Better EEVEE Renders - Settings, Lighting, and Other Cool Tricks

hi everybody mr. Chiefs here now just like cycles ET renders can either look really good or they can look really bad in this video I want to teach you some things to get your renter's born on the really good side of that spectrum some of these tips can be used for cyclist but the main ones will be for Eevee so that's what we'll be using in this video without any further ado let's hop right into blender and improve those render skills you should all know this beginning part pretty well turn on ambient occlusion bloom and screen spaced reflections I find that turning up the ambient occlusion distance a little to something like 0.5 makes it look slightly better don't turn this up too much though or it starts to look weird the settings for bloom really depend on the scene you have if it's really bright you may want to turn the threshold down and decrease the intensity a little bit make sure that your bloom stays relatively small though definitely don't overdo it here as for screen space reflections turn on refraction and turn off half res trace I like to turn up the trace precision and almost everything but the rest of the settings here really depend on the scene you're trying to render I usually turn up the max roughness and the thickness a little bit believe the edge fading and the clamp at their default values for most of these settings I find it best to just get pretty close to whatever is the main reflective object in your scene and then tweak these until the reflections look close to what you're envisioning shadow settings are relatively universal the cube and cascade size will control the resolution of the shadow Maps so it will typically want to turn that size up when you render your image for higher resolution shadows high bit depth increases the quality slightly so I almost always turned that on as well the change isn't super noticeable but you can see it in small cavities and things of that nature I also leave soft shadows on as that does exactly what the name would imply the light threshold is an interesting value allowing you to define at what value a light object contributes to the scene I almost never increase this but I do sometimes put this down to zero so that all the light is coming in and absolutely none of it is restricted because evey does not use ray tracing sometimes light won't work the way you want it to if I get close to the Suzanne head here and to look close into the eye we can see that there aren't any shadows there something interesting that you can do to help with this is to go to the settings on your light object and enable contact shadows the few settings here can sometimes help out but I usually just leave them at their defaults looking close to the eyes again we can see that turning that on fixes the problem and here's one quick note to wrap up this section on the render settings the sample count is very important for making things look good the more samples you have the more your shadows will be calculated and the better your reflection will look as well because evey runs pretty fast I'd recommend matching your viewport sentinel's to the amount of samples you have in the render so you can see what the scene will look like when you render it out if you don't do this just remember that the jagged and bandi shadows in the viewport may not look that way in the render so long as you have a higher sample count let's talk about textures for a quick second these I've found can completely make or break your Eevee renders even more so than cycles I'm going to pull up a texture and apply it to this Suzanne here to show what I mean now obviously we can't just do a color like this so let's grab the rest of those textures to quick sidenote unless you're texturing a specific object you usually don't actually need a metallic map I know that these textures here are supposed to be metallic so low set the slider all the way to 1 if I look at this texture it's completely flat and will do the exact same thing as changing that slider so I'll just save on a little bit of performance and load times by not using that image now that tangent is over I'm going to tell you what I do for roughness Maps for anything that doesn't use color so metallic roughness and normal Maps I'll set the image to non color data then I'll add in a color ramp node and bring that over the roughness input like so and mess with these values to get a bit more contrast a lot of imported maps such as the ones you would download off of the Internet usually don't have too much of a difference in the values of the roughness map and I found that it usually looks a bit better if I just boost that with a color ramp this is without the color amp and this is with you have to be a lot more careful with your normals in Eevee than in cycles I'll show this with a normal map first and then we'll do a bump map as well I'll plug this into the normal of course and we get our height information if I change this slider to a higher value that's when the problems start to occur once I push this past a value of about 2 then things start to look really weird now if I switch over to cycles you can see that it doesn't look too strange over here but it definitely does in Eevee so for normal Maps keep that strength value low the same thing applies to bump maps but I want to show you a little trick with those 4 most official textures that you download from a place like CC 0 textures calm you will get a normal map instead of a bump map because in most cases they will be better but sometimes you'll find yourself trying to build an entire extra set from one single map which is usually the only situation where a bump map would get used at least in my case I would take this color and plug it into a bump node and then you can see that we get an even worse problem than the normal maps we can take the strengths down to something like 0.1 but it still looks kind of funny I'll add in a color ramp between the image texture and the bump node and take the strength of the bump back to one so I can clearly see where it is affecting then I'll slide these values around to get something like this and take the strength of the bump node back down to zero point one or point two and just like that we can get some height information without a full texture set and it doesn't look too bad in evey we can also plug this image into the roughness and use that color ramp trick and the material will actually start looking decent with only one image texture this right here is probably the most important part you can have good textures and you can turn on all the render features but none of that will come together and unless you have good lighting I'm not really a Thor ative figure on this subject and we could spend a whole video talking about this so I'm just going to link some good resources for that in the description down below I will give you one tip though and that is to simply emphasize make sure you have light on the things that you want the viewer to see but keep a few shadows in there for depth in addition to that try to get some nice light bouncing off of your objects to show off your roughness Maps there is one trick that I can show you to instantly make your lighting better hit shift a and add in a reflection cue map and an irradiance volume from the light probe area the reflection cube map will allow blender to calculate reflections up to the edge of site cube map the irradiance volume will calculate indirect light bouncing again inside of the light probe to demonstrate this I'm going to add in a cube make it a mint green light and move it close to our Suzanne head now you might think that it's bouncing light but that's just due to the enabled screen space reflections we aren't actually getting any light from this emissive cube which is made clear if I disable those screen space reflections if I make sure that both of these light probes are encapsulating both the monkey and the cube and go down to the indirect lighting drop-down then I can bake it now that that's done I can go back to the rendered view and we can see our reflections and indirect lighting because these have been calculated with the cube map we can see the reflections without the screen space toggle so it's a lot less fake of an effect and these ones are a lot more accurate if I click the button to delete the lighting cache we can see the reflections and the indirect bounce lighting such as the colored shadow disappear there are a few settings that we could change for this but I find that it's not exactly necessary to change these all that often if you have a super reflective object you may want to up the cube map size and you could also turn up the diffuse bounces to bounce even more light around the scene and for all you people who have made it to the end I have one last tip that will instantly put your renders far above everything else go to your camera settings set the f-stop to 0.3 and hide all the errors in your blend file without a huge amount of depth of field now let's take a quick look at how these two images compare with all the tricks that I've shown in this video if this helped you out and you like this sort of content make sure to go right down there and subscribe to my channel you'll get to see more helpful tutorials and you'll help me out too thank you all for watching and have a great day [Music]

Channel: Mr. Cheebs

Views: 52,572

Keywords: blender, blender 2.8, 3d, animation, tutorial, rendering

Id: 88ifDBHhkMY

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020