered in Eevee. I am imagining a workflow where I can do the bulk of the work in Eevee, then finish off and render the final project in Cycles, without having to do much re-work.

Here is what I changed to make this image:

* Fog Density to 0.05 (from 0.15)
* Emergency Sign's neon (white centre) emission from 10,000 to 1,000
* Purple spot lights: 400w to 800w
* Photographer Add on - changed Exposure Value to 12 (from 9.61) (get it here for free: gumroad.com/l/FWQf )
* Changed Point light in front of figure's face to a Spot light, and adjusted its angle

* Increase the blue tint in the Compositing nodes

*The most perplexing issue I had was with the Principle BDSF for the glass in the doors. In Cycles it was acting like tinted glass, despite being set to white, fully transparent, IOR of 1, and working as clear in Eevee (and every other material Ive set up as glass). I think it was something to do with the reflections of the dark environment? (I confirmed it was not any of the textures on the glass either, or the mixing)

Those changes made the non-composited images roughly the same in brightness, fog detail, and overall effect

Then I worked out how many Samples to use in Cycles by checking the detail on the wall to the right of the doors. When the number of samples showed a similar level of detail in the noise texture, as in Eevee, then I rendered the full image at 1080p. I saw how long it was going to take at 4k, so I dropped it from 4000 samples to 3000 samples, and started it rendering on my desktop with a GTX1060 6GB.

This resulted in a 10 hour render @ 3,000 samples in Cycles, compared to 30 minutes to bake the Indirect Lighting and a 6 minute render in Eevee @ 256 samples (on the same machine)

OBSERVATIONS (Some of course are IMHO):

* Both renders DO NOT use the Denoise filter. Using this washed out all of the noise detail on the walls in both render engines

* The overall colour tone is not the same in the Cycles render, despite compositing initially being exactly the same. After increasing the blue tint in the mid range, it was better, but still not as I intended.

* Of course there is a trade-off between Eevee and Cycles. The much longer render looks more detailed and the shadows and reflections are more realistic.

* The wall/building texture is more generally detailed looking in Cycles (despite losing some quality dues to reduced samples)

* the ground texture has too much reflection / brightness to it and not very nice.

* The blurring for the DOF effect is better in Cycles.

* Fog / Volumetrics is much easier to set up and faster to render in Eevee.

* The Fog effect looks better in Cycles

* There was a sacrifice of some quality when rendering with Cycles. As noted above, the extremely long render time meant cutting back on samples

*** The MOST TELLING thing is that after so many test renders in Cycles (including just rendering the box selected problem areas with reduced samples), I still did not have the lights and colour right for the interior and figure, but after all that time I do not want to do another render. Maybe its my patience that's wearing thin... Do other people get to this point and power through? Or do they say "that's close enough" and call it a day on a project?