How to make Realtime Archviz with Blender and Eevee (Part 1 of 3)

it is possible to create nice-looking arc vis with Eevee which I didn't think was possible honestly when you know Eevee was announced this real-time render of a blender 2.8 everyone was talking about how amazing it was and I was like yeah it's probably not gonna work for interiors which is what I mainly do right because interiors are all about like light bounces like bouncing light around and shadows and I just didn't think it would be possible but it is so I was inspired by seeing actually some of the tutorials on YouTube with some people who made some interiors with Evy and I was like that's better than I thought you could achieve so I discovered that it's it's really it's it's different than working with a ray traced engine you do have to you know know which settings to use and you know spend a little bit longer setting up your lighting and shadows and initially I was against that I was like oh that's gonna slow me down as an artist but actually it's the opposite like yeah you spend a little bit of time on that but you make up for it in in waves in in Quantum's I don't know you made you make up for it in you make up for it with not having to render this scene here probably would have taken me double the amount of time if I was to build it in cycles because with cycles you add in an object you put in some furniture you hit render and you have to wait five minutes and of course nobody sits staring at the screen while it's rendering you open up YouTube you check your email an hour has passed and you forgot that you've rendered something and then you go back to it and you keep getting like dislodged and it keeps like interrupting your your workflow evie is not like that you add in materials you can make decisions on the fly so you can think creatively and make iterations way faster with Eevee so it's pretty exciting I'm honestly like thrilled by this this was initially just a pilot project to see what could happen and I I think it's I think it's ready I think it's ready to to be used for for Aquos architectural visualization so in this video I'm gonna spend this first part explaining the light and shadow settings talking about light bleed and lamps in evey and how they're different two to two cycles part two is getting into more of the materials reflection probes that kind of thing and then part three is adding in all the different furniture we're gonna be using a lot of assets from polygons I'm not going to show you how to model things like the chair for example but in part three I explained why that is and why it's not a bad thing to use asset libraries and it's not just because I own an asset library there's more to it than that but anyway guys I hope you like this series and if you do please give it a thumbs up so other people can find it without further ado let's start alright so got the default scene open here and I'm not gonna delete the cube gonna keep this guy because this is gonna be our room so I'm gonna put the camera inside the room and this is gonna be the room a little small and I think at the start it's important to get real world units into play and by that I mean like these units right here so the dimensions of your object which you know if you're from that one country left in the world that doesn't use metric it could change to imperial but anyways the real world unit for floor to ceiling is about two point four meters generally for like an average home so you could change that there but I I've found out that like rich clients wealthy clients tend to use like a higher ceiling so around about 2.7 for like it I don't know why that's like a rich it's like superfluous right like extra money spent on heating because I can afford it I don't know I've heard that highest ceilings could make you feel more creative fidonet hell accurate that is anyways so what I'm gonna do just to make this easy I'm going to move this up so that my hold down control move this up so that it's resting on the grid floor which is going to help us model it and then I'm just going to grab these this one face at the top here and then where it's got the Z amount there I'm just gonna set this to two point seven four and there we go and now that I've done that what I can do is scale it on everything but that z-axis so if you keep that there just watch this if I get s to scale and then shift Zed now you can see the 2.74 amount there stays the same right so now I can make this however big I want the room so yeh it's got real world units so I want to put my camera inside this box here so in front view I'm just gonna go perspective mode as well right about here and then to make my camera snap to this location I'm gonna hit ctrl alt number pad zero and there we go pretty simple so um I want to have a window on the left-hand side here and you could model this yourself add in some loop cuts and then delete the face trouble with that is that if you want to move the window you're gonna like deal with all these loops and everything I'm not a big fan of it so I prefer to actually use a boolean object so what I mean by that is a secondary object like a cube which is going to subtract from this shape so if I select my room here and then go to the modify stack and add in a boolean modifier and then using this eyedropper tool we're just gonna select that new cube there by default 2.8 finally has a different selected by default which is the one that you always need so that's good it is actually working right now but it's obviously being blocked by the cube itself if I hit H to hide it you will see that it's now it is actually working it's just blocking it but you don't want to have to go like you know move it hide it unhide it whatever so it actually helps to go to the context panel I don't know if that's the was that the name before 2.8 object maybe that's the oh they're all called context I assume that's a block anyway if you go down to viewport display down in here you can the display as so the maximum amount of detail that would even be displayed in the viewport you can set that to bounce and that basically just means it'll only ever show up as a wireframe in the viewport which is nice but it's not cutting a hole in it like it's not like there's not a hole for the window because this is like one solid mass right now there's no thickness to the walls so we can fix that by adding a solidify modifier right there and then we position this above the boolean because of the modifier operator works top to bottom now you can see that we've given some thickness to our our cube wall there and now the boolean is able to operate and actually create it cutout