EEVEE - The New Blender 2.8 Rendering Engine With Video Animation Demo

Repository

https://github.com/dfelinto/blender

Introduction

The new Blender 2.8 is in his final stage of development. A lot of new things comes with this project and I have already made a post covering some of the most important features in Blender 2.80. Worth to notice that the available builds are unstable. Do not use them on any important files.

This year Blender conference was on October 25-27, in Amsterdam. A three days event with a lot of presentation and speakers from the Blender community. I’m still struggling watching all the videos from the event. There is a lot of them. Until recently there was a version of Blender called 2.8 alpha 2. Now, there is a version called Blender 2.8 Pre-Beta. Slowly going for the Beta. The official released date is scheduled for early 2019. From all these versions, one can tell that there is a lot of work done around Blender. Great job from the team and all the people working on it.

EEVEE

One of the most important new features is the brand new EEVEE rendering engine. Real time renders of the scenes are displayed with EEVEE. You can do edits directly in the rendered scene. This was unimaginable before. Every little tweak that you made to your scene, material, lightning is immediately shown in the scene. You can see it instantly, all in a responsive real-time engine.
One of the goals of EEVEE is to replace the Blender Internal renderer with real-time rendering techniques.

All the material nodes are supported. The most popular choice for shading is the Principled BSDF node. This is in part because of how “PBR” friendly this node is. Game artists are already familiar with the PBR workflow thus making it straightforward to setup good looking materials with existent PBR textures.

The most practical and nice thing when working in the new Blender 2.8 is checking out the final look of the model. I work on the model, do some sculpting, apply the material and want to check how does the final render look. Before you needed to go in cycles and switch from object to rendered mode. Cycles then need some time to clear out the render, starting for a very noisy render. Half a minute passes until this is done.

Here is the video I have made, rendered with EEVEE.

Hope you enjoyed the animation

I must say I have gone through a lot of trouble rendering this video. I had a couple of tries, and in the previous versions there was a volume scatter shader adding a fog and volumetric in the scene. I like this feature very much and find it cool. But I just couldn’t get the lightning done to my content. Some part was good, some bad, some dark, another one light. I made some adjustment, and they didn’t work as well, and in the end decided to go without the fog. One night of rendering down to the drain :).

Also, I would like the scene and the elements to be more compatible then this. In the end, since it is for testing purpose in an experimental environment, and not a final product, I decided to leave it as it is. As they say it is about the journey, not the goal. The rendering time is huge as well. This animation took me days.

I think I did my classic mistake and wanted to do too much, to early. So, lesson learned and for the next animation, a max of 30 seconds animation, with a low poly models. That is the way to go in this new environment. At least for user with my knowledge and experience.

The basic idea of the scene is something like an Indiana Jones scene, with a cave and mystery object in the middle, which is guarded by the keepers around it. And if something is touched everything goes wrong 😊.

The scene is composed form couple of elements. The floor is basically a plane, with a simple cycle material on it, that is giving it a rough yellow grey look.
The walls are sculpted with multiresolution modifier. Than the details are added using textures as brushes. Because they are high poly I have baked the normal map, and a pointiness map, a sort of cavity map, and then added to the low poly. A color is then added from a mix node.

The statue is actually a high poly model, copied five times and arranged in a circle shape, to make them look like guardians.
The lighting is done with an area lights with different color and intensity for more interesting look.

Since I mentioned the previous version of this animation, with the volumetric effect included, here are some photos of that scene.

The images are not bad, and the rendered stills were ok as well. But when composed and animated it was not looking good. It was to dark.

New workflow with EEVEE

From the experience working in EEVEE this couple of months, I can tell that is much better as a working environment. Having the possibility to see the rendered scene, to go trough it, easy and fast is a great relief. There is no need to jump from object to rendered mode, and then wait in the rendered mode to see at least a decent look of the scene. Now the whole scene is rendered, and you can freely move around it, and adjust things. This is a great improvement.

I have already peak up some new workflow thanks to EEVEE. Here it how it goes.

Do the main work in object mode. Building the scene, sculpting, arranging the objects. Next, switch to EEVEE rendered preview. The scene is instantly rendered. Here you can additionally go and make changes in the rendered EEVEE mode, but I must say it is not as fast as in object mode. Making some slight changes while in EEVEE rendered mode is preferred. This means building the scene in object mode, checking it in EEVEE rendered mode, make some slight adjustment there, come back again in object mode, do some bigger adjustments, check it again in EEVEE, slight adjustments. Repeat.

Also, my impression in this moment is that cycles is still a better rendering engine for the final product. This can vary a lot, and depends on the type of the scene etc. But EEVEE is maybe more like a working and preview environment. This is my first impression when rendering animations.

Here are some GIFs for editing in real time with EEVEE.

Adjusting the position of the models

Editing the model with proportional editing tool while in edit mode

All the photos are taken from my working environment in Blender.

All the best
@dalz

Resources:

• Blender.org/2.8
• Blender developer page
• Blender developers YouTube channel
• Blender Conference 2018 Keynote by Ton Roosendaal
• Zacharias Reinhardt YouTube Chanel
• Wiki

Series Backlinks

• The New Blender 2.80 Alpha 2 – Leading the way for the open source 3d graphics industry
• A Model Created In Blender, Using Detail Sculpting With Dyntopo
• Sculpting In Blender With Dyntopo – My First Decent Model
• Node Setup For Blender Cycles Material
• Setting Up Gradient Texture In Blender Node Editor
• Pointiness Future in Blender Node Setup – Give Shape To YourModel
• Moss, Snow, Dirt or Just Creating Variations in Blender - Node Setup With Normal Map