E-Cycles Render Engine

Focus on your Art

The fastest and easiest photorealistic render engine for Blender. 100% compatible with the Cycles render engine. You can use all your materials and add-ons while rendering on average 2x faster out of the box with NVidia GPUs. Features state of the art denoising technology, a streamlined UI for ease of use and fast workflows, Lightgroups in the viewport for instant feedback of lighting changes, and much more.

33% off on the Pro versions during the support pause until 14th of July 2021. Reduction is already applied!

You can get E-Cycles 7 now with up to 3x faster rendering compared to Cycles X!

Test builds are available in all variants (including the $1 demo) for Windows and Linux!!!

Rendering the Chocofur interior scene 03 with E-Cycles 7 and a single RTX 3090 would be currently equivalent to using Cycles X with 3x RTX 3090!

Coupons for 2019 and 2020 users: if you are upgrading from a previous E-Cycles version, you can enter the coupon code EC-SecondYear during checkout to get E-Cycles 2021 for $75 instead of $149 and E-Cycles RTX 2021 for $149 instead of $299. Please be sure to be logged-in and to use a private window for the coupon to work.

New!!! E-Cycles 2021.1 update available for 2.93 and 3.0 with:

• Faster rendering
• Completely rewritten AI-Denoiser with even higher quality and faster denoising
• SSAA available for final render for very crisp details.
• Light groups denoising
• New option: denoise all passes, especially usefull when saving as multi-layer EXR for compositing in third party tools
• New compatibility mode to have the same defaults as Blender, while E-Cycles now defaults to high quality and performance settings
• New portal creation tool for optimal rendering quality and faster scene setup.

The Distant World 2 trailer by Tim Barton was rendered 100% in E-Cycles:

You can see more examples on Tim Barton’s Artstation page!

Premiere lift group (a company that works with Zaha Hadid and Porsche, among others) switched from Unreal Engine to E-Cycles for all their still image renders and animations.

See more renders on their website!

iMeshh, a store known for their extremely high quality assets, have also switched entirely to E-Cycles. Their team have made a great video about the features that helped them most in their workflow:

Main features

• 100% compatible with Cycles
• render on average 2x faster on NVidia GPUs
• state of the art denoising technology
• streamlined UI for ease of use and fast workflows
• Light Groups in the viewport for instant feedback on changes to your lighting setup
• SSAA in the viewport for crisp textures and detail-rich denoising
• access to both professional-grade stability and bleeding edge features to fit the needs of every project: support for Long Term Support releases, stable releases and master builds.
• 30 days money back guarantee. It works as advertised or you get your money back!
• works on Windows and Linux (E-Cycles 2021 for Mac v2.92 is available here).

E-Cycles 2021 – February update – New features and improvements:

1. highly optimized viewport rendering for complex scenes. You can see the new viewport in action – along with a lot of other new features showcased – in a heavy architectural visualization scene by the iMeshh team in this video:
2. reworked quick settings panel: all viewport options are now directly accessible in the viewport itself, making them faster to access and leaving room for extra options in the quick settings – for example, to easily scale the resolution of your image,
3. improved quality for OptiX denoising,
4. better defaults out of the box: new scenes will now default to Cycles with GPU rendering. The standard version of E-Cycles will use CUDA by default, while E-Cycles RTX will use OptiX by default. Please ensure you haven’t set the device type yourself if you want to use these new defaults and save time. If you’re using CPU or OpenCL, you can simply switch to this and save your preferences!
5. for those who prefer to work with the compositor version of light groups, it will now update when tweaking the light groups values, even if no compositor window is opened. You can now easily see the effect of your changes. The best way is still to use viewport light groups though, as it’s real time,
6. Physical Glare is now available as a new mode of the glare node. It is based on the physical properties of the human eye, and gives very high quality results!
7. higher noise/signal ratio in many standard archviz scenarios for even faster rendering using less samples,
8. some very useful add-ons are now activated by default like sun-position to allow for easy use of the new sky texture based on time and location for example,
9. a huge load of polishing, bug fixing and typo clean-ups to make the user experience even better!

E-Cycles Render Engine gives you:

Extremely fast rendering, right out of the box

Thanks to code optimizations, rendering with NVidia GPUs and E-Cycles is equivalent to doubling the number of GPUs in your machine, on average.

What’s more, thanks to a new option called “Persistent Data”, for fly-through animations where only the camera moves, E-Cycles only needs to do the pre-processing step once for all frames. In the example above, rendering takes just 3 seconds per frame on a single GPU. In this case, the persistent data option saves 7 seconds of pre-processing per frame.

State of the art denoising technique

E-Cycles AI-Denoiser requires between 4 and 10 times less samples than other AI-based denoisers to get a similar level of quality.

Using less samples for the same quality means a proportional speed increase for your renders – that’s on top of the ‘regular’ speed increase E-Cycles offers on NVidia cards. For comparable image quality, with both the regular speed increase and the new AI-Denoiser, you can get up to 25x faster rendering. And it’s a one click setup!

Comparison of Cycles with OpenImageDenoise (left, 40 seconds render time) and E-Cycles with its AI-Denoiser (right, 9 seconds render time) by Marvin Luebke

 

100% compatibility with Cycles materials and add-ons

Most render engines require you to convert your materials, and even then, they’re mostly incompatible with add-ons that contain assets. With E-Cycles, you can focus on your art and start creating the second you start the program.

All your existing scenes, assets (e.g. E-Cycles + TerraScape) and add-ons ( e.g. E-Cycles + Graswald) will work out of the box!

2 engines in 1: Render Profiles for easy usage and 3-click optimizations

Switching between real time render engines and path tracers is time consuming and prone to errors. For producing high quality fly-through animations, E-Cycles can match the render speed of the most common real time render engines, while offering better quality and a faster scene setup.

For still images, there’s no need to convert all your materials and assets to export to a path tracing engine – just simply select a higher quality preset.

Premiere lift group (a company that works with Zaha Hadid and Porsche, among others) switched from Unreal Engine to E-Cycles for their still image renders and animations.

Animations by Ryan Plunkett at Premier Lift Group. More renders are available on their website, all made with E-Cycles.

Light Groups in the viewport for a real time lighting setup

When you tweak lights in the viewport, it will restart at 0 samples by default each time you change a parameter. But when using E-Cycles and light groups, you can tweak your lighting setup while the viewport continues to render, offering you very fast, high quality previews.

Optimized viewport rendering

Viewport rendering in E-Cycles has been improved and optimized a lot. Many archviz scenes will render in near real time and converge very quickly, letting you see the smallest details at an unmatched speed.

Smart Clay and AO presets

For even faster rendering and fast previews of your geometry and lighting, E-Cycles offers 2 new types of rendering kernels: AO and Clay. Both presets will also automatically setup material overrides for you and then switch to those kernels, for up to 4x faster rendering – on top of the 2x base speed increase – for up to 8x faster rendering.

New in E-Cycles 2021: SSAA for crisp textures and detail-rich denoising

Viewport denoising is awesome, but there are times when it washes out the fine details in textures, hair and dark areas. With SSAA, E-Cycles preserves more details and renders faster at a comparable sample count.

Comparison of viewport outputs in E-Cycles with SSAA off and on after 10 seconds of rendering.