Blender Tutorial | EEVEE : Getting Started

the Eevee viewport the blender is now available for very early testing once you've got it working it's a lot of fun to try it out however there are a few things I think you should know which hopefully will make your experience with it a little more pain free we've got real-time PVR shaders we've got volumetrics and we've got volumetric shadows we've got reflection spears and well the whole load of reflections actually we've also got a bucket load of post-processing and more so we'll go over where blender is up to with it so far to get blended 2.8 with this Eevee rendering engine let's head over to the blender.org download page and we'll click on this download here and hey look at that it's a space render from globalized space VFX course so now I fight back the tears of pride and joy and scroll down to the bleeding edge section click download experimental builds and over here you can see some blender 2.8 downloads choose the blender 2.8 for your system for me I'm going to choose this one since I'm on windows 64-bit and once downloaded we can unzip it and click the blender Exe file then we'll be transported to the magical land of 2.8 so aside from these basic objects that I've added into the scene your version of blender 2.8 might actually look a little bit different to this and that's just going to be due to the rapidly evolving nature of blender 2.8 right now and especially up at the top might be looking a little bit different and it's up at the top that I wanted to draw the attention initially anyway since we have our rendering engine pulldown left and as you can see Eevee is set as default and if we click on this we can see we've also got an option for clay so let's just take a quick look into our clay rendering I'm going to pull out the properties sidebar here you can see our rendering tab has changed and it's essentially kind of our solid shading view or kind of matte caps with benefits if you like since if we click on our clay collection material preview here you can see this is reminiscent of all those that we saw in earlier versions of blender in the madcap settings and if we can click on any of these to just change what we see here I'm just going to stick with this very flat diffuse looking clay render though and if we take down our cavity strength to 0 and our edge strength to 0 this is basically what we had before the samples aren't going to be doing anything right now they smooth out the settings we've just turned but now we can just concentrate on what's happening with these top four sliders you can see we can rotate around the lighting that is suggested by this matte cap and we can see we can shift the hue the saturation and the value in fact this is kind of quite interesting because we can take the value write down say something like almost right down to the bottom and then we can set our edge strength up to say one i mean fat let's crank that right up let's go way way up like 30 or so let's increase our sample since it's looking a little bit specula there so I'm going to take that up quite high something like 100 or so and now we kind of have this very very cool worn edges kind of a look to our very hard objects anyway and this isn't dependent on geometry which means if we tap into edit mode press W and subdivide a few times you can see the size of our edges the distance they spread is not being affected whatsoever I only mention this because the point in this node that is available to us in cycles can be used to create these kinds of effects but it is kind of limited based on the topology that we've got in that object for the kind of worn edge distance sizes that we get so here I'm subdividing this object and hit f6 to bring up the tool settings and increasing the number of cuts and that's informing the size of those worn edges but here we have a different setting and this is going to be the same distance for cavities and edges I don't know whether they're going to split that up at one point and since this distance affects both of these let's turn the cavities back on the trouble is though we can't really see the dark on dark so to have the cavity show will lighten the overall value when we increase the cavities value we can definitely see them now basically this is our ambient occlusion or darkness in the corners or creases or well of course cavities as the name might suggest what would be pretty cool is if we could break that out then we can create the sort of convexity map that we could use to blend textures together scratch textures for the edges and grime and dirt textures in the cavities for example as we might do in 2.79 with the point in its node so something that needs to really be stressed is this is very early days in the development so things are buggies and things are missing for example there is no toggle shading with the Zed key hit that sucker all you like and the only place you'll get it doing anything is in ye oldie blunder ender so if I hit a red key now you can see we can toggle that wireframe elsewhere though there is no wireframe so let's get back over to Eevee rendering and try a Zed key there and again no wireframe so before actually opening 2.82 try this out I suggest setting up a basic scene in a regular build of blender first or in other words two point seven eight or two point seven nine for example I wanted to import an FBX but was met with nope so I would bring your models in and then build up your materials in two point eight so here's the default basic scene content that I've exported from Unreal Engine 4 I did this in blender 2.79 and now I've opened it up in two point eight and now that we're back into play we need to talk about PBR just for a few seconds so for good results in a PBR setup we need an environment to reflect and the easiest way to get started is to just use an environment texture for the world material so here I have the node editor we're set to not show the object material but the world material here I have this basic set up which is an environment texture which is this HDR here that I've baked out of Unreal Engine just the default sky and we can see that in the background of our viewport here oh and a quick tip and if we press n to open up our properties sidebar here and scroll down to world background you can see toggling this doesn't really have any effect if you want to set up your own manual toggle I'm just going to create it a few nodes down here which will help so if I just bring these up if we just have our world output come out of this mix shader' here and let's plug this background into the first socket there you can see I'm just using this mixed shader and I'm using a light path node and it is camera array output into the factor so if it's seen by the camera we're just going to use this black color so we