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I have set up a model in Blender and started refining material properties, lighting etc. around some imported geometry. It is looking good, but I would like a surface to represent the light scattering of woven carbon fibre.

I have found an example of a very good approximation, though I haven't yet fully figured out how it works. It works using Cycles renderer. When I switch to Blender's renderer in this project essentially nothing gets drawn (uniform grey).

However when I switch my model to Cycles renderer nothing (still uniform grey) also gets drawn. It seems like there is a fundamental difference in modelling strategy bewteen the two renderers.

  • How can I move from one technology to the other?
  • How can I know whether a technology I am trying to use is meant for one renderer or the other?
  • Would it make more sense if there were two versions of Blender built around each renderer and only exposing the features that work with each? Perhaps the differences aren't as large as I'm suggesting.

Edit: I think the bigger question here is how I can know whether some tool I'm using is or is not compatible with the chosen renderer. As per the comments it seems that the internal renderer is being deprecated and Cycles or eevee is going to become king, how can I know I'm using the technologies compatible with it, without trial-and-error, use it, change it, render, see what happens?

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  • $\begingroup$ Hi, I suggest asking those three bullet-pointed questions individually instead of in one post. $\endgroup$
    – Ray Mairlot
    Dec 14 '18 at 17:20
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, BI and Cycles are completely different. They use completely different rendering techniques, material systems, and lighting strategies. The carbon fiber material was originally signed for Cycles, and will not work for blender internal. Blender internal materials and cycles materials are not interchangeable, unfortunately. $\endgroup$
    – Linguini
    Dec 14 '18 at 17:20
  • $\begingroup$ Basically all modern tools and nodepacks are created for cycles. They usually state that they do, as well. $\endgroup$
    – Linguini
    Dec 14 '18 at 17:21
  • $\begingroup$ And response to your last question, blender internal render is being removed in the next major update, 2.8. It is being replaced with a modern real-time render engine named eevee, which will behave similarly and use the same material system as cycles. $\endgroup$
    – Linguini
    Dec 14 '18 at 17:23