If you were to remove the labels, we couldn't tell which render engine was used. Lumen definitely wins since less time rendering allows more time iterating. Also you can color manage and post-process Lumen to give you the "look" that you desire.
Cycle is better for Animation as there is no artifacts happening or extra filters like motion blow that you can add on + it is fast the only issue it is the Ambient oclusion and the shadows seams soft.
Out of the 3, when comparing them, cycles is the best, but in most real world use-cases the time saving Lumen provides far outweighs most of the benefits of Cycles and other renderers. For a full CG scene, Lumen absolutely wins due to efficiency alone; in most use-cases It'll look perfectly adequate to most viewers without a comparison. For perspective, you could render around 48 different scenes with Lumen in the same time it takes cycles to render one.
i think so, however, in my case that i know nothing about ue, i'd need spend time trying to setup everything as it is in blender, baking normals, textures, etc, moving everything to unreal, then redoing the nodes for each assets, i think if the render takes in this case 5,5h to render in cycles, i'd probably take more time doing what i mentioned before, but! i'd be a very good option for whoever knows how to do that in ue already ( which i'll learn lol )
@@deepfakescoverychannel6710blender isn't a game engine like unreal. You can't way one I better than the other because they're intended for different use cases.
I agree In Gaming when we are in control we want to see everything clear like a pilote but for estethic cinematic scenes motion blur and depth of field are useful to guide the focus of a big scene on one subject. So depends of the objectif @@rahuldey8539
@@rahuldey8539Yes, we make such much effort and spend so much money to get very high FPS for motion clarity, only to fuck it all up again with this disgusting motion blur and other shit like that. If I want to play with motionblur I would just cap my FPS at 30. 😂
Man! The amount of times I've had such blissful dreams of Blender and Epic Games joining hands and somehow integrating the basic fundamental modeling tools from Blender to Unreal and Integrating Unreal's Lumen rendering engine into Blender... GENUINELY both softwares would be on a whole another level compared to the competition!
Technically, Eevee is the early fork of the UE5's render engine with an accent on image quality over render time, so it shares many aspects with Lumen.
@@shoopdawhoop Well technically Blender is 100 % open source free not quite like unreal or Lumen so more like creating bridges to jumb easy between the softwares because even the coding luanguages are different &cie
@@ahmedouardani2370 Technically, you are wrong. Unreal is open source (you can change and build the engine, also it's the only way to make dedicated servers like MMO). Both Unreal and Blender written on C++, so language is the same. Blender python is only for addons (and it's one of the worst things they made, because python is slow as hell).
Great comparison, however I would also argue that some of these scenes could have been made more efficient in cycles - it would be interesting to compare lower sample counts, there are so many settings in both cycles and lumen that this doesn't quite tell the whole story!
Path Tracer also has a ton of settings, you can't compare it all that well. What you definetly can say though, is Lumen is a LOT more efficient than any other of the options, and Cycles allows you for the highest fidelity
7 місяців тому+2
Yeah I was going to say the same, most of the scenes rendered in Cycles shoudn't take as much as shown here. Also, I'm feeling like the light sources are kept behind the glass objects in some interior scenes, this will introduce a lot of noise...
If you use ue5 path tracer correctly (the guy in the didn’t) it can achieve exact results or even more realistic than cycles and render in a shorter time
quality: cycles time saving: lumen and for most cases time is very important but we should consider the time for preparing the scene in UE to use lumen. SO in my opinion for long animations I'll definitely use lumen but for shorter ones I'll stick to cycles or eevee next soon :D
Side by side they all looked fairly similar, but watching them back to back made it obvious how much better the Blender renders look than even the UE5 pathtracing.
In most cases I prefer cycles. In every case, I still prefer Mantra, Arnold, Karma, or Redshift. UE Lumen is quite impressive but it doesn't manage the highlights or shadows well enough, a lot detail lost in the sauce
There are sometimes when Cycles definitely shines through displaying superior detail, but it's nothing short of impressive what Lumen can do in a _fraction_ of the time.
Looks like a little saturation and lowing the middle on lumans will bring things to balance with cycles. The only thing that makes me hesitate in the past is knowing that baking textures are involved. But now that my Uvs are correct and my pipeline already includes substance painter, I’m becoming more and more tempted to learn this pipeline.
watching this was VERY interesting to me. At so many examples you are like: Damn, the colours with blender are so on point and everything looks so perfectly crisp, but then (for example the wood at the shelf example) the unreal ones look better. Also the saturation of the colours seems to be better at blender, except for the books! Nice comparision!
Yeah! But the fact that you can tinker with post process and colors in Unreal and achieve almost the same result, plus only a bunch of minutes of render makes UE5 with lumen the winner
I think unreal has some post processing happening by default. They could have put something similar on the cycles renders to make them look closer in that aspect.
@@Aenimae Well you also can in blender, to a pretty big extreme actually. However most ways people tweak post processing requires more then just pulling a few sliders but thats the nature of how blender works
@@Aenimae Actually, Lumen is only winning at speed. Looking at the inconsistencies in lighting, shadows, details, reflections, etc, Lumen is fantastic for realtime preview but not for production when it's going to be in the foreground. Yes, there are plenty of examples of Lumen looking fantastic in a customized production pipeline, but those are exceptions. Exceptional exceptions, you might say?