could change this to whatever we want and then otherwise for the rest of the scene it's going to be reflecting our actual environment texture I'm going to select this mix shader and alt D just to pop it out though and now we're back to where we were with that alright to explain more I've rearranged things around a little bit in the node window we're still looking at our world material so I'm going to switch that over to the object material and I have the chair selected at the moment I've gone ahead and set up the textures for this material in a similar way to how they're set up in the default Unreal Engine 4 content so although this material might look a little bit crazy it's actually pretty simple on all we need to focus on right now is this metallic shader so this is one of the PBR shaders that we have in Eevee is one of two main types if I go shift a and take a look at the shader options here we've got the metallic shader and we've got a specular shader we just click that up it's basically very equivalent but you do need to author your textures differently to get these two to give equivalent results and if you're familiar with the principal PBR shader that we've already done a brief video on then you're actually already familiar with the metallic workflow and also if you've done any work in Unreal Engine 4 that favors the metallic workflow so to keep things simple we'll just be using the metallic shader here so with that I'm just going to delete this guy so something that's really cool with Evie is we can work with our shader but also you can see I'm branching out from these texture nodes into this principal shader up at the top and that means we can switch over to cycles rendering and now this stuff will take over but all our texturing is still the same there's a little problem right now though which is if we switch back over to Evie you can see that there is actually a little bit of support for this principal shader and this material output and it's actually ignoring this material output at the moment so for example if I control left-click across that you see everything's gone black even though we're in Evie and we have this material output working fine so what we want to do is want to actually just for the moment delete that and just use this one material output so I'm going to look so I'm going to hook that up to the surface output and now you can see we've got something happening again but that means when we switch back over to cycles we're not going to get anything happening here for the moment anyway this might be resolved I think the intention is to have all these shaders be as cross-compatible as possible so I'm just going to bring this material output down here duplicate it with shift D and then hook this one up Rob here and then when we select this material output it's this principal shader that we'll see in the viewport and then what we can do is switch back to Evie select our material output here and now it's going to be giving us our metallic shader and that's really cool I think this will be more streamlined in the future and a bit more effortless to switch but during this little cross shader pollination exercise eagle-eyed among you may have just spotted something weird with this chair which is in evey it looks kind of like it's this frame is all inflated somehow but in cycles and if we switch back up and select it there it looks far more angular and it's using the same normal map as you can see here it's branching off from there so let's switch back over to evey for the moment and then select our material output here and just for full disclosure let's take a look at what this normal map is actually doing we have our normal map here at the start of the chain this is exported out from Unreal Engine 4 I've got it set to non color data that's coming into these few nodes here's into normal map from Unreal Engine 4 it's going to need the Y Channel inverted or in other words the green Channel so that's what this is doing and we saw it worked in cycles so we'll just move along here into the normal map node and then into the normal socket of our two shaders depending on what engine were using but yeah it's all inflated so what's going on well this leads back to a huge current limitation which is the fact that none of the modifiers are supported so we don't have any array modifier bevel subdivision armature so on and so on and edge split now if we come over to our mesh data tab you can see we're set to auto smooth the whole object has been smoothed we can tap into edit mode we can go ctrl F and shade smooth that way or we can just press T while we're in object mode so I'm going to hit the tab key and then we have our smooth shading there let's tap back into edit mode though close that tool shelf at the T key if I deselect everything with a you can see this cyan line which is indicating where we want all our sharp edges to be let's control left-click across that normal there so we just get to see the native normals of the object and you can see if we tap back into object mode they still look all very inflated it's clearly ignoring our sharp edges even though we have our auto smooth on and even though we've painstakingly created all these sharp edges and because of the modifier issue we can't come over to the modify it and bring in our edge split as a backup so let's delete that so what's actually going on here is a little more relevant generally whether it's come from Unreal Engine 4 or not and that's simply because this object should have different normals to start with which is why our normal map isn't working properly so let's plug that back in if we tab into edit mode the bits where we have these cyan lines the shading and the normals across there should be very flat so let's go through and see if we can select one of these sharp edges like this one here in fact I'm going to turn on the gizmo just click on it here or use control space press G to move one of these at this one G just to move that one then go shift G to select similar sharpness and now we have all those sharp edges selected and now I'm basically just going to rip them with the V key so I'm going to press V and right click to cancel any move so what that has done is if we just get one of these edges again you can press G and we've now got double geometry at those edges but we now have the correct shading and you can see now the normal map is looking correct on this object again so I'm going to undo that with control Z and we're just going to move over to the middle where I've actually already gone ahead and done that with all the objects for that default unreal engine scene one of the more notable changes in the interface is the addition of viewport post-processing options over in the properties window so let's take a look on our rendering tab here