which is nice a couple of things though because we scaled up this cube here this scale measurements here are they out of whack which means when you go to UV unwrap something or like the value that you put here for the solidify it's all dependent on these scale values so you generally want to apply the scale control a apply scale so that all those we reset to one now this thickness amount here will actually matter so let's turn yeah let's go that but it's currently it's adding the thickness to the inside of the room which I don't want so let's make it appear on the outside like that and that is good now if we were to render this right now by the way you would see that actually the cube is rendering okay because although we we made this the wireframe view it's still going to render it so the way you hide it from rendering is in the outliner and I'm not sure but like in the latest couple of because I'm obviously working on two point eight which is it's still in beta but the latest version it's it hid by default the the render icon I'm not sure if that's gonna be there on the official but you can bring it back just with the filters here you can decide how many how much detail is shown so that's the one we're looking for render and I'm just going to uncheck that and now when you do a render it will actually it will hide the cube which is what we wanted all along okay so let's just move this I'll make this a little bit tall so it's sort of like a floor-to-ceiling ish looking window like so and if we went into render view mode this is what we would see not much but we don't really have a lot going on so we've got our light which is up here and if we move this to the side of our box we can see we've got light coming in but wait what's this dun-dun-dun light bleed we bleed this is something that anyone who has experiments with evey has come across and honestly it's probably like if you were to like look at like a Google Trends with something and you typed in blender evey I guarantee you like all the top results are light bleeped light shadow like all sorts of problems with lighting like that's really a lot of the setting up that you're gonna do with evey a lot of that getting things right like it just takes it takes a while to figure out like just if you've never used EB before it feels buggy like that was my first impression like Oh Evie so buggy because you'll you'll fix something like okay so here's an example this is what everyone says to do this what a lot of tutorials say they're like you just turn on contact shadows you turn on contact shadows and then you increase the distance and look at that the shadows disappeared haha I mean that the light bleed sorry has disappeared seems like a solution until you move around the scene and you look like look in the bottom left-hand corner of my screen hang on is it there you can sort of see like a little bit of light coming through in the bottom there and in the top right-hand corner there's a little bit of light right and that's because that's not how you're supposed to get rid of lightly that's like a cheat that's not designed for this at all and it will cause all sorts of problems contact shadows is a very powerful little thing but it's like it's not it's applying an extra shadow over the top of the scene and it's it's view dependent meaning that the reason that you're seeing this light coming through on the top there because based on what my screen is looking at right now this window right here it's only able to see the wall up to there it doesn't know that the wall continues so it's view dependent and actually now it's probably a good time to do this I'm just going to this is a chair that we are actually going to use in the final scene it's from polygon you can download if you want but I'm gonna add this in now because we need something to come on the one time gosh it always Hey hey see come on right I'm not crazy I did the exact same action just at a different time then it works anyway anyway I'm dragging in this chair now I'm just this is the this is the way the easiest way I do it you drag in the top line which for those who don't know just to do that again you can drag in drag a drop line into another one then you just click append and then I'm gonna go collection and I'm just gonna click the name of this chair so yeah anyway I I am gonna use this in the final render but the reason I'm adding just this right now is because we're talking about shadows and all sorts of things so you it helps to have something going on in your in your scene so anyway ah lost my train of thought selecting mile ampere okay so contact shadows yes it's very important but it's not designed for this like and you'll see actually like as I move around here like look what the problems that contact shadow causes on this chair here right it's not designed for this at all in fact here's a little render animation that I did and you can see the as the the plants like move around or disappear or like the chairs or whatever against the wall you get all this weird shadows like flickering and appearing and disappearing that's contact shadows I'm not sure how much better Unreal Engine is at this but it's it's not designed for this so contact shadows are important but they really should only be used as like a tiny little influence something like that with like really small values and like a really soft thing it should be used almost like ambient occlusion at least for an architectural scene since that's what I'm focusing on right now the way that you get rid of lightly like this is with there's a number of different ways and I'm gonna tell you the way that I looked at all the different methods and as far as I know this is the way to do it okay so first thing to note with this light weight effect the default shadow setting if you go to the render setting there it's set to ESM okay and now I don't know what these stand for but there's two methods VSM or e sm v sm will always produce much more accurate shadows and lighting always it uses double the amount of memory so I don't know if that actually contributes to render time or not but double the amount of memories straight out of the gate but it's worth it it just it works far far better you might not think that because you first of all get this splattery effect because this should be on by default but hide high bit-depth you check that and all that weirdness goes away now just to compare this is e sm this is v sm you can see the difference in the light bleed v sm produces far less right it's still there though but it's it's far less the other way you can get rid of likely it is by adding thickness to an object so without