@@Local_CC if not treated properly lumen is tricky af, yeah I agree. But you must keep in mind that most of these comparisons between engines are done "quickly" (don't want to discredit the creator of the video), and many times unreal's default output renders are meh and need polishing. But everything can be done in realtime, so in a bunch of years, realtime 3d will be used in productions too. I don't mean Lumen and Unreal directly (they showed what modern hardware is capable of), but many other companies want to adopt this stuff and USD workflows. I squeezed Cycles for many hours and loved it, from trying to render custom caustics in blender 2.8 to crashing my GPU by stress testing just for fun with the realtime denoiser... Realtime engines (DX12) will eat up our a**es 🍝
Lumen is a great time saver, but It doesn't take into account the time needed in UE to adapt the scene and materials, would be good to count that too! As a Blender and UE user, I know how painful it can be to adapt a whole scene in UE. Thanks for this video comparison. It would have been great to have also EEvEE and/or Eevee Next.
@@OverJumpRally That is kinda painful for those who used to Blender , bcs controls in UE5 compare to Blender is more complex and non-comfortable and there is no way to make it same as Blender .
@@ragingraijin I going to make some render from Blender to UE5 , atm I haven't made bake and retopology . According to Your experience , how much polygons should I leave for model before transfer to UE5 ? For example main model is 1 kk , scene is ~ 4 kk edges .
@@astral-online I think you don't really need to worry about the poly count if you have a beefy enough PC and You're only using lumen, you can activate nanite and the dynamic LODs should help with the poly counts.
With what Color Transform was Cycles rendered? Unreal uses ACEScg and Blender Filmic or now AGX Or was Blender rendered to a exr sequence and also put into the ACEScg space?
I know what you mean. I'm an 80s kid and always dreamed of making my favorite cartoons look real. Then when they came out with the first Transformers, I swear, all us adults must've looked funny getting all hyped up to the kids that were sitting next to us! It was like we were all 10 years old again. Now, with ai (not sure how you feel about ai), it's really crazy watching how fast things are developing. I've been calling it, "The Dawn of a.i.", just like the Industrial Revolution. In any case, I can see we are both enjoying watching the tech advance!
@@RyoMassaki i could just be bias because im going to Bcon this year so im rooting for Blender extra hard this time around but lets see! These companies are still relatively young. Any thing could happen in the future 😌
In most scenes it's a matter of taste in the end when it comes to the little differences that sometimes might even be caused by slightly different scene descriptions. In a few cases Blender is objectively more accurate. But it still blows me away how close Lumen comes at a fraction of the time. There might be no clear winner, but there is certainly a clear looser: UE5 Path Tracer
@@Miaumiau3333the results shown aren't, that's true. But we all know that Lumen is definitely real-time- viable even when it needs more performance than classic baked lighting. It's impressive to see what this technology can do, but from our current point it's still way to buggy to use in game production effectively. But Unreal isn't just used for Game Production. When can shave of 90% of your compute time it's absolutely devestating for other softwares that can't do that. I don't like Epic, but I love the Unreal Engine
@@karimoh3154yeah people don't realize in 2-5 years Lumen will be like path tracing quality in absolute real time. In 5+ years non realtime rendering will be ancient technology with very few use cases. We already see Lumen looking better than path trace renderers half the time.
I thank in advance the person who took the time to perform this test so that others could have a broader idea of the range of each engine. It catches my attention that in some cases the three examples have some type of flashing artifact in a particular area. Since if we go to the production level, in those cases none of the three images would serve at a professional level.
For Lumen, slightly decrease highlights, increase shadow levels a little more than you decreased highlights, Do the opposite transform for GI pass, then slightly increase color temperature of lumen with a slight decrease in saturation, but bump the vibrance. I think you can get it pretty close to cycles.
All of them have their pros and cons and there are obviously many ways to correct particular aspects of the render in each case. None of them look as good as they could be without tweaking certain variables to improve the quality, however my choice will always be with Path Tracing in UE 5.3. IMHO it is an incredible powerhouse, however it depends on which look you are going for. The final result will always be up to the user's satisfaction. One person's sub-par is another's perfection.
Lumens, for the type of work I would do is more than "good enough" and wiht the better render times (minutes vs hours) it would allow for more work and mor itteratrions and testing. Like David Sanbergh says "Sometimes Good Enoguh is good Enough" (paraphrasing from memory)
It almost looks like with a little time both cycles and path tracer could achieve near identical results- path tracer seems to have a bit more bloom and motion blurr added almost like naturally added imperfections, sometimes cycles has a bit more color, either of those things could be adjusted...that's where I'd be curious about trying to see differences. But overall the render work here is phenomenal.
Depending on the scene I flip between Cycles & Lumen. But I reckon with a bit of grading it'd be fine whichever you chose, if it's a prof output, you're almost always always gonna output 16bit EXR's or ProRes anyway.
For the work done Lumen does it brilliantly well, so much so that it could mostly make the other two modes almost incessary. Among the other options, Blender feels a little less real than the UE path tracer most of the time, but for some reason, it seems to remove some details.
I've always thought UE has a certain smoky bloominess (maybe b/c UE users tend to overdo it with this effect) that doesn't look right to me, especially with interiors. But, those render times...
1.) In blender... this is Optix render, or cpu? 2.) Sampling numbers is optimal, or oversampling? 3.) In blender, you.... used the Optix Denoise feature? Just because if you use it, you can set to one third the render samples, there is no visible difference in quality, maybe if you look at it with a magnifying glass, maybe, but the render time is halved! 4.) Tile sizes is optimal? 5.) light paths - Bounce numbers? --This Is only the required amount set or untouch numbers? These individually have a very strong influence on the render time in blender, especially if they are all set to the optimum! While the difference between the optimal and the wasteful mode is hardly or not at all noticeable in the completed image or animation quality, but If optimised, the render time can be reduced very significantly!
It would be interesting if you put resolution values and samples on which these renderings were made. 5 hrs of rendering in cycles for 10 secs of animation seams a lot. For sure Unreal is real game changer but cycles did progress a lot too especially in denoiser on GPU's.