and this is what we're talking about the post process stack at the top of that stack we have ambient occlusion let's enable this and then we have our ambient occlusion in the scene now this is quite similar to what we're used to shadowing that you get in parts of geometry that you would expect not as much light could reach but this time around we have some slightly different options and a different way in which blender is trying to calculate this for us and we have the samples down here if we set that down to say - you can see we get some very very spotty looking computed occlusion dots if you like but if we set that back up to sort of 30 or so smooth it right out the distance is the sort of spread of it and the factor is how intense that shadowing is as for the bent normals here if we uncheck that you can see it's not making a massive amount of difference in this scene so let's hop over to another scene and see if we can illustrate the difference there a little bit better here I have a part of this mech which is also from Unreal Engine 2 content by the way and we have a simple metallic shader here if we set this all the way up to 1 and toggle our bent normals option over here you can see pretty much nothing is going to change so we're going to need to have an unlit Alec object to be able to see this do anything just zoom in a little bit over year so this is with our ambient occlusion enabled and with bent normals on with it switched off we get this and then on and then if I just keep on toggling now the idea behind this is to correct overly shiny parts of the geometry or at least that's my basic understanding of it anyway and if we take a look over here with it switched off you can see we have quite a large amount of light coming through if we switch our bent normals on it shades it a little bit darker Here I am back in the table and chairs seen just to be able to demonstrate the next thing on our post-processing stack which is the motion blur setting so for this we're going to need a camera with some animation information on it which here I've just simply animated it pulling away from the table and chairs on the x-axis you can see it's that's nice and slow goes to its maximum speed and then slows off again toward the end go to be able to see the effect let's jump into the camera with zero on the numpad you can see we're roughly where it's at its fastest and we can see we're getting a little bit of blurring on the on our objects there let's just clean the view up by just setting it to only render you see that we still get the 3d cursor though so you might need to click that out of the scene but otherwise there we are we've got our blurring and we've got some simple settings here the shutter is just going to be help pronounce that effect is and then maybe if we increase the shutter there we might need some more samples to help clean it up but I think the setting of around 16 and one is pretty good for me so currently if we're just kind of looking around and moving the viewport and so on you can see we don't really see any motion blur we're going to need to be inside our camera and something else to note is if we press alt a from the camera view you can kind of see this rectangular yellow outline of the camera that might kind of spoil a render and there's our 3d cursor as well so let's click that out of the way and as for that rectangular line if we just simply select something else like this chair for example which I've just done it seems to get rid of the outline for that camera next up in the post-processing stack is the depth of field let's enable that and we're going to need our camera again so let's press 0 to hop into this new position that I've placed it just to give us more depth in the lens currently as you can see the chair closest to us is nice and sharp and then the rest of the scene is all blurry we do have some depth of field settings here but we can pretty much just leave those at because most of the important depth of field settings is going to be found instead on a camera itself so if we just make sure that selected and come over to the camera settings you'll see I've got the distance set to 1 and the f-stop does need to be pretty low to be able to get this kind of effect and we can simply push the distance to change what we're focusing on so if we just focus towards the stuff that's in the background there we're going to need to go above say maybe 15 and then if we want to increase the region that is in focus we want to increase our f-stop so if we just do that there most of the scene now looks like it's in focus again so just to enhance the effect I'm going to take that really low to something like 1 now you might be able to see pretty much the limitations of this effect at the moment so areas where we've got all geometry with geometry in the background it's blurring quite nicely but with geometry towards an infinite plane I guess in our background here where it's just a texture we get these sharp transitions so if you wanted to use this effect in real time maybe that's something to consider it with the way you go about your scene construction perhaps simply having a sphere with the texture run in the background would actually account for that okay so I've switched everything off in our post-processing but the next thing we've got down here is the balloon setting which is a lot of fun let's take a look at the settings that we have here right now the threshold is set quite low that means almost everything in the scene is going to have a little bit of bloom applied to it as we increase this only the brighter things in the scene are going to have this bloom effect take place so let's bring that back down so that almost everything in the scene feels like it's blinding us this new value if we set that down to zero my understanding of this is simply all the values above this threshold value are basically getting the bloom effect but with this new value we can kind of soften that transition between it not being bloomed and it being bloomed so somewhere around the middle is where it's at by default and it seems fine to me and the radius is the size of this balloon that we get and the intensity is well the intensity so we can really really burn our eyes out with this thing so let's set that back down to say something a bit more manageable like one take the radius down a little bit and put the threshold up and now we just get a little bit of a nice bit of glare on this very bright section there which seems to fit in this scene ok all right let's take a look at some volume metrics this is pretty on stuff we just need to enable it here and nothing happens we'll get to the bottom of that in a second first of all just want to explain what's going on here just a bunch of asteroid assets from the space V effects course