About cages, why cant you : duplicate mesh take duplicated mesh turn it into a cage mesh, set it to render target done the duplicated mesh will have the same uvcoords because you were a smarty and unwrapped the original model before all of this.
On EEVEE vs Cycles, someone tried to port a scene from the Spring short film so it could be rendered on both engines, for comparing (there's an animated comparison in the link below as well) https://www.blendernation.com/2019/07/20/spring-comparing-eevee-to-cycles/
@wilson66 I am not familiar with the d-noise add-on, so I don't know what it used exactly. But any option naming OptiX sound like it would use the OptiX cycles rendering device. And for OptiX you need a card with Ray tracing cores, so any of the RTX series. If you use the denoiser compositing node on the other hand, that…
@f1r3w4rr10r I haven't used Alembic yet, but I've read it's great for when you need to render a mesh that's been through simulations and such (softbody physics, cloth etc.) that no format supports. Such a thing has been used on some Unity projects for example: -…
Saw this on BlenderNation, thought it was worth sharing. Cycles really is awesome! :) The real action starts about 20 seconds in and just gets better and better! [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJlwmvBQNfo"]Blender Cycles in action - Archviz (GPU Rendering) - YouTube[/ame]
Yeah, Blender tutorials always assume you're going to be making a free goofy cartoon film, with lots of emphasis on subsurf, rendering, and strange modeling techniques. I stopped posting on Blender forums because they kept telling me to crank up the subsurf AND antialiasing... >_<
2.61 is out with some REALLY big improvements. Totally new rendering engine, dynamic paint (like painting with particles), ocean simulation, and some new motion tracking tools. Release log and download: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-261/
As a long time Blender user (about 15 years) the move to 2.8 has been difficult for me - quite a sea-change - but I've been having great fun with the Grease Pencil tools and I'm loving the ease and speed of view-port rendering with Eevee.
I do have a really strong spotlight, maybe thats the problem? I'll PM you the scene in a second, it was already decimated for the render. Also I'm on a GTX 760, not the greatest card but still 40 mins seems like a long time for one frame.
This is one of the cool little things about 2.8+. Everywhere else I am aware of you either get no option to turn off filtering or there's a global switch (like in 2.79 and earlier) that renders every texture in view razor sharp looking in a headache-inducing way.