E-Cycles addon for Blender

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S0rda
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E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by S0rda »

https://blenderartists.org/t/e-cycles-a ... 39717/1182

https://gumroad.com/l/SeYhy/727l0tl

Hey. This is not an advertisement. I am interested in the assumptions about what increases the rendering speed, and besides, I personally think that selling the same application for different branches of a blender at this price is the same as buying a new Windows license every time you add an operational one memory or any other replacement you do.
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lacilaci
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by lacilaci »

I don't know all the details but my understanding is that it's a build that contains some original patches and some that weren't reviewed by blenderdevs. It's mostly optimizations rather than big new features.

Blender devs aren't really doing much for cycles now with their hands full of 2.8 it seems, so this ecycles thingy comes very handy. It's still slower than luxcore when you rely heavily on GI lighting but other than that it's pretty fast.

As for price, there is also a subscription licence, the one you linked is yearly. There is no full online licencing service so even if you cancel you won't loose the ability to render, you just loose the access for future updates. The creator also claims all the changes to cycles he made will be submitted to blender devs after a year.

I think if luxcore devs would decide they would create similar business model: with some fresh new builds behind paywall on gumroad for funding, and a free older stable builds for free it would be great.
S0rda
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by S0rda »

I think it would be at the same time the worst thing I’ve heard when people talk about programs that were free for more than five or ten years (as if they had bought a blender for autodesk), and worse again. The subscription system is cancer. This is milking people.

The program is not gasoline, which you need to buy and top up every time you need to go somewhere.


Another thing is that this is a truly unique product, only few people use it (I don’t understand why the last year or two is about the same in circulation as the cycles), and one hundred or two hundred or three hundred dollars will not help much in the development , and only scare away those who use it anyway.

Approximately the same situation is observed with the program 3D Coat - in its own way, a unique product, but with a disgusting spread and fame, as well as a bunch of bugs. Only this is all for $ 379 and about two or three dozen active users on the forum.
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lacilaci
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by lacilaci »

But I'm not talking about full time on-line required licensing system like octane for example. But as subscription as an access to newest features etc, while you can still continue using the software if you unsubscribe. And also an older version fully free...

I think it's great way to push people a little more to support the project while also push devs to constantly keep up with the work to keep subscribers. Sure someone here and ther would still complain but I'm sure it would be worth it.

I also think timing is perfect with 2.8 release etc...

But that's just my opinion...
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by Dade »

I'm a bit puzzled by this E-Cycles thing: I'm not sure to fully understand what is going on. I mean, Cycles is APL like LuxCore so the license offers a lot of freedom.
However Blender is GPL and that is big NONONO for this kind of stuff, I'm a bit surprised Blender Foundation didn't used a big legal hammer to hit E-Cycles.
I have the feeling I'm missing something, did Blender Foundation ever expressed an official position about this initiative ?
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by B.Y.O.B. »

From what I understand, when you buy E-Cycles, you get the whole source code along with the binaries, and everything still has its respective license.
As far as I know, this is not in violation of the GPL. Only problem for the developer is, it's also completely legal to redistribute E-Cycles for free after you bought it - since it's GPL, you can do with the code what you want under the terms of the GPL.
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lacilaci
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by lacilaci »

I'm no expert in the legal field, but I think the way he has his legal stuff covered is the fact that he sells it primarily as a full course on how to apply patches to cycles and build blender, so I guess technically this also provides sources that are also already available but sells it all as a course/training primarily.

But on other hand he also sells a separate product of pre-built blender with patches applied, but then again you could argue that you actually pay for the comfort of someone applying those patches and building blender for you using available free sources...

This is in the end what I would like to see luxcore devs to do as well. More and more people switch to blender from softwares that are designed for simple people (like me) where I don't care about source code and compiling stuff etc, I want to download, run and use the product. And many others want the same.

So have your code on github, have a "product" on gumroad for subscribers that want "comfort" and have previous release fully free of charge...

Seeing how people react to ecycles (myself included) it would appear that a lot of people are willing to pay, used to use gumroad and looking for a better and faster alternative to cycles...