it's been sprinkled about the scene and I've also got this environment texture this space skate part ADHD are from the same course I'm just going to hook that into the background so we've just got something hanging about in the background of those asteroids still no volumetric so because we need a shader for that so I'm going to go shift a and bring in the volume scatter shader drop that in and then plug this into the volume of the world output and then that turns off all the lights because basically our atmosphere is incredibly thick with the density of one so if we take that down stations like 0.1 now some of the light is coming through and what's very cool about this is that we also have kind of shadows coming from the objects if we have our shadows option enabled and another important couple of seconds here is the start and end if this is set at 100 it pretty much obscures anything that you might have as an HDR coming into your background node there so we're going to want to have this down a little bit so for example if I put that down to 20 it's going to reveal a lot more of the background in a similar way as just increasing the density so you can kind of play those two settings off each other I'm going to leave that at around 50 and take a little spin around and just sort of see how our volume metrics are working in the scene something that's pretty cool is the color of this volume scatter has an effect as well as you can see there and if I bring that back over to here you can see also the anisa trophy will have an effect as well so we can take that down to minus 1 or +1 to get some intriguing effects in a very similar way to how the cycles volume scatter works I think it will be really amazing if we can actually use this volume scatter not just on the world but on individual objects I guess all that sort of stuff will be coming even in the meantime I was really surprised to see that already we can hook a noise texture if we use our object coordinates into the density setting and that will essentially just create an entire source of cloudscape that we can fly through if you just pepper along the track some point lamps so I've got some point lamps set to an energy of 20 and then here I'm using the full range that we've got available I guess that's from one blender unit away it's going to star and then stop 100 blender units away so if we hop into our camera and press alt a you can see what I've animated here running pretty slowly about almost 4 frames per second well that still impresses me quite a lot considering what's actually having to be rendered here and what's also cool is we can just take one of these lamps and then we could animate the position of this if we wanted to which we'll get some really interesting results and then also animate any of these settings for that matter so if you get some really really cool and interesting things going on I haven't enabled volumetric shadows though in this particular example since that seems to clog things up just a bit too much but I do remain hopeful that we can do some very interesting things with individual objects and not just the world coming soon okay so it's sci-fi corridor shiny time so we've got some reflections down here which aren't enabled at the moment right now it's just reflecting the environment texture you can throw anything on here really and we'll get some sort of reflections and also I'm going to enable volumetric we've got the volume scatter shader they're plugged into our volume let's go over to the object materials every object in the scene has this material on it I haven't even unwrapped everything it's just taking the object texture coordinates I could use this to scale them up or down if I wanted to what otherwise it's just going into an image texture with a blend value cranked up after we've set it to box mapping and we've got it also going into the base color and into the roughness but I'm using color amps just tweak the contrast of that now it's almost metallic but not quite and I've done that for a reason which I'll go over very shortly now this is just the geometry itself at the moment but I did add a load of lights into it so I'm just going to do that now by enabling those and that will help sell the volumetrics as well once we turn those lights on you can see them starting to reflect in various areas and we're starting to get a bit more grounded in the scene and I've also added in some mesh lights as well so if we just enable that layer you can see you've got some lights on the walls and these kind of circular areas but we aren't seeing any reflections from those and there's kind of two ways to go on this you could go with the screen space reflections or we could go with the light probe reflections here so for example I've got a couple of probes there we just enable that you can see we now the circular area here you can that starting to reflect in different areas on the wall these won't be perfectly placed reflections but to sell the vibe and trick the eye that this space is reflecting onto itself those probes are doing a pretty good job where if we just turn off those probes for the moment and now we'll turn on our screen space reflections alright so this is looking pretty good we've got this circular area here clearly reflecting I think if we look up to the ceiling area as well we can see some of it reflecting there but we are still getting a massive amount of the environment texture so for that I'm going to want to come over and probably reduce this down a lot more something like 0.2 in this case for this scene and then it's a case of just tidying up our settings just to get whatever it is that we're after but I think that's looking pretty good to go all the settings let's jump into a way simpler scene to make it as obvious as possible what these settings are doing first a couple and outs for screen space reflections we can actually animate them a little bit for example if I press G on this here you can see the reflections are actually changing although this clearly you need to be a little bit careful with what you do with that in fact screen space reflection isn't particularly ideal for this kind of reflection it's sort of mirror like surface we do actually have a light probe to handle this sort of stuff a reflection plane however I'm kind of just setting it like this just to really illustrate what's actually happening so let's zoom in a little bit on this green cube over here and take a look at our first set in the half res trace basically this option is whether to make it easier on the processing by simply using half of the resolution of what we see on screen instead of the full resolution and we're using four samples in fact that's the maximum setting at the moment we've only got between one and four to choose from a note from the