I feel with a bit of color grading Lumen could look really similar to Cycles. I mean the time saved alone would make it worth learning. In some cases Lumen looks closer to Cycles than UE5's Path Tracing! Especially when it comes to transparent materials like glass, Path Tracing tends to make it a bit too light.
Post processing and compositing in Lumen or Evee (also using correct render commands + using reflection captures) > makes then equal to PATH tracing Or Cycles > no doubt
if you dont use denoiser in unreal path tracer is 10x faster then cycles, just put temporal and spatial sample count at 16 in the anti aliasing settings
Hmmm... I think I like the Blender render best, but UE5-PT on the wall surfaces. I am unsure about which I like best they are all good. I think I prefer Blender. It is like the UE versions if you mix them both you would be close to Blender. So yeah I like the Blender best so far on tis particular environment. Detailing comes out sharper, unsmooth areas on the walls nicer. So yeah I stick with Blender on this one.
Great video comparison! Blender is more photorealistic, so for single images it's what I prefer when doing archviz. UE on the other hand, has a much faster workflow for doing video or vfx but I can see those two be a perfect couple in the future with Nvidia Omniverse!
you know you can disable motion blur on path tracing so you get a clearer image when moving around the scene. Just looking at this video would give the wrong impresion that blender has a crisper render then ue but this is just bad settings.
Cycles looks good, but you can twist your scenes in the UE to get the correct lighting etc. so you end up with 1:1 result. I assume IRL cases the customer and directors will accept if you just twist the scene with the lightning to get the right color effects on objects. :) The production time is incredible fast. ^^
Great tests! No doubt, Lumen wins on render time! And it's super impressive for good it looks in that short amount of time. But, on second glace there's a harder real-time look in that isn't quite up to the softer, more realistic way Cycles scatters the light. The market shot is the best example of that. But there are so many settings with the renderers, lights, materials, and color management that can change all that, so it's tough to get a perfect visual comparison.
Have you used any denoiser in cycles? There is the option of optix from Nvidia and open image denoiser from Intel gives better results and in the latest version of Blender it will be run on GPU which will be much faster. The times seem very exaggerated to me. How many samples did you have set per frame? There is also a new version of EEVEE coming out which is a Blender solution similar to the UE5 technology. It is true that Blender has to hurry to catch up to UE5 because the results are very good.
it's ok and totally worth it wit animated sequences, but if you're playing with close macro scene with detailed specular or roughness map. Unreal is forcing you doing huge sacrifices. Still impressive tho. But if you have GPU power under the hood, you might choose Blender to impress your customer with little and gorgeous details. ( Xcuse my crap english talking)
If I had to pick one UR5 Lumen , out of the three it has the less - clean look all CGI seems to have , once they crack the slight dirt look it’ll nigh on impossible to tell the difference.( the too bright and spotless look)
Lumen wins for time and overall efficiency. Hours to minutes is hardly something to ignore. I'm impressed by Cycles clarity and color retention and I'm a little surprised by how much haze Lumen and Path Tracing have.
The UE5 Lumens looks most real, due to the dark shadows being most prominent, but Blender’s render feels like it’s the most pleasing to look at, due to the cozy feeling from the soft shadows.
Lumen is good enough, I currently use it in my work. But sometimes there are some artifacts/flickers with it and I hope epic games team will fix that in the near future.
Does Blender look better? .. sure .. but lumen with that speed is still pretty good. Specially for quick previews, background plates, etc. Patch tracing UE is kind of falling behind. Close to Cycles in looks but since is slower ...
Looking at the results and times from cycles, i believe that, with adjusted render settings, the render time could have been cut down to a single digit percentage of what you show here.
I prefer Cycles to UE5. It's more photo-realistic. In UE5 colors are still too smooth. I would be curious to see a render comparison between UE5 and EEvee-Next with AGX color management
I mean for the tradeoff with time I'd take Unreal Lumen even though it doesn't have everything crisp. For VFX and with compositing most of the projects will benefit from the use of UE Lumen i guess
Hello, thanks for the interesting comparison. Which version of Blender was used? I would be curious to see the result if Blender was asked to render the scene in the same time as UE 5 (Lumen), i.e. use the Time Limit and Denoise parameter of Cycles dividing by the time used per frame with UE.
If we compare cycles VS path tracing. Blender renders looks good. They look sharp and crisp. But on the other hand Unreal engine path tracer renders looks kind of smooth. I notice other renders too looks off a bit of unreal.
Would be great if you also added eevee here, that would be a more direct competitor to UE..also some lower poly scenes here could be optimized to render a lot faster in cycles (I believe that GT40 clip with an empty desert can render faster than 4.5hrs if you lower the samples and tweake the denoiser)
I would like to use eevee even if it takes longer ( still much faster than cycels), the exporting and importing to unreal adds another level of complexity for animation
Wow that's a lot of work if you did all of these comparisons! Thanks for the effort! It shows in what an awesome time we live in now. I noticed for some there's a lens texture added to the Blender render and not for the others, if so that would not make for a proper and fair comparison. Also a bit strange/weird why for some you cut off right at the moment it starts looking really bad...for instance, in the first example the baskets are rendered quite crappy with UE's PT and Lumen, later in the separated examples you show the entire basket on the floor for Blender and cut out for UE. That makes me wonder... Anyway, it's just a curious observation and the effort is still very much appreciated. The technology is undeniably impressive and at the same time this comparison also shows there's still a long way to go when you look at texture fidelity, reflections, GI, motion blur...so many aspects are still quite inferior to an offline renderer, but for a game engine it's damn impressive. It will be cat and mouse in that sense, because offline renderers are still evolving. The majority is still tristimulus based, but some renderers are already semi-spectral or nearly entirely spectral. Then this comparison game goes to the next level...
Try some scenes lit with medium to small emissive lights, or with more reflections (particularly glossy reflections OF metals - depending on settings...) and Lumen will look comparatively worse. Lumen is really cool but these scenes are also pretty kind to it.
