## The Falcon Renderer The new “falcon” renderer is a “uni-directional path tracer” which allows for long-requested enhancements to C3D’s output. The old renderer is still there for anyone needing to replicate the “look” of renders from earlier versions of C3D, or needing features that haven’t been brought forward into the new world. Also, in simple cases, the old renderer may be faster than the new renderer. ### Top Ten Reasons to Use Falcon 1. _Immediate_ render feedback on the whole scene (yes, it’s grainy, but you can quickly tell whether you need to do more tweaking). > **AI draft:** generated from the Cheetah 3D 8.1.1 manual; not yet reviewed by the author. 2. **Motion Blur**. And it’s free. (Note that motion blur only works when you render an animation, not a single frame. Its strength is set by the camera’s **Shutter time**, and the renderer settings let you turn camera, transformation, and deformation motion blur on and off separately.) > *End of AI draft.* 3. **Far less tweaking** required to get complex lighting effects working. You basically don’t need to use render tags at all. 4. **Radiosity/AO not needed**. Falcon is a physical renderer and does the right stuff automatically. No more weird corner artifacts and blotches. No more guessing error values. 5. **Cool, (formerly) expensive effects** — depth of field, blurred reflections, blurred transparency — you probably avoid because they slow down rendering and require huge amounts of trial and error _just work_ and are _free_! 6. Rather than guessing at quality settings you can just **set samples to 0** and let it render until you like what you see. 7. Generally, **realistic lighting setups work** and less fakery is needed. 8. **Changing the number of samples** (e.g. to render a quick animatic or test lighting samples) is a _single, simple operation_ that doesn’t require monkeying with multiple camera settings. 9. **HDRI lighting works better** (i.e. perfectly) in Falcon (e.g. it’s easy to get sharp shadows from a good HDR by setting clamp to 0). > **Note:** needs checking in Cheetah 3D 8.1.1: does a Clamp of 0 still mean “no clamping” on the HDRI Light? The manual warns against setting it too low. 10. **Be surprised by awesomeness** instead of glitches.