The only advantage of ecycles over luxcore is that it is as fully featured as cycles is and also benefits from 2.8 (eevee renders cycles's shaders giving a nice realtime preview)

Like I mentioned already, having a gumroad library folder with recent (weekly?) prebuilt blender optimized for luxcore just download ,unpack and use (how ecycles works) would be a fucking great deal.

I think something like early luxcore 2.3 + early blender 2.8 support would also help push people into trying it out.

And since sources are still out there and no one would demand fulltime online licensing, no one can say you forcing them to pay for open source product, rather than for convenience to have stuff built for them and support for development. And again, you can add stuff like videos, tips and maybe the prebuilt version could also include some basic libraries of materials and ies or whatever, just added value for people who support...

I have like 15 products bought on gumroad and usually people buy a lot of tutorials and assets and whatnot cg related. So its a well established platform used by cg artists a lot. I would probably not bother buying ecycles if it wasn't on gumroad...
S0rda
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by S0rda »

I'm a bit puzzled by this E-Cycles thing: I'm not sure to fully understand what is going on. I mean, Cycles is APL like LuxCore so the license offers a lot of freedom.
However Blender is GPL and that is big NONONO for this kind of stuff, I'm a bit surprised Blender Foundation didn't used a big legal hammer to hit E-Cycles.
I have the feeling I'm missing something, did Blender Foundation ever expressed an official position about this initiative ?
Glad to understand me. It seems that this is also understood on the forum, because my post with this content was deleted, and the moderator did not comment on what I wrote to him in personal messages.

This is really strange.

The only advantage of ecycles over luxcore is that it is as fully featured as cycles is and also benefits from 2.8 (eevee renders cycles's shaders giving a nice realtime preview)

Like I mentioned already, having a gumroad library folder with recent (weekly?) prebuilt blender optimized for luxcore just download ,unpack and use (how ecycles works) would be a fucking great deal.

I think something like early luxcore 2.3 + early blender 2.8 support would also help push people into trying it out.
I personally begin to be annoyed by the attempt to sell everything and everyone, as Voracious Andrew does with his empty addon with a bunch of rendered pictures with a funny dude under different lighting.
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by Dade »

S0rda wrote: Thu May 16, 2019 9:04 pm
I'm a bit puzzled by this E-Cycles thing: I'm not sure to fully understand what is going on. I mean, Cycles is APL like LuxCore so the license offers a lot of freedom.
However Blender is GPL and that is big NONONO for this kind of stuff, I'm a bit surprised Blender Foundation didn't used a big legal hammer to hit E-Cycles.
I have the feeling I'm missing something, did Blender Foundation ever expressed an official position about this initiative ?
Glad to understand me. It seems that this is also understood on the forum, because my post with this content was deleted, and the moderator did not comment on what I wrote to him in personal messages.
Out of curiosity: on BlenderArtist forum, E-Cycles forum ?
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lacilaci
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Re: E-Cycles addon for Blender

Post by lacilaci »

S0rda wrote: Thu May 16, 2019 9:04 pm I personally begin to be annoyed by the attempt to sell everything and everyone, as Voracious Andrew does with his empty addon with a bunch of rendered pictures with a funny dude under different lighting.
What type of argument is this? I'm suggesting a way of stable funding through popular means, are you comparing luxcore with an empty addon? Or funding with an attempt to sell just about anything?

There is simply a different mindset on both user side and developer side, when it comes to paid software. As a user if you see a well made and polished paid product you know the devs are being paid to work full time on their stuff so you don't worry about development. And on development side there are responsibilities and a bit of pressure if they want to keep their clients...

Even if the guy behind E-Cycles did nothing else but taking a bunch of patches that aren't reviewed and making a blender build out of it(which I'm not saying he does), I'd still be interested in it.. why? Cause to sell it, he has to keep track of new stuff, test it and implement it and provide me a build.. for something like 15$ monthly it is nothing, and if I see no more important updates for me I can unsubscribe and still use the software, or not if I don't need it.

Now if there is a legal problem I don't know. If blenderdevs tomorrow decide to do something about it and get rid of ecycles I don't care...
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