Cycles color grading and lighting is more suited for realistic scenes. UE5 Path Tracer has brighter lights and darker shadows which suits game renders better but its less realistic because for example the plane shadows shouldn't be that dark with direct bright sun light.
great! how did you import the camera and the whole scene to Unreal for blender? or how did you do to match everything? would love to see a tutorial of that!!!
EEVEE in Blender is much faster than Cycles, but global illumination in it can only be available with addons for now. Whe have to compare rendering quality and speed again when EEVEE Next comes out.
Sorry EEVEE didn't get a go too. Its come a long way. Clearly would be in 4th place for visual fidelity but you'd be looking at almost 1:1 render times. If anything the loser here, surprisingly is UE PT. In some cases it looks the worst and in several cases its even slower than Cycles. The real winner is Lumen. In several examples it looks "just as good" as PT and Cycles but when you factor in 500% faster render times the few pixel F**
@@VejtasaArt You can comparizon with UE5 Lumen and EEVEE Next in the Blender 4.2 Release Candidate version 😊👍 I use for now EEVEE Next for my 3D jobs. Its really fast for the 3D animations. Update: "I saw your Lumen vs Eevee video" 😂😂😂😂
The fact that blender and UE with Lumin are comparable is absolutely astonishing! Yes blender looks better, but it took 4 hours to render, compared to UE's 5 minutes! That puts the win into UE's trophy cupboard if you ask me!
Nice video comparison, but it's not very fair to compare UE5 path tracer to Cycles in terms of time, cus both uses different algorithm, have different qualities, I can even notice more shadow details in the UE5 path tracer.
write what you think is better and why.🤔
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Make on on EEVEE/EEVEE Next and Lumen since they should be closer in timings
If you were to remove the labels, we couldn't tell which render engine was used.
Lumen definitely wins since less time rendering allows more time iterating.
Also you can color manage and post-process Lumen to give you the "look" that you desire.
@@myxsys of course you would, Unreal path tracing has some artefacts in the light, and cycles vs lumen have different purposes
Cycle is better for Animation as there is no artifacts happening or extra filters like motion blow that you can add on + it is fast the only issue it is the Ambient oclusion and the shadows seams soft.
Can You write Your config for Cycles , please ? )) Also , very good job , very useful , ty so much ^_^ !! ))))
Out of the 3, when comparing them, cycles is the best, but in most real world use-cases the time saving Lumen provides far outweighs most of the benefits of Cycles and other renderers. For a full CG scene, Lumen absolutely wins due to efficiency alone; in most use-cases It'll look perfectly adequate to most viewers without a comparison.
For perspective, you could render around 48 different scenes with Lumen in the same time it takes cycles to render one.
i think so, however, in my case that i know nothing about ue, i'd need spend time trying to setup everything as it is in blender, baking normals, textures, etc, moving everything to unreal, then redoing the nodes for each assets, i think if the render takes in this case 5,5h to render in cycles, i'd probably take more time doing what i mentioned before, but! i'd be a very good option for whoever knows how to do that in ue already ( which i'll learn lol )
@@pansitostyle you can always learn something once and it will save you hours of work in the long run
Pro gamer move: bake secondary reflections and caustics onto texture layers, and path-trace only direct light and first bounces.
0:53 In this scenes the Lumen gives more texture calrity while, in others textures looks soft and smoothened .
What about Eevee? The Eevee vs Lumen would have been a better comparison
Unreal - Frames per Second
Blender - Seconds per Frame
✅✅
blender is better
@@deepfakescoverychannel6710 no it's not
@@XWXS2UE5 dead because C++ is dead.
@@deepfakescoverychannel6710blender isn't a game engine like unreal. You can't way one I better than the other because they're intended for different use cases.
You need to turn off DOF and motion blur in UE or everything will be fuzzy. It killed most of the small details.
Oh that's why everything look blurry in Path Tracing.
Agree, I also don't like blur, motion blur and DOF in game.
I agree In Gaming when we are in control we want to see everything clear like a pilote but for estethic cinematic scenes motion blur and depth of field are useful to guide the focus of a big scene on one subject. So depends of the objectif @@rahuldey8539
Exactly!
@@rahuldey8539Yes, we make such much effort and spend so much money to get very high FPS for motion clarity, only to fuck it all up again with this disgusting motion blur and other shit like that. If I want to play with motionblur I would just cap my FPS at 30. 😂
Man! The amount of times I've had such blissful dreams of Blender and Epic Games joining hands and somehow integrating the basic fundamental modeling tools from Blender to Unreal and Integrating Unreal's Lumen rendering engine into Blender... GENUINELY both softwares would be on a whole another level compared to the competition!
Technically, Eevee is the early fork of the UE5's render engine with an accent on image quality over render time, so it shares many aspects with Lumen.
@@shoopdawhoop Well technically Blender is 100 % open source free not quite like unreal or Lumen so more like creating bridges to jumb easy between the softwares because even the coding luanguages are different &cie
@@ahmedouardani2370 Unreal Engine is open source and on GitHub
lol
@@ahmedouardani2370 Technically, you are wrong. Unreal is open source (you can change and build the engine, also it's the only way to make dedicated servers like MMO). Both Unreal and Blender written on C++, so language is the same. Blender python is only for addons (and it's one of the worst things they made, because python is slow as hell).
Thank you!!! Wonderful work. For those wondering. The Blender analog to Lumen is actually Eevee (not Cycles).
Kind of. But the thing is that Eevee isn’t really as powerful as Lumen.
