- [Zach] Welcome to the 14th video of the Blender 2.8
Beginners Tutorial Series. In this video, we will take a closer look at the EEVEE render
engine which we basically used all the time 'til
this point, but here we want to take a look at
all the settings we have, some nice effects we can enable, like this bloom glow
effect or depth of field, and then we will learn how
to export a final image. As always, you can find the timestamps in the video description below,
and if you want to follow along, you can sign up
to our resource section, free of charge, where you can download all the project files, textures
and videos for this tutorial series and our handy
Blender 2.8 shortcut pdf. Hi everyone, Zach here for CGBoost.com and let's get started. So, I'm in the camera view,
in the layout workspace and I disabled all the viewport gizmos, and the viewport overlays so we just see the final result here, and for setting up the lighting and materials and everything, we use the EEVEE realtime render engine. So first of all, I notice
that I accidentally left this area lamp in the scene. Let's select this and let's delete this. Then the first thing I wanna do, let's go to the scene, select the camera. Let's quickly enable the overlays. Here we have the camera. Go to the camera settings
and in the viewport display, enable limits. Why? I show you in a second. Let's enable depth of
field, and now if I would use the focus, we can
see this yellow cross over there and with this yellow cross, we define the focus because depth of field basically adds a blurry
back and foreground, and we can only see this area
near the cross as in focus. So let's take a look from
the camera perspective, and if I change the distance over here, you can see it pretty clearly. Let's move it closer towards the knife because this area is our main focus, and then we can play
around with the f-stop. So if I would use this, you can see the effect is really strong, let's disable the viewport overlays,
but then we can't see anything from the nice scene anymore. So I wouldn't make this too strong. So I think the default value
of 2.8 fits very nicely. And now let's go over to
the EEVEE render settings. First of all, we have
the samples over here. Sometimes we have a value
for render and for viewport. Viewport is basically
the value we see here live when we navigate
our view, and the render is when we output our final image. So, some of the effects
like the glossiness here or this contact shadow
is using the sampling which you can see by this noise, and when you move your camera around, and leave it still, then you can see that this effect needs a little while until you have the full quality, and if I set this to 64, you can see that this will be the final quality in the final rendering,
but for the viewport, since we wanna have a
fluid running viewport, we don't need that high values. Let's go over to Ambient Occlusion. Let's enable this and here you can't see a big difference, but when I switch over to the LookDev mode, you
can see it quite clearly. If I disable this, this adds
this nice contact shadow. When objects are very close to each other, then we have this shadow. We can also increase
the distance if we like, and this adds a lot of
realism, as you can see here, because now it looks
as if the light doesn't shine into these gaps
over here, and this works also in the rendered viewport shading, but since we have a lot of hard and dark shadows, we
can't see it that clearly. Anyway, we leave this enabled. Then let's enable the
bloom effect which adds this nice glow, but
certainly we don't want to have this effect to be so strong. So let's open up the
settings here and increase the threshold, that means
only the very bright areas have this little glow effect. You can also change the
radials here if you like, and some other settings,
and then let's also change the intensity a bit and this is what you need to know
about this right now. Then I also enabled
screen space reflections while we were working on the materials. This is disabled by
default, and as you can see, if this is disabled,
we don't have this nice refraction effect here in the water drops, and we don't have the
reflection off the objects here on the surface of the objects. So if I enable this again, you can see we have the nice refraction effects since this is enabled here as well, and we also have the nice
reflections in the objects. To have a better reflection
now for the rendering process, we can disable Half Res Trace to have a higher resolution in the reflections. The screen space reflection, if you enable it here, it will
work for all the objects, but the refraction will only work if you select an object, go to
the material settings, Settings and enable
Screen Space Refraction. This we already did for the drops. If I select one drop here, you can see this is enabled,
otherwise this won't work. Then let's take a look at the
shadow settings over here. Let's change the method to VSM which has a little bit better quality,
and then let's change the cube size here to
1024 pixels which adds a better quality to
the shadow and to avoid some shadow errors here and there, you can also click on this High Bitdepths and if you wanna have a little
bit more realistic shadows in your final image, you
can enable Soft Shadows. You can see if I move
around, this is flickering, but as soon as the camera is still, it's calculating the
effect and it's basically randomizing the rotation
of the shadow a bit, and blending this
together and then it looks like we have realistic soft shadow. You can see the result
with, and here without. So here we have much harder shadows, and soft shadow makes it realistic. So for the final EEVEE rendering, I leave this Soft Shadow enabled. Then let's take a look under film. If we wanna render the background here which don't has any objects
as transparent later on, we have to enable transparent over here. And here's also a nice little feature which can be quite important. For example, if I zoom in here, you can see at some
point here on the edge, the shadow disappears
which is basically outside of the frame, and to avoid
this for the final render, we can enable the overscan
and then this will add 3% of our final image to the frame around the image to have
the shadow calculated outside of the image so we see it here correctly inside of the image. So, if you do a EEVEE
render, I really recommend to enable this overscan. So, and the last thing I wanna do here under Color Management, Look. I set the Look to medium high contrast. By default this is set to none. You can see this looks
a little bit more flat, and with the look we can
increase the contrast, but I don't wanna have this too high, so let's use medium high
contrast which I like, and this adds this contrast
also to the realtime view here. And then we have stronger
colors here in the image. So one last final tweak here. You can see that shadow on this area looks a bit off, and that's because, let's select one of the area lamps. We have enabled the contact shadow. If I disable this, you
can see this disappears because the contact shadow
is not super realistic in terms of the depth, but I think for this specific lamp