solidify modifier here if I increase this you can see if I increase it far enough you can see that the light bleed eventually disappears and the reason this is happening is like basically the light I'm not sure if I talked about this or not because this is the fifth sixth time I've recorded this tutorial and it all just blends in my head but anyways the thicker the object is like at a certain point it will start it's almost like there's a resolution to the whole scene like an like a kind of like a volume like little pixels but in a volume and once something has a sufficient amount of thickness it starts to be detected as like an object that should be casting shadow right so when you've got something that is you know really thin like this it's it's not detecting that that's actually something that should cast shadow so just something to keep in mind so there like you can just increase the thickness of things but obviously you don't want to go something like stick because now look at this bank vault of a wall right nobody is going to want that in an architectural render so that is a method to fix it but it's not the method I would suggest the part of the reason this is happening is because this lamp has softness on it and actually if I actually it wasn't really happening there but anyway one one thing you're gonna want for a lot of architectural scenes is softness right because for this actual scene that we're building right now we want to have the appearance of like sky lighting that is like throwing like overcast light into the environment right so you want to have smooth soft lighting like this the trouble is is that this softness value here it's not doing what you would think it's not doing like what would happen with cycles when you increase the size of a light when you do that it would actually like increase the the areas that it would actually throw a light to like real physically accurate light in the real world in evey all it's doing is it's taking this sharp edge here and it's just blurring it right which is not good right it's not accurate and once you get to a certain point like look you can see we got softness that's actually blurring into the scene now and so let's increase the yeah let's increase the amount of light coming in here you can really see it now right so this this softness value I originally thought like yeah I need I need softness I need softness to to make my my scene looks nice but this value it was just destroying it it was horrible right so I discovered that if you if you want soft lighting like this in evey the way to do it is underneath shadows you want to check soft shadows now when you do this you might not see that anything has changed but basically what this is doing now is it will actually basically make this lamp behave a little bit more like a real Cycles light like a physically accurate light it's based on the radius value here so as I increase this radius you can see that that light is now actually spreading around in two different places so different parts of the scene are getting different amounts that the light is hitting in different areas okay so you can see like that that circle around the light there that's that's actually the radius so imagine this is like a ball of light so the bigger that ball is the more like some light is actually now going to be hitting the ceiling or like on the wall there or whatever so it does this kind of like splattering effect it it says that like okay the light is this circular size so I'm gonna put a lamp here here here here here here here here here it's gonna randomize its placement and it's gonna do this splattering and then you get basically like a softened light effect like you would see in the real world or we're always cycles if you and by the way this splattering effect is dependent on the number of samples so the viewport is set to 16 but if I increase this to 128 you would see that it gets smoother and smoother and smoother until it's like that jaggedy effect becomes not noticeable essentially yeah so it will increase the render time is definitely but there is like no better way to get softer light and light that behaves like real lighting and using soft soft soft shadows turning that on okay now what about oh yeah so I've still got I've still got some light bleed happening but let's not worry about that yet I want to talk about the correct lamp to use because there's really there's a Sun lamp there's a spot lamp and there's an area lamp the default one of course that I've been dealing with is just the point lamp the best one I found is actually the area lamp I would actually I would love to use the Sun lamp the Sun lamp is cool does actually a pretty decent job it's better than most people say oh the did the amounts here are way too too much out of the gate it does an okay job but I've just found in comparison to the area lamp the detail around objects like the feet of things I've changed all the settings like it just doesn't do as good a job as an area lamp so what I'm going to do is just at the place of that lamp there and I delete it and I'm gonna add an area lamp the reason I'm adding in a completely new object instead of changing it is it's a little janky when you just like change this value here or whatever it can just not do things properly it's a little buggy it is it is beta so far so I'm just adding an entirely new lamp let's make it really bright eight thousand eighty thousand mm maybe something like that okay so as I mentioned the the size of this area lamp here is going to be yeah it's going to affect how far this light spreads is so the higher I set is to the more that light is going to be splattered around there which if I'm creating overcast lighting which I am I want it to splatter around quite significantly now one I want to mention this point because I've seen a lot of people suggest this and that is to to fix like all the light bleed issues to fix all this soften light all this kind of thing put the lamp in the window so this is what a lot of people I've seen suggest do they put maybe behind a curtain or something like that you put the area lampion and it's great like it look at that you know more light bleed you've got light just coming in through the window things probably going to be fast you don't probably don't even have to have soft shadows turned on it's like it removes a lot of problems the problem with this is that it's it sounds good in theory because you think about and in like an interior you've got light coming in through a window so you would think that yeah the light source is the window but that's not actually true like that's not the point of that's not the