@@mr.hashundredsofprivatepla3711 New Eevee is pretty crazy though, big step up from original
Its not, its very buggy and inconsistent renders. It never was tested in a real animation production, it's only good for simple stuff @@tominonelove
Great comparison, however I would also argue that some of these scenes could have been made more efficient in cycles - it would be interesting to compare lower sample counts, there are so many settings in both cycles and lumen that this doesn't quite tell the whole story!
Path Tracer also has a ton of settings, you can't compare it all that well. What you definetly can say though, is Lumen is a LOT more efficient than any other of the options, and Cycles allows you for the highest fidelity
Yeah I was going to say the same, most of the scenes rendered in Cycles shoudn't take as much as shown here. Also, I'm feeling like the light sources are kept behind the glass objects in some interior scenes, this will introduce a lot of noise...
It was necessary to compare this way:
Cycles Path Tracer
EEVEE Lumen
EEVEE would loose immediately!
EEVEE Next will also loose but not that spectacular! xD
bro lumen is too far
lumen is better 3000% right?
Eevee and lumen is realtime.
But Eevee is ssgi and lumen in actual gi. So there is a lot of difference.
for preview UE 5 Lumen is fantastic, but for quality final Blender Cycle is more of what is expecting in the end production.
If you use ue5 path tracer correctly (the guy in the didn’t) it can achieve exact results or even more realistic than cycles and render in a shorter time
quality: cycles
time saving: lumen
and for most cases time is very important but we should consider the time for preparing the scene in UE to use lumen. SO in my opinion for long animations I'll definitely use lumen but for shorter ones I'll stick to cycles or eevee next soon :D
I got my first animation render-ready in blender. It will only take me 3 years 15 days 2 hours in cycles. See ya in 2027
@@its3amagain. it seems your rendering workflow is the slowest since my animations (archviz) take 10sec per frame using my slow laptop XD
Side by side they all looked fairly similar, but watching them back to back made it obvious how much better the Blender renders look than even the UE5 pathtracing.
For a game engine to reach this kind of quality next to a ray tracer is a huge accomplishment in a few years it will beat it.
@@zedguerr4820 none of these are in real time tho
@@slopedarmor Yeah Lumen's not real time but it can do something in minutes that take hours in cycles.
Idk path tracer looks better in pretty much every example imo. Cycles comes out with a really fuzzy look.
@@zedguerr4820It will never beat it, game engines focus on fast rendering while Blender Cycles focuses on correctness.
In most cases I prefer cycles. In every case, I still prefer Mantra, Arnold, Karma, or Redshift. UE Lumen is quite impressive but it doesn't manage the highlights or shadows well enough, a lot detail lost in the sauce
What about Corona? What's your opinion?
Mantra is fucking slow, bro literally said he prefer mantra over cycles without hesitation 💀, cycles is my go to before karma stable release
@@zedeon6299 you mean karma xpu?
"karma stable release" lmaooo@@zedeon6299
@@storiz107 yeah, that's what I meant, forgot to put xpu
There are sometimes when Cycles definitely shines through displaying superior detail, but it's nothing short of impressive what Lumen can do in a _fraction_ of the time.
blender eevee engine can do literally nearly the same
@@zergidrom4572 Eevee is amazing but not as powerful as Lumen. It doesn't really do ray-tracing. More raster than anything
@@zergidrom4572 nope, it lacks raytracing and GI, I DO hope it will be worked on in EEVEE Next.
Looks like a little saturation and lowing the middle on lumans will bring things to balance with cycles. The only thing that makes me hesitate in the past is knowing that baking textures are involved. But now that my Uvs are correct and my pipeline already includes substance painter, I’m becoming more and more tempted to learn this pipeline.
I am thinking about just modelling in blender and doing everything else in unreal. Seems smarter to me.
watching this was VERY interesting to me. At so many examples you are like: Damn, the colours with blender are so on point and everything looks so perfectly crisp, but then (for example the wood at the shelf example) the unreal ones look better. Also the saturation of the colours seems to be better at blender, except for the books! Nice comparision!
Yeah! But the fact that you can tinker with post process and colors in Unreal and achieve almost the same result, plus only a bunch of minutes of render makes UE5 with lumen the winner
I think unreal has some post processing happening by default. They could have put something similar on the cycles renders to make them look closer in that aspect.
@@Aenimae Well you also can in blender, to a pretty big extreme actually.
However most ways people tweak post processing requires more then just pulling a few sliders but thats the nature of how blender works
@@Aenimae Actually, Lumen is only winning at speed. Looking at the inconsistencies in lighting, shadows, details, reflections, etc, Lumen is fantastic for realtime preview but not for production when it's going to be in the foreground. Yes, there are plenty of examples of Lumen looking fantastic in a customized production pipeline, but those are exceptions. Exceptional exceptions, you might say?
@@Local_CC if not treated properly lumen is tricky af, yeah I agree. But you must keep in mind that most of these comparisons between engines are done "quickly" (don't want to discredit the creator of the video), and many times unreal's default output renders are meh and need polishing.
But everything can be done in realtime, so in a bunch of years, realtime 3d will be used in productions too. I don't mean Lumen and Unreal directly (they showed what modern hardware is capable of), but many other companies want to adopt this stuff and USD workflows.
I squeezed Cycles for many hours and loved it, from trying to render custom caustics in blender 2.8 to crashing my GPU by stress testing just for fun with the realtime denoiser... Realtime engines (DX12) will eat up our a**es 🍝
Lumen is a great time saver, but It doesn't take into account the time needed in UE to adapt the scene and materials, would be good to count that too! As a Blender and UE user, I know how painful it can be to adapt a whole scene in UE. Thanks for this video comparison. It would have been great to have also EEvEE and/or Eevee Next.
You should really try using the USD pipeline rather than FBX or OBJ, really saves you a ton of time, I know it did for me
You could have assembled the scene in UE5 in the first place.