developer Clement volcko is that half resolution trace on as we have it here and samples of four that's basically equivalent of having this switched off and samples of one however it's with the half res trace on with four samples that should run slightly smoother even though they are pretty equivalent so technically though although more taxing on the system taking the half res trace off and having maximum samples should give us the best-looking results but maybe not the fastest for our frame rate staying nice and smooth and the viewport there trace quality the next setting down this is basically just the quality of the effect and lower values and noisier around the perimeter of the reflected shapes just check out around this area here for example and as we increase this that's just going to reduce the noise they're very very high values Doce around zero point nine five and above tends to clip it a little bit so here it'll make the cube look a bit shorter in the reflection but our setting around zero point nine seems to be perfectly fine when the maximum roughness a value of one is doing nothing and this is going to depend on the roughness values of the materials in the scene so for example with this green cube we've got roughness at zero point six and we've got a roughness of zero point two on the blue cube so let's just position the camera so we can see a little bit of screen space reflections happening in both of these objects and as we drop this below zero point six we're going to start to lose things in the green object just around there once we get down below zero point two for the blue object since that's set to zero point two roughness we're going to see the screen space reflections reduced there as well so as I say a value of one and that's basically switched off the thickness setting is a value used to know when array has hit something in a practical sense higher values include more into the reflections for edge fading we're not using any edge fading at the moment and you'll probably notice at the edges of the screen we have this hashed cut off let's zoom in a little bit closer so we can see on either side and to smooth this out we've got this edge fading option here so as we increase that we're just going to be able to blur across that and hide the severity of what's going on there so the size of this fade is going to depend on the size of the screen so when you zoom in your camera in on things you're going to notice your reflections change in a little bit so just bear that in mind things in a very very middle of the screen though should have full reflection and finally we've got our clamp setting down here a value of zero and this is doing nothing and a value of about 100 or so in this scene even isn't going to do anything in fact it's only once we get down below one where it's going to start to reduce the brightness that you get to see in your screen space reflections as you can see about there now the usefulness of that in the higher contrast area sometimes it appears noisier so we can kind of reduce that by playing with our clamp there in a lot of cases or we're going to need some reflection probes so let's take a look at them in this different scene here just a load of mirror-like surfaces you can see it's fully metallic please smooth and that's the case for all these if we just peek around the corner though I have this red cube which is just not at all metallic and it's a little bit rough so let's come back over to this area first to start in between these cubes here and let's get ourselves some reflections so let's start off with a light probe let's try a reflection plane and I'm going to press G and then Z and just lift it up ever so slightly and then just as it pops in there you can see that we get our perfect mirror shine we only get our mirror reflections in the boundaries of this reflection plane though so if we press s the scaler up is going to cover the area we want it to the problem is if we're only seeing the data from the actual reflection plane we're not actually seeing the floor anymore so if we come over to this little radiation circle here and come down to our display area if we uncheck show data we can now see the actual geometry of our scene with the reflections on there now something to note on this if we select this main object which takes up most of the room here reflection planes don't support roughness so as we increase this you can see it just basically fades it out and so if we set up at down we'll get them back the cool thing about this reflection plane of course is that it does give us a really good opportunity for some animation and let's reselect our reflection plane here we'll take a look at some of these simple settings in the display area we've already seen what show data does and the influence if we just zoom out a little bit the influence is just this visual representation of the fall-off and the distance so we can turn those up if we want to just have a plane and of course the arrow size is whether we want to increase the size of the arrow or shrink it right down so the influence itself if we increase the distance it now means surfaces that might be as high as this distance that we've stretched it to can actually now use the data from here so if we go shift a add a mesh plane right up there and then let's move it off to the side let's give it a new material and let's make this like a mirror as well all the way metallic and all the way down on the roughness and let's take a look and you can see we're getting although it's not an accurate reflection from this high we can actually see some of the data from that reflection plane so let's delete that plane and we can reselect this reflection plane let's take that down a little bit something more like one in a lot of cases you're probably just going to want to use this but just literally a mirror or a very shiny floor in which case of course the distance is probably going to be best if we keep it really really low if we go back over to our screen space reflections and enable this you'll see it kind of looks a bit crazy but blender knows to use the more reliable reflection plane in the area that we can use it it's very cool that this stuff can work well together so a lot of these objects are very metallic and we're not really getting any problems in this reflection plane well let's delete it with X key and let's add in a reflection cube map instead and you can see we get a lot of black in the scene let's just raise that up slightly and if we take a look at the data so let's come over to this radiation symbol and we can see if we toggle our show data that's this little sphere that we get which shows us what it's using as its reflections you can see all these black areas if we select the geometry and we bring our metallic value down