Since its first release decades ago, Blender has proved to be a worthy competitor to paid software for creating 3D projects, carving itself a considerable chunk of the current market. There are no more debates about its quality; it is considered a great tool for hard-surface modeling and procedural object creation with Geometry Nodes. It has found its way into the pipelines of game developers and visual effects studios. Blender was even used to create an Oscar-winning animated movie! However, as with any large, multifunctional piece of software, there is always a question about which of its parts are best. In this article, we’ll take a look at Blender’s native rendering engines, Cycles and EEVEE. Can they compete with commercial alternatives?
Cycles: The Power of Ray Tracing
The best thing about Blender is that you can achieve photorealistic results in-engine, without purchasing any engine addons. Cycles is an unbiased path-tracing engine that works to simulate the realistic behavior of light. It can provide renders on par with Corona and V-Ray in quality and speed, both with CPU, but especially with GPU.
Cycle has versatile settings, allowing it to accelerate rendering without a noticeable loss of quality. There are options for setting a desired number of samples or the number of paths to be traced per pixel of a final image. It also includes Adaptive Sampling, which adjusts the number of paths based on the noise threshold. It is possible to control the number of bounces each light ray makes in a scene through the Max Bounce option, which can be set differently for diffuse, glossy, transmission, volume, and transparent rays.
Cycles is also a good fit for cinematographic workflows, supporting render passes, filmic filters, motion blur effects, and several denoisers. It’s easy to use Cycles together with Blender’s Compositor to output complete movies with color correction and visual effects applied through specialised nodes. Cycles is also useful in architectural visualisation, thanks to caustics and native PBR material support, making it easy to transfer existing projects into Blender without data loss. In addition, Cycles is perfectly suited for independent animation projects; it’s as flexible as V-Ray, faster than Arnold, and completely free (as opposed to Redshift). Each year, more new creators are raised by Blender and Cycles, bringing this knowledge to their workplaces in the animation, film, and game development industries.
EEVEE: Speed and Quality Balance
If Cycles is such a good rendering engine, why does Blender come with another one? The main reason is rendering speed. Path tracers take a long time to remove noise even using a GPU; as we begin lowering the number of bounces and turning off demanding effects, we lose the desired quality. Real-time biased rendering engines were created for the sole purpose of fast rendering with acceptable results, and EEVEE is one of these.
When determining what to visualize, EEVEE does not calculate the paths of light rays; instead, it checks what surfaces are visible to the camera and estimates light interactions with only these, in a process called rasterization. This makes EEVEE perfect for interactive rendering; any changes occurring in the scene will immediately show on render. EEVEE offers full PBR support and uses the same material nodes as Cycles, making them interchangeable in early stages of project development.
Sacrifices have to be made to achieve this speed, however; EEVEE lags behind Cycles when it comes to supported features. It only supports a limited number of geometry nodes and custom attributes for the materials. Lights in a scene can only be one color, their sizes don’t affect the shape of shadows, and the number of light probe objects in a scene is limited. The appearance of BSDF materials may differ between EEVEE and Cycles, but when it comes to photorealism, there’s simply no Cycles vs EEVEE contest. EEVEE's output can be made more realistic by increasing rendering times, but that goes against the main purpose of its speed, and the effects will still be less realistic approximations compared to unbiased rendering engines.
However, not everything always needs to be photorealistic. The Oscar-winning movie mentioned at the start of this article? 2024’s "Flow", made by a small Latvian studio, was fully made in Blender and rendered in EEVEE. Despite EEVEE's apparent shortcomings, the final result is stunningly beautiful. It’s not about what a tool can or cannot do, but how to apply its biggest advantages to a project. EEVEE is a great tool for stylized animations, and its results have been proven in both smaller and large-scale projects.
A Secret Third Option
Did you know there’s another rendering engine in Blender besides Cycles and EEVEE? This engine is Workbench, and it is used in viewport to show the current scene being worked on. Its main uses are as a utility tool for the 3D artist and as a main renderer for modeling, animation, and geometry generation. However, it can be also used as the rendering engine for final renders in very specific situations.
This is a bit of a joke, of course. Workbench can’t compare to either EEVEE or Cycles in versatility or performance. And of these two, which should you choose for rendering in Blender? The answer is both. EEVEE and Cycles each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Learn Cycles to render complicated photorealistic scenes, and learn EEVEE for fast workflow. You can also try tweaking EEVEE to achieve smoother realistic results and experiment with Cycles to stylize the output. The beauty of Blender is that you can seamlessly switch between both engines at any time.
