A question that we often got from our readers is that Cycles is indeed the best solution for architectural interiors with Blender. Should you stick with Blender’s default render or look somewhere else to faster speeds? In the past, we had limited options regarding external renders to work with Blender. Today the number of options to render is much more significant with commercial and FOSS alternatives to Cycles.
One of those options is LuxCore that delivers some impressive lighting and shaders for interiors. If you are an experienced artist that still remembers LuxCore from the time it was still LuxRender, you probably recall that render speeds were not a highlight.
Things are much faster with recent developments of LuxCore and support for modern technologies such as OptiX on RTX cards. Do you want to see a quick comparison between Cycles and LuxCore? In a recent post at the Blender artists forums, we can watch a video produced by artist Charles Nandeya showing the same scene rendered with Cycles and LuxCore.
(Click to enlarge)
Here is the video with the render.
As you can see from the video, we get some impressive render times with the LuxCore light cache. The scene has lots of details to stress, even high-end GPUs with lots of glass, glossy surfaces, and complex geometry.
I wonder how it would compare with E-Cycles?
Nevertheless, it is impressive to see such render speed gains with LuxCore.
It’s an interesting comparison, I am in the middle of learning LuxCore as my Blender engine (I currently use Blender for all my 3D modeling etc.) but use Keyshot for rendering engine as opposed to cycles.
The glass feels more substantial in the LuxCore versions, but doesn’t necessarily feel ‘off’ in the cycles version – just seems to lack that ‘thickness’. The odd thing to me is how different the white wall with the ‘ball’ pattern looks from each one.