a little bit and now if we just wrestle X our probe which gives us these spherical outlines that we can select and if we press G just a nudge it slightly it'll update and you can see now that it's no longer completely metallic we can see some reflections that aren't black now you can see that there's no green and blue cubes in the reflections and that's due to our clipping value being a little bit higher what you might be able to tell that we probably don't really want the green and blue cubes on these back walls and also a lot of our reflections are bending in so in a more organic environment this might be okay and that's due to the fact that we're set to sphere if we set this to box instead for this kind of architectural like environment this is probably a much more suitable and you can see we're now getting more vertical lines but let's set our clipping value down really low like 0.1 and then press G and just nudge it a little bit and you can see now we get our green and blue cubes showing up but it does kind of look a little bizarre on the rest of the walls there so that's when playing with our clipping value might really help us out so let's create another one these press shift D to duplicate it and let's press Y to just slide it over onto here this side let's press s to scale it down and we want another one of these reflection boxes I guess we should say to cater for this side of the map so let's just scale that back up again and although I used shift D to duplicate it has actually created an instance I can see the number 2 over there and it does look like it's just using exactly the same data from there so let's let's try clicking on this number 2 and press G just nudge it to see if anything happens and not a lot is so I'm going to place the 3d cursor over there delete this one with the X key and then throw in another reflection cube map and see if we can get something which looks a little bit different and then we do so we can see our little red cube shows up now and if we come over to this one we're still using the older reflection mapping which is what we want for this area so let's just come back over to this side and we'll set that one to be a box as well so you may be able to tell by now that these reflection cube maps the idea behind these is to place them around the scene with a little bit of overlap so that you get the coverage that you need they're not going to be completely perfect reflections as you can see over there but we just need just enough to basically fake it so what happens with to an object that is in the intersection between two of these reflection cube maps let's just test that out let's grab this green cube shift D to duplicate it shift Z to move it in between without moving it up and down and let's get rid of the green material out it's going to select that there and just hit the minus button and then we've got the mirror material on there and what I'll do is grab this red cube over here and I'm going to just kind of stretch it out using the scale to also S and then X and then something similar here G and then shift Z F and then X let's select both reflection cube Maps press G just to jilt them a little bit and then right mouse button to cancel that move and now we've refresh them essentially so what we want to see in this cube here is a little bit of red which we can see there and we also want to see a little bit of green as well and we know that it's picking up both details there so let's select this cube press G and then shift Z and we'll push it away so it falls outside of the reflection cube map zone and you can see now it's only using the reflection cube map from over here going to do that the other side as well so we're getting a little bit of red in there G and then shift Z and then we'll just see this fade out as well and as it goes into that reflection zone and out of this one and that fade can be tuned with fall-off one last thing I'd like to take a look at on this reflection cube map is the use custom parallax option let's delete this green object and press shift F and let's move in into this corner of the geometry and check out the reflections of this checkerboard pattern in the floor here as we can along you can see the reflections don't really stick to where you would expect them to be and that's what we have this custom parallax option for so if we enable that and instead of having these curved lines and you're going to select the box option and now if we pan across here you can see that the almost akin to position if we just find you in our size I think we need to take that down a little bit to about there in this case and now as we slide across now you can see that it seems to fit a lot better let's jump into this basic scene to demonstrate the last light probe that we have here that a radiant volume and the tooltip tells us that the irradiance probe is going to capture some diffuse indirect lighting if we're unsure as to exactly what that is we can check out cycles as a path tracer and it does have indirect bounces in it and each of these objects has two sets of shaders on one which is going to kick in four cycles which is this principal shader which has basically the same settings as the metallic shader up above which is what Evie is using so let's take our rendering options and switch over to cycles and if we take a closer look in here you can see on the side of this cube we've got some blue lighting from this cube and we've got some red lighting coming in from this cube as it bounces if we switch back to Evie you can see you're not getting any of that but that is where our hero the irradiance volume is going to come in so if we drop that into the scene let's just lift this up for a second to get a clearer view of it and it's essentially this grid of points which at each point it takes a little sample of what the lighting what the indirect lighting should be in that area so let's move that into the scene like this scale into position s and then X maybe like this G and then X just move this over just get it right into position you don't really want one of these points kind of inside an object since that usually makes all the lighting in that area very dark and there's another way you can finesse this is to just change the resolution so for example perhaps it's better if we add 5 along the x-axis or perhaps even 6 and maybe not quite as many on the z-axis I'm sure you get the point let's press G and then Zed and raise that down allow it to finish calculating and now let's take a look we've got a little bit of blue lighting coming on the side of this cube here and a little bit of red just showing up on there it could be a bit more extreme but you can definitely see in the data that there is some red light bounce hit in that sphere there so the object in this region is