Eevee vs Cycles
Blender's real-time and path-traced renderers
Also known as: Blender Eevee · Blender Cycles · Eevee Next · Blender render engine · Blender which render engine
Definition
Eevee and Cycles are Blender's two main render engines. Eevee is a real-time engine that rasterizes the scene like a game engine, so it is fast and good for previews, stylized looks, animation and quick turnarounds. Cycles is a path tracer that simulates light physically, so it gives more accurate reflections, refraction and global illumination but takes longer and needs more samples to avoid noise. Both use the same materials.
In production
Use Eevee for quick look development, stylized and cartoon renders, and long animations, and Cycles for final stills, realistic glass and metal, and complex lighting. Many artists model and texture in Eevee and switch to Cycles for portfolio renders. Cycles runs on CPU or GPU, and denoising makes it much faster. Eevee in recent versions adds ray tracing options for better reflections and shadows.
Tools that use Eevee vs Cycles
See also
Principled BSDF
Blender's all-purpose PBR shader
Global Illumination
Light bouncing between surfaces
HDRI
High Dynamic Range Image lighting
Noisy Renders in Blender Cycles
Grain and white dots in Cycles renders
Cel Shading
Flat-shaded stylization
Bloom
Soft glow around bright pixels
Arnold Renderer
Maya's default path-traced renderer
Toolbag Ray Tracing
Marmoset Toolbag's GPU ray-traced renderer
Path Tracing
Physically accurate light with random sampling
Ray Tracing
Simulating light by tracing rays
Denoising
Cleaning noise from low-sample renders