Cycles is Blender’s ray-trace based production render engine and in development since 2011. It was originally developed by Brecht van Lommel, and is maintained by an active team of developers today. Since its release as Apache 2.0 (permissive open source), it’s also in use by other 3D tools, such as Poser and Rhino.
Features
CORE SPECIFICATIONS Unidirectional path tracing with multiple importance sampling Branched path tracing Multi-core CPU Rendering with SIMD acceleration GPU rendering with NVidia CUDA & AMD OpenCL Multi-GPU support Unified kernel code for CPU and GPU
INTERACTIVITY Designed for interactive updates Fast object, shader, light changes Tiled and progressive rendering
LAYERS & PASSES Render layers for decomposing the scene Render passes for geometry and lighting Holdout mattes
GEOMETRY Instancing Hair curves Volumes Multi-core BVH build
CAMERA Perspective and orthographic cameras Panoramic and fisheye cameras Stereoscopic rendering Depth of field
MOTION BLUR Cameras Object transforms Meshes and curves
SHADING Physically based Node based shaders and lights Production tricks Open Shading Language (CPU only)
VOLUMES Absorption Scattering and emission Smoke and fire Subsurface scattering
LIGHTING Global illumination Point, Sun, Spot and Area lights Mesh lights World background Sky model Light portals for indoor scenes
TEXTURES Image textures Environment maps Procedural textures (noise, voronoi, checker…) Bump and normal maps