here, for the white lamp, it's not really adding much to the scene. It's basically destroying the scene a bit because it adds this weird shadow. So in this case I disable
the contact shadow, and then the whole thing
looks way better, I think. So, now we have set up
all the render settings. Now let's go quickly over
to the output settings here. So here we can change the
resolution of our final image. It's a standard HD resolution right now. So in here I wanna have
a really high quality, so I increase the percentage to 200%. So this basically doubles
the resolution we have up here and down here we can also change the output settings, but here we just need to change it if we wanna
output an animation. If we wanna output a still image, we can also change it later on
while saving the image. So that means we don't need
to set up anything here, and now in order to render this image so that we generate our final image, we click on Render and
Render Image, or press F12. Before I do that, I
change the display mode to image editor because
otherwise Blender will open a new window where
the rendering shows up, but here I wanna have this
showing up in the same window, so I changed the display mode to image. So, before we render the image, there are three small things we have to change. First of all, the blade of the knife just appears in one color. So what I would do, I select the handle. We can enable the viewport overlays, press R X twice for
the rotation and rotate this just a bit so that we
can see the structure here, and what I just realized
when I zoom in here is that the knife is a bit out of focus. That means the focus of our camera is not exactly there where we want it. So, let's select the camera once again, go to the camera settings and change the distance and you can see that we now have the focus on the knife, but to make sure that's really the case, take a look from the side, enable
the viewport overlays, and then you can see this yellow
cross is now exactly here. That means this area will be in focus. So, and another small thing which I didn't mention earlier, let's
enable the drops once again. Let's select all of them and
move them to the side here. As you remember, we disabled
the collection over here. That means they won't
show up in the viewport. However, if I do a quick
render, click on Render, Render Image, you can see
that they will show up. So the question is how can we hide them for the rendering process? Let's hit escape to get
back to the 3D view, and what we need to do
first, up here click on this filter icon and
enable this camera icon. These are the restriction
toggles for the rendering because the eye only hides
objects in the 3D viewport. So I can hide the drops for the rendering. The problem is, if I render this image, you can see they are gone; however, they are also gone on the apples. And certainly, we wanna have them on the apples, but not over here. Let's hit escape and that's why we have to use a small trick. Let's open up the drops collection, then select the collection
and add a new one. You can see that a
sub-collection was added, and all we need to do now is
to select all the drops here, and move them into the sub-collection. The sub-collection is
visible for rendering, but the parent collection up here is not visible for rendering. Now, let's select an apple. Go to the particle
system, and under Render change the instance
collection to drops one and let's also do the same
thing for the cut apple. You can see now both of them have also the drops one collection and that means if I now click up here,
Render Image, or hit F12, you can see now it's
exactly how we want it. The drops are gone over here, but they still show up on the apples. The knife down here is now also in focus, and now we can save this image. As you can see, this took
roughly 13 seconds to render. This is not realtime, but you have to keep in mind we generated the image with a very high resolution,
and all the effects, the shadows, and so on also needs to be calculated with the full 64 samples, and this still takes a little while. So the final rendering
process is not realtime, but compared to cycles, as you will see later on, still super fast. So in order to save this image that you can use it
further in any photo editor or posted on social media, click on Image, Save As, or hit shift S, then up here you can choose your hard drive. Over here you can navigate
through your folders, and with this button you
can also create new folders. I created this render folder. Let's call this apple_scene_01 because we maybe wanna create more
of these renders later on, and then down here we can
change the image format. Right now you can see png is enabled. I would recommend to leave png enabled because it is a lossless format. That means when you save this image, you won't lose any quality, but you can also go with jpeg or
any other image format. Then the color we can set to RGB, that we only have the
color red, green and blue. If you wanna export
this with a transparent alpha channel, you have to choose RGBA and you have to check
the transparent option in the render settings under Film which I showed you earlier. Then if you wanna have the
highest possible quality, change the color depths to 16 bit. This is important if you
wanna post-process the image. That means change the color, contrast, and all this stuff later on
in an external image editor. If this is not the case, then eight bit is totally fine, so, if you wanna post it straight to social media
or something like that. So, in my case, I wanna have full quality, and then simply hit Save As Image. So, to go back to the 3D
viewport, simply hit escape, and don't forget to save the Blend file. And now, as you can see here, you can open this on your hard drive and do whatever you want to do with this image, and since we rendered this
in a quite high resolution, if I zoom in here, you can
see we have a lot of details. Hey guys, now you know
how to use the EEVEE render engine with all
the different settings we can set up, with all
the nice effects we can set up and you know how
to export the final image. If you enjoyed this video,
make sure to give it a like, subscribe to
this channel, and ring the bell underneath this video if you wanna get notified for future videos, and if you enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy our Blender
2.8 Launchpad Course where we will also make extensive use of EEVEE, and there we
will not only create a static image, there we will create a fully-animated 3D scene from scratch. Click on the link in the
video description below if you wanna learn more, and also check the free preview lessons
on the product page. Thanks a lot for watching, guys. Now check the next and final
video of this tutorial series where we will take a closer look at the more photorealistic
Cycles render engine. There we will take a look
at some important settings. We will adjust some things in our scene to work better with this
Cycles render engine, for example, the water
drops, and then we will render out an image
using this render engine and we will use some de-noising features to remove the noise from
this noisy Cycles render. So, don't miss this last video. I will see you there. Goodbye. (reverb synth)