@@OverJumpRally That is kinda painful for those who used to Blender , bcs controls in UE5 compare to Blender is more complex and non-comfortable and there is no way to make it same as Blender .
@@ragingraijin I going to make some render from Blender to UE5 , atm I haven't made bake and retopology . According to Your experience , how much polygons should I leave for model before transfer to UE5 ? For example main model is 1 kk , scene is ~ 4 kk edges .
@@astral-online I think you don't really need to worry about the poly count if you have a beefy enough PC and You're only using lumen, you can activate nanite and the dynamic LODs should help with the poly counts.
With what Color Transform was Cycles rendered? Unreal uses ACEScg and Blender Filmic or now AGX
Or was Blender rendered to a exr sequence and also put into the ACEScg space?
I was born half a year before the IBM PC became a thing. The last few decades have been an amazing journey, it is fantastic to see where we are going.
I know what you mean. I'm an 80s kid and always dreamed of making my favorite cartoons look real. Then when they came out with the first Transformers, I swear, all us adults must've looked funny getting all hyped up to the kids that were sitting next to us! It was like we were all 10 years old again. Now, with ai (not sure how you feel about ai), it's really crazy watching how fast things are developing. I've been calling it, "The Dawn of a.i.", just like the Industrial Revolution. In any case, I can see we are both enjoying watching the tech advance!
@@caissa6187 Yeah, you just nailed it. 🙌
You gotta update this when eevee next comes out even tho it's now where near this level.
I just said this!! But idk man i think Eevee next will DEFINITELY be able to hold a candle to Lumen. I am so excited for it
@@CoreyMcKinneyJr well it's still screen space so idk
@@CoreyMcKinneyJr Prepare to be disappointed. It may come close in some scenarios, but overall it's not gonna hold up because its using inferior tech.
@@RyoMassaki i could just be bias because im going to Bcon this year so im rooting for Blender extra hard this time around but lets see! These companies are still relatively young. Any thing could happen in the future 😌
Good luck in production
Lumen is truly good and the performance is top notch
In most scenes it's a matter of taste in the end when it comes to the little differences that sometimes might even be caused by slightly different scene descriptions.
In a few cases Blender is objectively more accurate.
But it still blows me away how close Lumen comes at a fraction of the time.
There might be no clear winner, but there is certainly a clear looser: UE5 Path Tracer
Wow cycles is killing it, for the extra bit of dynamic range i might wait the 9 hours
The fact that we can even compare real time to classic rendering is mind blowing and speaks for Epics talent.
The video says that UE took a few hours to render with the path tracer, and a few minutes with Lumen, so it seems like it's not real time?
@@Miaumiau3333the results shown aren't, that's true. But we all know that Lumen is definitely real-time- viable even when it needs more performance than classic baked lighting.
It's impressive to see what this technology can do, but from our current point it's still way to buggy to use in game production effectively.
But Unreal isn't just used for Game Production. When can shave of 90% of your compute time it's absolutely devestating for other softwares that can't do that.
I don't like Epic, but I love the Unreal Engine
@@Miaumiau3333 yeah it isn't realtime, but could be if hardware was capable.
@@Miaumiau3333 Yeah yeah of course. But its so much faster and still looks incredible.
@@karimoh3154yeah people don't realize in 2-5 years Lumen will be like path tracing quality in absolute real time. In 5+ years non realtime rendering will be ancient technology with very few use cases. We already see Lumen looking better than path trace renderers half the time.
I like the colors of cycles, but Lumen its the most realistic, and its incredibly fast. I am really impressed.
I thank in advance the person who took the time to perform this test so that others could have a broader idea of the range of each engine. It catches my attention that in some cases the three examples have some type of flashing artifact in a particular area. Since if we go to the production level, in those cases none of the three images would serve at a professional level.
Thank you! Great video.
For me, Blender images are richest, especially the details in shadows. but Lumen speed is incredible.
please, make this comparission again, but including NEXT EEVEE render too.
For Lumen, slightly decrease highlights, increase shadow levels a little more than you decreased highlights, Do the opposite transform for GI pass, then slightly increase color temperature of lumen with a slight decrease in saturation, but bump the vibrance. I think you can get it pretty close to cycles.
I think the global illumination looks the best with Cycles. But it's impressive Lumen can get nearly the same results so much faster.
All of them have their pros and cons and there are obviously many ways to correct particular aspects of the render in each case. None of them look as good as they could be without tweaking certain variables to improve the quality, however my choice will always be with Path Tracing in UE 5.3. IMHO it is an incredible powerhouse, however it depends on which look you are going for. The final result will always be up to the user's satisfaction. One person's sub-par is another's perfection.
Lumens, for the type of work I would do is more than "good enough" and wiht the better render times (minutes vs hours) it would allow for more work and mor itteratrions and testing.
Like David Sanbergh says "Sometimes Good Enoguh is good Enough" (paraphrasing from memory)
It almost looks like with a little time both cycles and path tracer could achieve near identical results- path tracer seems to have a bit more bloom and motion blurr added almost like naturally added imperfections, sometimes cycles has a bit more color, either of those things could be adjusted...that's where I'd be curious about trying to see differences. But overall the render work here is phenomenal.
That's some major artefacting in the UE5 path tracer in the scene with those wooden chairs. 😛
Depending on the scene I flip between Cycles & Lumen. But I reckon with a bit of grading it'd be fine whichever you chose, if it's a prof output, you're almost always always gonna output 16bit EXR's or ProRes anyway.
the important thing here is the graphics and speed ratio.
For the work done Lumen does it brilliantly well, so much so that it could mostly make the other two modes almost incessary. Among the other options, Blender feels a little less real than the UE path tracer most of the time, but for some reason, it seems to remove some details.
Nice work! I always appreciate, if someone takes the time to make such a comparison.
