【Blender】Complete Guide to Render Settings - Choosing Between Cycles and Eevee

Overview

Blender includes two rendering engines: "Cycles" and "Eevee." Each has distinct characteristics, and choosing the right one for your purpose is important. This article explains the differences between both engines and optimal settings.

What is Cycles?

Cycles is a physics-based path tracing renderer.

Features

• Photorealistic: Simulates physical light behavior
• Accurate reflections/refractions: Beautiful glass and water rendering
• Global illumination: Automatic calculation of light interreflection
• Render time: Relatively long (can be accelerated with GPU)

Best Uses

• Still images (product visuals, architectural visualization)
• High-quality animations
• Scenes with glass, metal, and transparent objects

What is Eevee?

Eevee is a real-time renderer. It uses the same technology as game engines.

Features

• Fast: Real-time preview possible
• Good quality: Satisfactory results for many purposes
• Some limitations: Some optical effects aren't as accurate as Cycles

Best Uses

• Animation (especially long sequences)
• Previews and tests
• Checking game assets
• Social media content

Switching Engines

1. Properties → Render (camera icon)
2. Select Cycles/Eevee under "Render Engine"

Important Cycles Settings

Sample Count

The number of light ray samples. More samples = cleaner image but longer render time.

Purpose	Recommended Samples
Preview	64-128
Final render (still image)	256-1024
Animation	128-256

Location: Render Properties → Sampling → Render.

Denoising

Feature that removes noise. Achieves clean results even with fewer samples.

1. Render Properties → Sampling → Enable "Denoise"
2. Select denoiser:
   • OptiX: For NVIDIA GPUs (fast)
   • OpenImageDenoise: For CPU/all GPUs (high quality)

GPU Rendering

Use GPU for acceleration.

1. Edit → Preferences → System
2. Select your GPU under "Cycles Render Devices"
3. Render Properties → Device → "GPU Compute"

Important Eevee Settings

Ambient Occlusion

Adds natural shadows to corners and contact areas.

1. Render Properties → Ambient Occlusion → Enable

Bloom

Makes bright areas appear to glow.

1. Render Properties → Bloom → Enable

Screen Space Reflections

Enables reflections.

1. Render Properties → Screen Space Reflections → Enable
2. Also turn on "Refraction" for better glass

Shadows

Improves shadow quality.

1. Render Properties → Shadows
2. Increase "Cube Size" and "Cascade Size" (1024+ recommended)

Transparency

Displays transparent objects correctly.

1. Material Settings → "Settings" → "Blend Mode" → "Alpha Blend"

Output Settings

Resolution

1. Output Properties → Resolution
2. Set X and Y pixel values
3. Common resolutions:
   • HD: 1920 x 1080
   • 4K: 3840 x 2160
   • Instagram: 1080 x 1080

File Format

Format	Features	Uses
PNG	Transparency support, lossless	Still images (with transparency)
JPEG	Lightweight, lossy	Web still images
EXR	HDR support, high quality	Compositing, post-processing
FFmpeg	Video format	Animation

Rendering

• F12: Render current frame
• Ctrl + F12: Render animation

Save results via "Image" menu → "Save As".

Summary

Item	Cycles	Eevee
Quality	Photorealistic	Good quality
Speed	Slow (GPU recommended)	Fast
Reflections/Transparency	Full support	Limited
Main uses	Still images, high-quality CG	Animation, previews

• High-quality stills: Cycles + Denoising
• Animation: Eevee (or low-sample Cycles)
• Previews: Eevee

Choose the appropriate engine for your purpose and optimize settings for efficient rendering.