going to incorporate that and then similarly over here the spheres are showing us that there's definitely some blue lighting hitting from this side so any objects around that region again similarly will be shown to have a little bit of blue on that side so this just gives it that extra added realism each time you make a little change to the scene though you're going to want to select this and I guess they'll put in some kind of refresh or something like that but for the moment we can just press G and then right click to cancel that move and it will recalculate let's take a look at this cube and this plane and we'll take a look at some basic lighting so let's go shift a and I'm going to add in a point lamp and press G and then move off to the side there we don't need to worry about the node editor because none of the lamps are going to work with the nodes at the moment so that means for now we can't use any textures on lamps like we might do with the spot lamp for example in cycles you'll notice also in this point lamp here that we've got we're casting a shadow but we don't have a shadow set there but if we enable that we can get access to these settings and then actually disabled again to turn that back on and the shadow is quite sharp but if we take down our exponent level once we get really really low on there we can kind of soften out those shadows but that might be at the expense of kind of contact shadows with the ground the Sun lamp doesn't have any shadows at all at the moment and I like the little sign here saying coming soon a spot lamps these are working pretty well we have our size and we have our blend I'm going to turn the blend all the way up the softness of the spot and also show off a little bit of the gizmos that we've got here so you can see this little purple arrow that's going to show us the size of our cone there and we can tweak that a little gray most of where it once was is also indicating whether we're increasing or decreasing depending on which side of the arrow we're at and what's press G and move this around a little bit we also notice that there's this little yellow circle that we've got on there if we can just left-click accurately onto that wherever we place our cursor the spot lamp is basically looking at which I really like I think that's pretty cool over on the Hemi that doesn't work and on the area that's working really nicely great for sizing up and placing in front of windows for example so let's use another really basic scene to demonstrate some transparency stuff and that's an important distinction to make we're looking at transparency here not opacity and just to indicate what's going on in the scene we've got two objects here that share the same material and these two in the background share the same material we'll just keep those as a bake and here when we change a setting on this we'll see what effects it makes on this cube as well so sliding this around isn't going to do a thing initially to get it to do something we're going to need to come over to the materials tab of the properties window and set our blend mode under the options here into one of these are the modes and the best behaving mode is alpha blend when we select that we've got a choice to see what we want to do with our shadows but we'll take a look at that in a minute for the moment this alpha blend is going to allow us to have a smooth gradient of transparency all the way from completely opaque to completely transparent something to bear in mind is if we have something halfway or so and we just move this up here maybe shift D to duplicate shift D to duplicate this one let's duplicate that material by clicking on that number four and rather than renaming we'll just give it a slightly different color or something like this and maybe you can tell as we rotate and pan and shift the camera around the sort order of those claims is not perfect at the moment the one that we've got selected seems to be above the others right now and then it pops to the bottom sometimes so just bear that in mind I'm just going to shift select the other one and then delete let's take a look at what else we've got we've got alpha hashed and this behaves more like it's kind of dissolving we've also got this alpha clip which is basically a setting of whether it's either completely opaque or completely transparent based on our clipping value so you can see that's right in the middle at 0.5 so as we go above 0.5 it'll just give us complete transparency let's take a look at multiply now for this unfortunately I don't think this is quite working properly since the transparency and color doesn't seem to make much difference at the moment sometimes if we tab in and out of the object that can help or it seems to be stuck a little bit just at the moment so I'm sure this will be working at some point but if we duplicate a couple of things you might be able to see roughly what I think the intention will be since you can see that as we stack these up they'll multiply on top of each other and become darker similarly we have this additive mode and you can kind of see at the point where the three planes are overlapping we get the most brightness let's head back over to alpha blend and we'll take a quick look at the transparent shadows and now we've seen these terms before so like hashed for example is going to give us these shadows which kind of dissolves the shadow depending on how transparent it is and we've also got opaque which is just going to give us this shadow but as we change our transparency the shadow isn't going to change along with it just going to pretend that the object is completely opaque and then finally we have our clip which again is going to be set on the clip threshold and the transparency once we hit that transparency it will flip on and consider itself opaque something else to consider is if we come back over to our post-processing take a look at the screen space reflection we're not really going to get any screen space reflection where we have transparency concerned so if we come back over and switch that opaque you can see things appear suddenly in our screen space reflections as soon as we choose alpha blend they're going to disappear and that's going to be the same if we're even using a reflection cube map as well they're basically going to dismiss anything that seems to be using transparency just at the moment so in general there's lots of cool little things that are in evey already for example we can come over to the color management area and you can see that does support filmic otherwise we're set to default we get this kind of thing with the blown out highlights but if we come over to filmic and we try one of these contrast settings for example medium-high in this case dynamic range of the scene is nicely contained hair is also