Blender Render and Cycles

Blender has different built-in render engines: Blender Render and Cycles. In the middle of the Info Editor (the bar at the top of the interface), you’ll find a button that lets you select the render engine you want to use. By default, Blender Render is selected, and if you click the button, you’ll see two other options: Blender Game and Cycles. Blender Game allows you to play with real-time graphics as if Blender were a game engine. You can create games and interactive content that will run in the Blender Game engine.

Blender Render is the “old” engine; it allows you to setup materials that simulate reality, but it’s just a simulation, so achieving realistic results can be difficult. Although it’s not a realistic render engine, if you control its parameters, materials, and lighting correctly, you can achieve pretty realistic renders with good quality. By its nature and because it is not as realistically accurate, it’s also a lot faster than Cycles and that makes it a nice alternative for nonrealistic rendering or when you’re short on time.

Cycles, on the other hand, is slower, but it’s a physically based render engine, so light and materials behave realistically using mathematical functions that simulate real light behavior. Light bounces off surfaces and generates indirect lighting, just as real light would. Getting a realistic result with Cycles is much easier. However, it requires different skills because Cycles is designed to use materials built with nodes, but when creating very basic materials you don’t really need to use nodes at all. Cycles also lets you render using GPU, so if you have a good graphics card, you can speed up your render times considerably.

You need to decide which render engine you want to use before you start building the materials for your scene. For the most part, the different engines are not compatible and their lighting systems are also quite different, so switching between the engines once you have your materials set up is usually not a good idea. You would have to rearrange your materials or even build them again from scratch so they would work properly in the other engine.