Did you use Lumen with Hardware Raytracing, or without?
I've always thought UE has a certain smoky bloominess (maybe b/c UE users tend to overdo it with this effect) that doesn't look right to me, especially with interiors. But, those render times...
You can see why for many professionals Pathtracers are important. Consistency Consistency Consistency. You know what you're going to get.
1.) In blender... this is Optix render, or cpu?
2.) Sampling numbers is optimal, or oversampling?
3.) In blender, you.... used the Optix Denoise feature?
Just because if you use it, you can set to one third the render samples, there is no visible difference in quality, maybe if you look at it with a magnifying glass, maybe, but the render time is halved!
4.) Tile sizes is optimal?
5.) light paths - Bounce numbers? --This Is only the required amount set or untouch numbers?
These individually have a very strong influence on the render time in blender, especially if they are all set to the optimum! While the difference between the optimal and the wasteful mode is hardly or not at all noticeable in the completed image or animation quality, but If optimised, the render time can be reduced very significantly!
1:40 2 minutes, and it looks this good. The people at Unreal have outdone themselves.
It would be interesting if you put resolution values and samples on which these renderings were made. 5 hrs of rendering in cycles for 10 secs of animation seams a lot. For sure Unreal is real game changer but cycles did progress a lot too especially in denoiser on GPU's.
I feel with a bit of color grading Lumen could look really similar to Cycles. I mean the time saved alone would make it worth learning. In some cases Lumen looks closer to Cycles than UE5's Path Tracing! Especially when it comes to transparent materials like glass, Path Tracing tends to make it a bit too light.
Post processing and compositing in Lumen or Evee (also using correct render commands + using reflection captures) > makes then equal to PATH tracing Or Cycles > no doubt
if you dont use denoiser in unreal path tracer is 10x faster then cycles, just put temporal and spatial sample count at 16 in the anti aliasing settings
Hmmm... I think I like the Blender render best, but UE5-PT on the wall surfaces. I am unsure about which I like best they are all good. I think I prefer Blender. It is like the UE versions if you mix them both you would be close to Blender. So yeah I like the Blender best so far on tis particular environment. Detailing comes out sharper, unsmooth areas on the walls nicer. So yeah I stick with Blender on this one.
Great video comparison! Blender is more photorealistic, so for single images it's what I prefer when doing archviz. UE on the other hand, has a much faster workflow for doing video or vfx but I can see those two be a perfect couple in the future with Nvidia Omniverse!
you know you can disable motion blur on path tracing so you get a clearer image when moving around the scene. Just looking at this video would give the wrong impresion that blender has a crisper render then ue but this is just bad settings.
Cycles looks good, but you can twist your scenes in the UE to get the correct lighting etc. so you end up with 1:1 result. I assume IRL cases the customer and directors will accept if you just twist the scene with the lightning to get the right color effects on objects. :) The production time is incredible fast. ^^
Blender is impressive but compared to timing UE 5 Lumen is much faster with some compromise but it's super fast
ok thank you for your comment that was just obvious..
@@pommedapi3847 okay thanks then
Imo cycles still looks the best, but the fact that Lumen can render it in such a short time is absolutely mindblowing
That Blender render time. Lumen is a beast. 👹
For the time it takes lumen is absolutely magical!
P.s how did you transfer all the materials, lights and animations?
Probably used a USD pipeline
USD
abc can do it just fine too
@@_decktor you this man
@@ragingraijin oh! didn't even see you there 😂
Great tests! No doubt, Lumen wins on render time! And it's super impressive for good it looks in that short amount of time. But, on second glace there's a harder real-time look in that isn't quite up to the softer, more realistic way Cycles scatters the light. The market shot is the best example of that. But there are so many settings with the renderers, lights, materials, and color management that can change all that, so it's tough to get a perfect visual comparison.
Have you used any denoiser in cycles? There is the option of optix from Nvidia and open image denoiser from Intel gives better results and in the latest version of Blender it will be run on GPU which will be much faster.
The times seem very exaggerated to me.
How many samples did you have set per frame?
There is also a new version of EEVEE coming out which is a Blender solution similar to the UE5 technology.
It is true that Blender has to hurry to catch up to UE5 because the results are very good.
ngl, Lumen looks fantastic given how quickly it performs
it's ok and totally worth it wit animated sequences, but if you're playing with close macro scene with detailed specular or roughness map. Unreal is forcing you doing huge sacrifices. Still impressive tho. But if you have GPU power under the hood, you might choose Blender to impress your customer with little and gorgeous details. ( Xcuse my crap english talking)
If I had to pick one UR5 Lumen , out of the three it has the less - clean look all CGI seems to have , once they crack the slight dirt look it’ll nigh on impossible to tell the difference.( the too bright and spotless look)
Lumen wins for time and overall efficiency. Hours to minutes is hardly something to ignore. I'm impressed by Cycles clarity and color retention and I'm a little surprised by how much haze Lumen and Path Tracing have.
The UE5 Lumens looks most real, due to the dark shadows being most prominent, but Blender’s render feels like it’s the most pleasing to look at, due to the cozy feeling from the soft shadows.
Why no eevee but lumen
This comparison seems focused on renderers that use rays to render lighting. Unreal & Eevee without ray tracing looks the same.
EEVEE sux
Because lumen is far… Far better
Would have liked to see it too but there’s just no competition
Eevee is still to date not capable of actual GI.
It is now using SSGI for illumination as of 4.2 which is still not good enough
Lumen is good enough, I currently use it in my work.
But sometimes there are some artifacts/flickers with it and I hope epic games team will fix that in the near future.
Does Blender look better? .. sure .. but lumen with that speed is still pretty good. Specially for quick previews, background plates, etc.
Patch tracing UE is kind of falling behind. Close to Cycles in looks but since is slower ...
