The organization. The Blender Foundation (2002) is an independent public benefit organization. Its spin-off corporation Blender Institute (2007) hosts the foundation’s offices and currently employs 24 people who work on the Blender software and creative projects to validate and test Blender. Blender comes with a ray-trace based production render engine called Cycles. The Cycles render engine can handle unidirectional path tracing, multi-core CPU rendering, multi-GPU support, and unified rendering for CPU and GPU.

Even with the release of Blender 2.9, not much has changed in terms of rendering capability. Blender still comes with three engines: Workbench, Eevee, and Cycles. Of course, they are great for what they are and can get the job done, but it’s important not to limit yourself to only what is included right out of the box; there are also several free third-party engines you can use in Blender. Keep reading to find out what independent rendering options are currently available for Blender to help you decide which one is worth giving a try.

Contents

• Blender’s Internal Rendering Engines
• Third-Party Rendering Engines for Blender

Blender’s Internal Rendering Engines

We’ve previously talked in detail about Blender’s internal engines, but to better understand how third-party renderers stack up here, it’s important to look again at what Workbench, Cycles, and Eevee can do.

Workbench

Originally known as Blender Render, Workbench is the software’s original engine, optimized for the fastest, most graphically simplistic rendering during the modeling and test animation process.

Not recommended for use as a final rendering engine, it can be used to display your work while modeling in the 3D viewport. When you need to show your client a basic progress report on where the scene, animation, or rig setup is in terms of completion, Workbench is a good option.

Cycles

The oldest and most used of the three internal Blender engines, Cycles is a physically-based, unbiased path tracing rendering solution for Blender. It can use either your machine’s CPU or GPU to produce beautiful final scenes and animations.

Cycles’ main characteristic is its path tracing capabilities. Path tracing is an algorithmic process that renders imagery by simulating how light reflects on an object. The algorithm traces its light paths from the camera as opposed to from the light source, making it a sort of “backwards” path tracing engine.

Rendering in Cycles uses samples (a single ray of light that is being sent from a pixel to the camera) to generate the operations in a single scene. In order to account for every possible light path that potentially exists within a scene, multiple samples are necessary to provide a better result.

The more samples you have, the higher the quality of your scene, but also the more time it takes.

Spring by Blender Animation Studio

Eevee

Eevee (short for Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine) is powered by similar code used for the Unreal Engine. While it can’t compete with Cycles’ visual capacity, its unmatched speed is where it shines.

This physically-based engine can be used not only as a renderer, but also in real time for creating physically based rendering (PBR) and procedurally textured assets, yielding impressive, immediate results in Blender’s viewport.

It also shares the same node-based material (most notably, the Principled BSDF material) system available in the Cycles engine, and it can work with pre-existing scenes made in Blender with Cycles in mind.

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Biased vs. Unbiased Rendering Engines

Cycles always seems to be the darling of the Blender rendering engine family, given its ability to achieve beautiful, realistic results, but it comes with its own set of drawbacks.

To achieve those results, some computation restrictions are implemented to reduce rendering times, such as faking light bounces and sacrificing accuracy and detail. This designates Cycles as a “biased” renderer.

Eagle-eyed designers will only really notice these compromises when the calculations are extremely complex, like dark environments with a single light source cascading through a window, for example.

In these instances, it’s recommended for more sophisticated users to rely on an “unbiased” engine such as the next renderer on this list. Now with the basics out of the way, let’s talk about available third-party rendering engines for Blender.

Third-Party Rendering Engines for Blender

LuxCoreRender

Though seemingly obscure to most Blender users, LuxCoreRender is one of the most capable open-source rendering engines on our list.

LuxCoreRender is what is known as an unbiased renderer, meaning that it takes absolutely no shortcuts in its calculations of tracing rays. This type of engine often produces exceptional render quality; of course, with the caveat that rendering speed is compromised. With more accuracy, but longer rendering times, you will notice the difference in quality where caustics are visible, like a swimming pool or a close-up of a glass on a table.

by Charles Nandeya Ehouman (Sharlybg)

OctaneRender

OTOY’s OctaneRender is a very fast, unbiased GPU-oriented renderer. While it’s a free standalone engine, its main downside is that it’s limited to using only one GPU, even if your machine carries multiple.

