K-Cycles 2024 with exciting features: Faster Rendering Performance for 4.0, New Lightgroups and Light Mixing, Outliner View, Presets and Improved Light and Shadow Linking (See Videos Below)!

New features for 4.0 and 4.1:

Ultra Denoiser GPU (4.1) – Huge speed up for denoiser mutli-pass and lightgroups (Check video below).

Ultra Denoiser GPU (4.1) – Automatically denoising of all the light and lightgroup passes before the compositor.

Performance Update – New faster core for K-Cycles (Check video below).

Ultra Lighting – New powerful Light Mixing with new outliner view and filtering (Check videos below).

Light Mixing – New with two modes for all the scene lights or lightgroups.

Light Mixing – Collection and individual control for visibility, solo, selection, exposure, color and white balance.

Lightgoups Mixing – Real-time presets and lightgroup mixing line control.

Light & Shadow Linking – Improve ease of use, accuracy and control.

What is K-Cycles?
K-Cycles is a highly optimized custom build of Cycles render engine, ultra lighting, post FX, ultra denoiser, camera settings, multi-camera render, camera override and realtime viewport lighting and effects for Blender. It is fully compatible with Cycles and designed for Nvidia GPUs. Features include:

Ultimate rendering performance for viewport and final renders.

Amazing Ultra Lighting the most powerful and complete lighting features for Cycles.

New Ultra Denoiser with the latest Intel denoiser technology and multi pass for clean and super sharp images.

Ultra Denoiser works inside Blender without needing the compositor and has great performance avoiding complicated compositor nodes.

Animation Denoiser uses the latest OptiX temporal denoising to improve animation render times.

Even faster renders using intelligent scene and settings optimizations preset modes with higher K-Cycles performance while still maintaining good image quality.

Amazing viewport Ultra Lighting, Post FX including BLOOM effects, FLARES with glare, anamorphic and ghosts, Tone Mapping and Lens effects that elevates your art to the next level.

Camera mode/override for Ultra Lighting, Post FX and Output Resolution.

Render Cameras for rendering individual cameras to the image editor or to automatically save file render.

All K-Cycles Ultra Lighting and Post FX effects are animation ready with all the settings fully keyable and with previews on the viewport.

The K-Cycles Ultra Lighting, Post FX effects can be done in the viewport or final render both in GPU or CPU.

Cycles image quality with less render noise.

Fully compatible with Cycles and all Blender addons.

Regular stable release and alpha builds updates with the latest features from the Blender.

One version optimized for both Optix, Cuda and HIP.

Easy to use without the need of changing Cycles settings for fast performance.

K-Cycles Performance
K-Cycle performance mode.

GPU Boost.

Global Illumination presets.

Sampling render presets.

Optimize viewport updates.

A set of Cycles performance features and options for improving the Cycles viewport and final rendering. The K-Cycles performance mode for maximizing the rendering time. GPU Boost controls Cycles GPU memory to help improve performance and memory usage. Global Illumination presets allow scene lighting settings for faster rendering or higher lighting quality. Sampling final render presets is the best way to control the render time, noise level and scene image quality. Reduce viewport updates for faster viewport rendering.

The performance chart below compares K-Cycles to the same Cycles build of Blender. Tests done with the default Cycles final render settings of noise threshold of “0.01” and samples of “4096” without denoiser.

Videos on K-Cycles Performance:

K-Cycles Performance Limitations:
K-Cycles will not improve time for scene loading, textures, synchronization, particle generation, BSP, or other pre-rendering calculations.

K-Cycles performance gains will be minimal at low render samples or high noise threshold above 0.05. In this case it is recommended to use “Ultra Denoiser” to improve scene texture and geometry detail, and image quality that requires considerably less render samples compared with the standard denoiser.

K-Cycles performance gains can not be guaranteed due to differences in graphics hardware, system configuration, render setting or specific scene issues.

K-Cycles Physically Based Light and Shadow Linking
Physically based Light linking per objects/collections.

Physically based Shadow linking per objects/collections.

Invert light linked objects/collections.

Lightgroup shadow casting.

The new physical based light and shadow linking. For the ultimate creative control of the lighting and shadows of the scene to bring your art to the next level.

Video on K-Cycles – New Physically Based Light and Shadow Linking:

K-Cycles Camera Mode/Overrides

Individual Ultra Lighting settings per camera.

Individual Post FX settings per camera.

Individual Resolution/Frame Range settings per camera.

Instantly switch between global scene settings or individual camera settings for Resolution/Frame Range, Ultra Lighting or Post FX by enabling the camera icon.

Ultimate control for all your K-Cycles settings per individual camera. Instantly switch in the viewport and final render from default global scene settings for Ultra Lighting, Post FX or Resolution/Frame Range to a per camera setting by just clicking on the “Camera Icon”. These adjustments are done in real-time without re-rendering. By duplicating cameras can explore multiple lighting and post fx variations of the same camera with instant comparisons. Allows full customization and artistic control of the multi-camera setup in the scene by just enabling the camera icon see below for the UI.

Video on K-Cycles Camera Mode Overrides and Render Cameras:

K-Cycles Render Cameras
Render All, Selected or Single cameras to the image editor or to save file render.

Animation is supported per camera.

Slot Auto to move the renders to the next image slot with a user setting for maximum slots..

Slot Naming adds the camera name to the image slot name.

Reset Slot Names to clear all the image slot names.

File Save options include relative path and increment.

File Save naming options to include camera and/or blend file name.

Easy to use and powerful multi-camera render to the image editor and/or file save. A great complement to the K-Cycles Camera Mode/Override with many features to quickly view and save the individual camera K-Cycles settings results. See below for the UI options:

K-Cycles Ultra Lighting
Interactive real-time viewport and final lighting workflow.

Ultimate Lightgroups features with ease of use.

Solo preview lightgroup mode.

Remainder lightgroup mode.

Compositor mode.

Complete accurate lighting setup.

Real-time light mixing for viewport and final render

Tone mapping per lightgroup.

Full and fast denosing for all the lightgroups.

Lightgroup shadow casting.

Light and shadow linking with many options.

The most complete and powerful lighting system for cycles. Lighting is critical in bringing your art to the next level. Using ultra lighting features like lightgroups, light mixing, light linking and tone mapping lightgroup with ease of use to get amazing lighting results. Fully denoise lightgroups layers to continue work in the compositor if needed.