origin of that light the light is from the sky or the Sun and those things are not like a solid point of light from the window that's what it would look like if you had like a giant LED panel in your window you would have light that looks like this but if you've got lighting from the sky light comes down because it's directional it comes from above us so generally most of the light is hitting the ground some of it's hitting the wall but you wouldn't really have any hitting the ceiling unless you're on a really tall building and you had the Sun the horizon maybe but you wouldn't you wouldn't have this the real a real whatever you call it just to show you the difference right look at the ceiling now in comparison to where it was right now the ceiling is in darkness and the lights hitting the floor this is how light looks in the real world you can see why having it in the window there is just not desirable the other problem just to mention this because that there is another reason why you don't want to do this is because of the inverse fall-off method which is how light is calculated in the real world and also in blender inverse square law I talked about it in my lighting series we talked all about the science of lighting and I go into detail on fall-off and how important this is to understand if you haven't checked it out click up there and you can watch that watch that series very important but just briefly having the point of light start right here that means that if you've got this chair right here and then let's say you've got another chair that's like right say there the amount of light that's going to be hitting that chair leg that that armrest is going to be four times the amount of light that's going to be hitting it there if it is double the distance from that point of light to here to here double that distance it's going to be four times less it's called the the inverse square law sounds crazy but it's actually true and I show you in the the lighting series why why that actually does happen in blender as well so this is crazy because coming from the sky or from the Sun when you've got real natural light coming into the scene you're not seeing almost any fall-off at all because the Sun or whatever is gonna be imagine this but way way further two hundred billion kilometers I believe it is the the amount of fall-off is drastically drastically less right so you want to have the light outside the room in the same position above basically as what the real sky would be otherwise this is just you're not gonna get any sort of realism in your interior so just wanted to bring that up we are going to use an area lamp and we do want it to match the size of the sky but yeah having it in the window it's just just a bad idea so let's increase the size of this because we're making the appearance of like an overcast sky and that is basically wrapping around like it's we want like the corner of that square there right like that because of how big it is it's now going to be throwing light on that wall right that's why this size here is important because that's how it works in cycles and everything else anyway so look at this we've now got some like proper looking light coming into the scene it's soft looking light we have a little bit of bleed okay but the reason I mentioned is like right at the end here now that we can fix it is because now we can change this bleed bias amount and we can actually fix this right so just about that point zero seven it's gone no more light bleed and now as I move my camera around I don't have that contact shadows that was causing all these weird glitching things it's it's actually shadow the way it should be right so now that you've done it correctly things are gonna get a lot easier later on so let me just change the color of my life here because I wanted to sort of look like the color of an overcast sky which if you saw my lighting series you'll know about color the Kelvin scale measurement for like an overcast sky it's around like 7000 8000 Kelvin unforseen you don't have a Kelvin scale in evey for the point lights yet but it's basically like a light blue color so that's what I'm trying to that's what I'm trying to go for here okay and we will in the next part or a future part whatever it is however long this tutorial series takes we will get to contact shadows because there is a point to them but you just don't want to use it yet cuz it's like you've got to be very careful with it so anyways we've we've covered the lighting we've got some nice decent looking lighting and I'm just trying to stall to make sure I haven't forgotten anything else that I want to bring up bleed yeah bleed is really how you do it oh and also I was gonna say you solidify value you don't want to really go higher than around about this like point zero five start point five is about as high as you as thick as you want your wall to be anything thicker than that and it just starts to look a little bit ridiculous so you go as thick as that and then you make up the rest with your light settings now we're just about ready to jump into the next part of the video but I'll just finish with a final sign-off and say that there is a lot of news in 3d AI machine learning all that stuff and it's hard to keep a track of it right new techniques new tutorials showing new methods so I've got a newsletter list which is once a week and it's three to five links that I find interesting that week so if you enjoy this tutorial I think you'd enjoy learning from this newsletter list so the link is in the description it's just once a week and it'll just keep you up to date on the 3d industry with that little pitch out of the way you can go ahead and join me in part two of this series and we are gonna get into reflections adding windows with transparency background settings all that kind of stuff so go ahead and join me in the next part

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 288,550

Rating: 4.9655948 out of 5

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, eevee, tutorial, archviz, interior, realtime, lounge, poliigon

Id: 2VNztZdfGZY

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/blueSGL]

I've seen multiple times where you have lamented the amount of takes it took to get a video done in one, wouldn't editing the video to add in details be quicker than reciting the entire thing 6 times?

[u/_memelord666]

Hey Andrew, could you do a hard-surface modelling tutorial?

[u/Skittles817]

Super excited about this one!! Thank you for your videos, they are freaking awesome. ❤️❤️

[u/whitethumbnails]

Spiraleye

[u/prajken2000]

Oh look it's Mr. Donut Man

[u/Flannakis]

Needs more donuts