supported if you have a particle system on an object and you can set it to hair and with these kinds of settings that seems to be pretty nice and smooth in the viewport if we come over to the material you can see I've set this as green to insinuate this is grass well otherwise you could kind of go for hair or a carpet rug some sort of fur whatever the case may be it seems to render pretty nice and smooth there is already some support for cycle shaders as you can see in the shader list here things like the fuse claw sea and the mix shader' put them together like this and then we can switch over to cycles and we get something very very similar and let's switch back over to Evie and it's looking pretty close in fact if we added in an irradiance volume as we've seen before and let that calculate for us the similarities should be even closer so we've got our Evie and we've got our cycles and something else just as stress this is the fact that I haven't unwrapped this scene this is just using object coordinates and then I'm placing this image texture on top blending away any sharp seams with this setting and that's informing the base color and the roughness that's using an image texture but we could also just do that with noise texture so let's grab that output let's control left-click cross there bring it down here and then let's plug this shader into instead so this just has a roughness setting of 0.2 for the moment and let's plug this in instead and that is a noise texture so we're getting to procedural roughness throughout now and it also works with bump so I've got this bump node here and we can just plug in our normal into the normal socket and it's basically just another noise texture going into the height socket and there we are again able to preview the scene before we've even unwrapped or texted anything basically while it is cool that we can paint within evey it is currently limited to just seeing in the viewport while you're painting the image that you're actually painting onto rather than the actual effects of how that aiming is affecting your mix shader' as it goes into the factor input as we can see here we're going to go back into texture paint mode and it's not going to show us anything beyond this image texture it's not going to show us any of this stuff but that's for the moment anyway here I've got a metallic shader with an environment texture from HDR I Haven and I've just set to scope mode and I'm just sculpting around on this thing just doodling making no sense whatsoever but it does show that it does work quite nicely in real time but if we switch to dine tako though we kind of get some different sort of shading here not exactly sure what's going on but in any case you can still sculpt and then once we hit optimize we can see what that looks like but as soon as we orbit around it pops back I guess it's a very very rough version of it so if we go to object mode and then go to roughness all the way up it seems to be this kind of thing although I can't be certain I'm not sure whether there's any plans to include baking into the Eevee viewport what we can see in the rendering panel there's no options about baking at the moment whereas if we jump into cycles we can see there is a little baked section there in fact there's an interesting little cage that's in there for some reason or in any case over in Eevee as I say I'm not sure whether that's actually planned I don't see why not though since rendering is planned of course so if we come up here we can set our resolution but you may dismay at the fact that there's no render buttons well for that all we need to do is just come over to the little icons that we can see here this one on the left for a snapshot of the screen and this one will render out the animation frame range so if we just hit that there we get our render and the render seems to be a little bit smoother than we get in the viewport I think the anti-aliasing within the viewport is planned and coming for the moment the anti-aliasing rendering options appear to still just be in the blender render options so we make our changes here we can affect how that render appears in Eevee another quick note is that we could render at 50% we can render a hundred percent but we can also render say at double the power at 200 percent and then maybe even scale down that way if we wanted to I think a lot of work is going on behind the scenes of blender all over the place so blender game engine it makes perfect sense to try and incorporate this viewport into it and any other are cute game engine projects so this video is long enough already let us know what you'd like us to dig into deeper on this subject 2.8 is expected to be way more stable by the end of 2017 at which point we'll do a more exhaustive breakdown but until then it's hard to resist seeing where things are at midway through development if you want to follow along with development you can check out this page here for all the latest commits and check this out there's a fix for the multiply blend mode we can also go over to Twitter and search for the blender commit logs Eevee related and again there's that fix the multiply blend mode some of the developers you can follow along with on Twitter who posts 2.8 progress is Clemont which I'm sure I always mispronounce we've also got Mike Irwin who did last year's 2.8 blender conference talk and we've also got delightful in tow who also by the way worked on a VR adult blender so there is every chance that could show up for 2.8 - here is da lies VR link and it looks like that's currently for blender two point seven seven though you can check that out in any case I find it always immensely fun just seeing what people are doing with blender and of course on Twitter you can also just type in hashtag Eevee as a filter and just generally find interesting trials that people are doing and a bit of Pokemon as well since I believe Eevee is one of the Pokemon names oh I believe that's just an accidental similarity rather than some homage of some kind like Suzanne the monkey and that's all for now I'll leave you this easy roadmap so whether you're creating assets for games or using cycles as your main rendering engine and want a very close real-time preview on your final result you'll probably be wanting to check out the Eevee viewport in either case [Music]

Channel: CG Masters

Views: 254,730

Keywords: Blender 2.8, 2.8, Eevee, reflections, SSR, DOF, Motion blur, clay, bent normals, ao, probes, cubemap, volumetrics, hair, PBR, Blender, Cycles, Principled BSDF, Free Tutorial, Transparency, hashed, AA, Free Blender, Cycles PBR, Blender Tutorial, PBR Shader, Aidy Burrows, Aidy, CG Masters, CGMasters, CGM, CGMasters.net, Space VFX

Id: DR_uRoKuST8

Length: 47min 58sec (2878 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2017