At 5:41 he switches to the cycles rendering engine and this is where things stop for me. I have openSuSE 13.1 installed on a 64bit machine and installed the blender package with zypper. The version I received is 2.67b. The dropdown in the top middle of the screen has “Blender Render” and “Blender Game” but not “Cycles Render” like in the video. Digging a bit deeper there is a File > User Preferences window that has a tab “Addons”. If you click on the “Categories” > “Enabled” a box shows up for “Missing script files” “cycles”.
From the blender docs I get that you need either an NVIDIA or an AMD/ATI card with proprietary drivers installed, otherwise it’s not going to work. Second thing is, that I get the impression that the cycles render engine is still experimental.
All in all, IMHO you would be better of in the blender forums.
Blender 2.69 is available from the graphics: repo. See software.opensuse.org: , tick “Show other versions”, select your openSUSE version, tick “Show unstable versions”. Installing right now, will report whether the cycles renderer is available.
> Hi,
> It is better to use the latest blender from the blender site. Right now
> it is 2.69. You download it and unpack and ready to use.
>
> http://www.blender.org/download/
That’s what I do, and I highly recommend it. Cycles will work with CPU
rendering (it doesn’t require an nVidia or other high-end video card to
work), but it will render fairly slowly.
Using gpu with cycles requires a high-end video card or a least you have two video
cards one dedicated for blender rendering. In my case my machine has only one slot for video card
and the video card I have is not powerful enough. I can use the gpu for rendering but slower and opening
another application is slow. I am using cpu and decent enough to render faster than my gpu on my core i7
with 10GB ram machine.
> Using gpu with cycles requires a high-end video card or a least you have
> two video cards one dedicated for blender rendering. In my case my
> machine has only one slot for video card and the video card I have is
> not powerful enough. I can use the gpu for rendering but slower and
> opening another application is slow. I am using cpu and decent enough to
> render faster than my gpu on my core i7 with 10GB ram machine.
Well, it requires a moderately powered nVidia card - I don’t think CUDA
(as I recall, that’s what it uses) is supported on anything else on Linux
at this point.
But the comparison between CPU and GPU rendering is pretty astonishing.
I do rendering on an i7 laptop as well, and what I’ve seen of GPU
rendering in videos (since I don’t have the gear myself yet), it’s much,
much quicker - which makes sense, given what’s going on in the renderer
(ie, raytracing - computationally heavy calculations).
That’s good to hear. Perhaps your machines graphic card is far better than what I have.
My graphic card is an nvidia GeForce GT640, 128-bit, 2048 memory, CUDA cores 384. I know it is really not meant for 3d rendering
but I choose this one because it has no problem in linux. My desktop is core i7 with 10GB ram.
today after I read your post I tested one of my interior blend files with a size on 177MB.
With GPU, It took 5 minutes 40 seconds, while using CPU it took only 2 minutes and 17 seconds both using 100 samples.
> hendersj;2614316 Wrote:
>> On Sat, 04 Jan 2014 21:56:02 +0000, conram wrote:
>>
>> But the comparison between CPU and GPU rendering is pretty astonishing.
>> I do rendering on an i7 laptop as well, and what I’ve seen of GPU
>> rendering in videos (since I don’t have the gear myself yet), it’s
>> much,
>> much quicker - which makes sense, given what’s going on in the renderer
>> (ie, raytracing - computationally heavy calculations).
>>
>> Jim –
>> Jim Henderson openSUSE Forums Administrator Forum Use Terms &
>> Conditions at ‘openSUSE Forums FAQ’ (http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C)
>
> That’s good to hear. Perhaps your machines graphic card is far better
> than what I have.
I actually am not using GPU rendering - I’ve seen demonstrations of it
being done, and middle of the road cards seem to do well.
> My graphic card is an nvidia GeForce GT640, 128-bit, 2048 memory, CUDA
> cores 384. I know it is really not meant for 3d rendering but I choose
> this one because it has no problem in linux. My desktop is core i7 with
> 10GB ram.
> today after I read your post I tested one of my interior blend files
> with a size on 177MB.
> With GPU, It took 5 minutes 40 seconds, while using CPU it took only 2
> minutes and 17 seconds both using 100 samples.
That sounds like a config issue to me - you might ask on the blender
mailing lists for information about configuring it, because you should be
seeing nearly instantaneous rendering.
There’s a reason that GPUs are the “hot new thing” in computational tasks
they’re very good at crunching the numbers. That you’re getting such a
poor render time tells me there’s something not right in the setup.
> Hi Jim,
> This is the specs, however this machine’s drive is dying:(
> http://paste.opensuse.org/21982125
>
> If you find really something wrong with the setup please make a comment
> and I will raise the question again in a blender forum.
Those specs (i7 + 10 GB of RAM is what I see) should be more than
adequate, and as I recall, the nVidia card you said you’re using should
be adaquate to the task of rendering with Cycles. I’d definitely ask for
more help in the blender forum.
If you ask there, please post the link to the post here, because I’d be
interested in following along with the discussion.
odd but seems like something to expect HP to do these days. Their builds are very sloppy these days. Used to be HP was the word on guilty. Hewlett and Packard must be spinning in their graves.