Blender 2.62 Cycles

Cycles is Blender’s new render engine, more based on the actual physics of light than Blender’s internal render engine. The goal is to produce more realistic lighting. The new cycles render engine is automatically enabled in Blender 2.6. The purpose of this tutorial is to compare the two. In particular, the Material and World settings have significantly changed, radically enough so you won’t recognize it. Also, the Render settings have new panels, Integrator and Film, that are specific to Cycles. Cycles is still in the development stages, with many settings still either experimental or not implemented.

I’ll point out those as we go. Also, since the Cycles rendering is based on nodes, I will give you a gentle introduction to how Cycles interacts with nodes, in particular with material nodes, now called Shaders.