Though full integration is possible with real-time viewport rendering, it can only be utilized with a custom Blender build that comes with the installer. Because of this limitation, you can’t use OctaneRender in other Blender alpha / beta builds, but the custom build is regularly updated by the developers.

Lastly, OctaneRender isn’t compatible with Cycles’ materials and texture nodes as it has its own. A Cycles-to-Octane material converter is available, but it has not yet been updated to the latest available versions of Blender.

Yamkino House by Jan Morek

Radeon ProRender

AMD offers Blender users Radeon ProRender, a free path tracing rendering engine. Though ProRender is fairly new and its features may not be as extensive as render engines like LuxCoreRender, it’s an excellent, easy-to-use rendering engine that’s well-integrated with Blender’s UI.

ProRender works with Apple’s metal graphics library, which Cycles doesn’t. This can speed up render times in Blender specifically for MacOS users.

With ProRender, you also get a real-time Blender viewport but can’t use Cycles’ material and textures without converting them to ProRender modes; this isn’t too difficult as a material converter comes with the engine. ProRender also provides a robust and easy-to-use material library.

by Yohsuke Nakano

Appleseed

Last updated in 2019, Appleseed is another lesser-known, open-source engine that has plugins for Maya and 3DS Max as well as Blender. Offering both biased and unbiased rendering, Appleseed has a greater capacity for providing detailed caustics than Blender’s internal engines and the power to deliver beautiful results.

Built by a small, international team of talented volunteers from the animation and VFX industry, Appleseed has the potential to become a great engine. Its biggest drawbacks are not having macOS integration for Blender and relying on CPU use only, which makes it rather useless if your system carries a capable GPU.

Blender Engine Fire

Also, while Appleseed has real-time rendering capability for Blender’s viewport, it doesn’t work with Cycles’ material and texture nodes as it has its own.

Ajax bust by Torolf Sauermann (jotero), render by Juan Carlos Gutiérrez

Yafaray

Long before Cycles, Yafaray was well-established as a rendering option for Blender. Its name, originally called YafRay, stands for “Yet Another Free Ray Tracer.” It still works relatively well as when it was launched, even though it’s the most esoteric and obscure of all the renderers listed here — not to mention it hasn’t been updated since Blender version 2.79.

Considering its age, Yafaray still offers many excellent rendering techniques, with Blender users continuing to be its most popular fanbase. As the oldest rendering engine on this list, its age certainly shows given its lack of basic features that most users would consider essential nowadays. Real-time viewing isn’t supported in the viewport (you will need to rely on an active Image Editor), and it doesn’t work with Cycle’s material and texture nodes as it has its own features and textures.

The Blender Game Engine is a discontinued component of Blender, a free and open-source 3D production suite, used for making real-time interactive content. The game engine was written from scratch in C++ as a mostly independent component, and includes support for features such as Python scripting and OpenAL 3D sound.

History[edit]

Erwin Coumans and Gino van den Bergen developed the Blender Game Engine in 2000. The goal was to create a marketable commercial product to easily create games and other interactive content, in an artist-friendly way. These games could run either as stand-alone applications, or embedded in a webpage using a special plugin that was eventually discontinued, as the inability to sandbox Python aroused security concerns, though there was a later effort to revive it (an updated alpha version for Internet Explorer, and Firefox and COLLADA support was considered). Another plugin has surfaced named Burster, which enables secure embedded gameplay on websites, with sandboxing and encryption support.

Key code in the physics library (SUMO) did not become open-source when the rest of Blender did, which prevented the game engine from functioning until version 2.37a.

Blender 2.41 showcased a version that was almost entirely devoted to the game engine; audio was supported.

Version 2.42 showed several significant new features, including integration of the Bullet rigid-body dynamics library.

