What is Cycles 4D?
Cycles is a render engine developed for the open source 3D application Blender. The engine itself is separate from Blender and being open-source can be used in any other 3D application which has a suitable bridge to it.
Important notice
it is important to realise that the engine is developed by the Blender Foundation and not Insydium. We have developed a bridge to it from Cinema 4D. When you buy Cycles 4D, you are NOT purchasing Cycles; that is free and is included in Blender itself. There is also a standalone version for which the source code can be downloaded and compiled. Nor have we licensed Cycles from the Blender Foundation; anyone is free to produce a bridge to Cycles from Cinema 4D if they wish.
What is Cycles?
Cycles is a render engine with a number of features, including:
- path tracing unbiased renderer
- CPU- or GPU-based rendering, including multiple GPU support (note: full support for CUDA, partial support for OpenCL)
- fast interactive preview render
- node-based material system
- large library of shader nodes
Cycles 4D
Cycles 4D acts as a bridge between Cycles and Cinema 4D. Once the Cycles render engine is selected within Cinema, rendering to viewport or picture viewer is seamless and works exactly as if using Cinema's inbuilt renderer.
In addition Cycles 4D adds additional support for X-Particles so that particles can be rendered easily with Cycles 4D.
More information
There is a great deal of information about Cycles on the web. Since Cycles 4D supports almost all features of Cycles, which work in exactly the same way as they do in Blender, it is easy to follow tutorials originally written for use with Blender. Here are some links:
Blender home site - Rendering
Blender home site - Cycles reference manual
Blender 2.8 - Cycles release notes
The Cycles Shader Encyclopedia
Blender Artists forum - Creating materials
chocofur.com - Creating materials
Blender Guru - How to get rid of 'fireflies' in your renders
And there are many more if you search for 'blender cycles' on Google.