It's decided, I'm going to learn Unreal Engine!
Looking at the results and times from cycles, i believe that, with adjusted render settings, the render time could have been cut down to a single digit percentage of what you show here.
agx fixed all my color problems in blender. it is also so natural and realistic lit I just barely do touch ups in photoshop
I prefer Cycles to UE5. It's more photo-realistic. In UE5 colors are still too smooth. I would be curious to see a render comparison between UE5 and EEvee-Next with AGX color management
I mean for the tradeoff with time I'd take Unreal Lumen even though it doesn't have everything crisp. For VFX and with compositing most of the projects will benefit from the use of UE Lumen i guess
They both should collabrate UNREAL + BLENDER
Hello, thanks for the interesting comparison.
Which version of Blender was used?
I would be curious to see the result if Blender was asked to render the scene in the same time as UE 5 (Lumen),
i.e. use the Time Limit and Denoise parameter of Cycles dividing by the time used per frame with UE.
If we compare cycles VS path tracing. Blender renders looks good. They look sharp and crisp. But on the other hand Unreal engine path tracer renders looks kind of smooth. I notice other renders too looks off a bit of unreal.
Excelente 👌, muy práctico tu video fácil de entender....nuevo sub y me meteré a ver todos tus videos a ver que aprendo, estoy iniciando en esto 🎉
Would be great if you also added eevee here, that would be a more direct competitor to UE..also some lower poly scenes here could be optimized to render a lot faster in cycles (I believe that GT40 clip with an empty desert can render faster than 4.5hrs if you lower the samples and tweake the denoiser)
I would like to use eevee even if it takes longer ( still much faster than cycels), the exporting and importing to unreal adds another level of complexity for animation
I noticed a pixel had a different shade in one of the videos
Would also like to see usability of RTXdi (that pathtracing from cyberpunk) in cinematic renders
Wow that's a lot of work if you did all of these comparisons! Thanks for the effort! It shows in what an awesome time we live in now. I noticed for some there's a lens texture added to the Blender render and not for the others, if so that would not make for a proper and fair comparison. Also a bit strange/weird why for some you cut off right at the moment it starts looking really bad...for instance, in the first example the baskets are rendered quite crappy with UE's PT and Lumen, later in the separated examples you show the entire basket on the floor for Blender and cut out for UE. That makes me wonder... Anyway, it's just a curious observation and the effort is still very much appreciated. The technology is undeniably impressive and at the same time this comparison also shows there's still a long way to go when you look at texture fidelity, reflections, GI, motion blur...so many aspects are still quite inferior to an offline renderer, but for a game engine it's damn impressive. It will be cat and mouse in that sense, because offline renderers are still evolving. The majority is still tristimulus based, but some renderers are already semi-spectral or nearly entirely spectral. Then this comparison game goes to the next level...
The video compression actually has me struggling 😂 I’m a VFX artist and I was questioning if it’s real or Houdini, it’s definitely real haha
Try some scenes lit with medium to small emissive lights, or with more reflections (particularly glossy reflections OF metals - depending on settings...) and Lumen will look comparatively worse. Lumen is really cool but these scenes are also pretty kind to it.
you forgot to turn off noise filtring when using pathtracer, thats why you get this jittering and lack of details
Lumen looks amazing given the difference in render time
Although you can see certain improvements in cycles, I prefer the speed that lumen gives me.
Will the people care to details in shadows if the narrative is good?
could have be good to have reflective/glossy shader to see the quality result
Cycles color grading and lighting is more suited for realistic scenes. UE5 Path Tracer has brighter lights and darker shadows which suits game renders better but its less realistic because for example the plane shadows shouldn't be that dark with direct bright sun light.
blender is nice , ue5 lumen is great
great! how did you import the camera and the whole scene to Unreal for blender? or how did you do to match everything? would love to see a tutorial of that!!!
EEVEE in Blender is much faster than Cycles, but global illumination in it can only be available with addons for now. Whe have to compare rendering quality and speed again when EEVEE Next comes out.
The futrue is UE 5 lumen. It break the boundaries of current technology limit with software implementation.
1:28 the moment easy work beats hard work.
Sorry EEVEE didn't get a go too. Its come a long way. Clearly would be in 4th place for visual fidelity but you'd be looking at almost 1:1 render times. If anything the loser here, surprisingly is UE PT. In some cases it looks the worst and in several cases its even slower than Cycles. The real winner is Lumen. In several examples it looks "just as good" as PT and Cycles but when you factor in 500% faster render times the few pixel F**
Hi, since blender EEVEE Next is nearing its release, when blender 4.1 is released, could you make another comparison using EEVEE Next and Cycles?
Since this comparison is successful, I will definitely try to make another comparison of different engines. so yes, eevee will probably be next.
@@VejtasaArt You can comparizon with UE5 Lumen and EEVEE Next in the Blender 4.2 Release Candidate version 😊👍 I use for now EEVEE Next for my 3D jobs. Its really fast for the 3D animations. Update: "I saw your Lumen vs Eevee video" 😂😂😂😂
Honestly for as fast as it can churn out for very comparable results lumen is pretty god damn impressive
Lumen looks amazing but idk I still like the style and texture of cycles
The fact that blender and UE with Lumin are comparable is absolutely astonishing! Yes blender looks better, but it took 4 hours to render, compared to UE's 5 minutes! That puts the win into UE's trophy cupboard if you ask me!
Can't wait for this render thing to reach the level of minecraft shaders! 😊
Id use lumen and just do post production color grade for the final look
WoW. The time difference is huge.
Nice video comparison, but it's not very fair to compare UE5 path tracer to Cycles in terms of time, cus both uses different algorithm, have different qualities, I can even notice more shadow details in the UE5 path tracer.