A new system for integration of GLSL shaders and soft-body physics was added in the 2.48 release to help bring the game engine back in line with modern game engines. Like Blender, it uses OpenGL, a cross-platform graphics layer, to communicate with graphics hardware.

During the 2010 Google Summer of Code, the open-source navigation mesh construction and pathfinding libraries Recast and Detour were integrated; the work was merged to trunk in 2011. Audaspace was coded as well to provide a Python handle for sound control. This library uses OpenAL or SDL as a backend.

Blender Engine Fire

Features[edit]

The Blender Game Engine uses a system of graphical 'logic bricks' (a combination of 'sensors', 'controllers' and 'actuators') to control the movement and display of objects. The game engine can also be extended via a set of Python bindings.

• Graphical logic editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
• Collision detection and dynamics simulation now support Bullet Physics Library. Bullet is an open-source collision detection and rigid body dynamics library developed for PlayStation 3
• Shape types: Convex polyhedron, box, sphere, cone, cylinder, capsule, compound, and static triangle mesh with auto deactivation mode
• Discrete collision detection for rigid body simulation
• Support for in-game activation of dynamic constraints
• Full support for vehicle dynamics, including spring reactions, stiffness, damping, tire friction etc.
• Python scripting API for sophisticated control and AI, fully defined advanced game logic
• Support all OpenGL lighting modes, including transparencies, Animated and reflection-mapped textures
• Support for multimaterials, multitexture and texture blending modes, per-pixel lighting, dynamic lighting, mapping modes, GLSL Vertex Paint texture blending, toon shading, animated materials, support for normal and parallax mapping
• Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing
• Audio, using the SDL toolkit
• Multi-layering of Scenes for overlay interfaces.

Future roadmap[edit]

Ton Roosendaal has stated^[2] that the future of the Blender Game Engine will integrate the system into Blender as an 'Interaction Mode' for game prototypes, architectural walkthroughs and scientific simulators. Blender developer Martijn Berger stated that 'The sequencer and game engine are in serious danger of removal, if we cannot come up with a good solution during the 2.8 project.'^[3]

On the 16th of April 2018 Blender Game Engine was removed from Blender ahead of 2.8's launch.^[4] Audio interface for mac usb.

Blender is working to have a good support for external game engines like Godot, Armory3D and Blend4Web.^[5]

UPBGE[edit]

UPBGE (Uchronia Project Blender Game Engine) is a fork of Blender created by Tristan Porteries and some friends in September 2015. It is an independent branch with the aim of cleaning up and improving the official Blender Game Engine code, experimenting with new features, and implementing forgotten features that currently exist but have not been merged with the official Blender trunk. UPBGE Blender builds can be downloaded from the upbge.org website. As of late 2017, the UPBGE team is integrating their code with the unreleased 2.8 version of Blender and the team's intention is to make use of the new real-time physically based renderer in Blender 2.8 which is called Eevee. There are ongoing discussions about the UPBGE code becoming part of a future official Blender release.

Gallery[edit]

• Blender Game Engine 2.42 screenshot

• Blender Game Engine 2.42 screenshot

• Blender GLSL shader node editor 2.42 screenshot

• Logic Bricks and Python Scripting

Notable games[edit]

• Fly In The House^[6]

See also[edit]

• Bullet (software), Game Blender's Physics engine
• Blend4Web, Blender-based engine for online games
• Verge3D, Blender-based WebGL framework

References[edit]

1. ^'Blender 2.79 Release Index'. Blender.org. 11 September 2017. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
2. ^'Blender roadmap – 2.7, 2.8 and beyond'. Blender. Retrieved 1 March 2014.
3. ^'2.8 project developer kickoff meeting notes'. Blender. Retrieved 12 November 2015.
4. ^'rB159806140fd3'. developer.blender.org. Retrieved 18 April 2018.
5. ^'[Bf-committers] Blender 2.8 - realtime and interactive 3d'.
6. ^https://www.indiedb.com/games/fly-in-the-house

External links[edit]

• Official website