Cycles | Better Default Settings for 2.8
Altough it clearly isn't, Cycles is often considered to be a slow renderer by people unfamiliar or new to it. In my opinion the main reason for this are the way too high default settings. Also having better default settings makes live easier for educational institutions because you don't have to change the settings for every student individually (chaning default settings in schools/universities isn't a good Idea because student's will get confused by Blender being "different" from their Blender at home etc...)
My proposal is to change the default settings as described below:
- ( Clamp Indirect: 0.0 → 5.0)
Discussable - I am not a fan of clamping in general, but a value of 5.0 might be okay for most scenes
- Caustics (Reflective & Refractive): On → Off
As they are rarely needed in most scenes (especially for beginners on which the default settings are meant for) and are the main source of fireflies.
- Filter Glossy: 0.0 → 0.2
This cleans some fireflies in case you need caustics and without Metropolis Light Transport / Bidir. PT, Cycles can't produce sharp caustics (that would require this setting to be 0.0) in acceptable rendertimes anyway.
- Bounces Max/Min: 12/3 → 6/2
12 is just ridiculously high and will increase rendertimes unnecessarily. 6/2 or even 4/2 will work for most scenes. If you want to render some jewelery etc. that would require so many GI Bounces, you can set it manually.
- Diffuse Bounces: 4 → 2
Same reason as above
- Geometry - Step Size: 0.1 → 0.25
Makes rendering Volumes much faster with almost no visual difference.
- CUDA/OpenCL & GPU Rendering enabled by default
Or is there a technical reason not to do this? In this case ignore this one.
This numbers are just what I think works for the largest range of scenarios. My main point is: Consider revisiting Cycles Default settings for Blender 2.8
6 Comments
More or less agreed except for changing default device to GPU.
In blender 4.4.3 the default setting of cycles could be improve. It should be fast by default with the possibility to increase quality if need and depending on the GPU you have.
light paths bounces no longer has a min max value, just a single value.
I just wanted to address this:
That's not the case if the students are taught to create their own startup.blend files and take them with them (USB drive, Dropbox, etc) for use at home.
@Jason van Gumster: You are right, but it's a hurdle - you get the point. Having better defaults can only beneficial for a software :)
@Jason van Gumster:
On the one hand, you're right, you can always teach such things.
But on the other hand, it basically means that you also teach your student a modified Blender which isn't normal. It kind of locks them in a bubble.
And even tho you can teach them everything about the changes to do and why, at the end of the day it makes a time consuming obscure software manipulating to teach just in order to get a more functional Blender instead of teaching them more interesting things like modeling, texturing, animating, ... While Blender could have those settings by default.