I tried Eevee Next... Here's What I Learned

there's a huge change coming to the realm of realtime rendering in blender Eevee is getting a rehaul and it's a big one no no I'm not talking about cosmetic changes I'm talking about huge rewrites in the code resulting in some important changes in the way you work with this amazing real-time renderer in today's video I decided to give this eveve next a try and tell you what I've learned in order to prepare you for its arrival at this point I'm working in the 4.2 bit version but the release of the official version is very close set to July in fact so it's right around the corner first let's have a look at the world settings because here is where one of the most exciting changes resides when you plug in your favorite hdri into the world surface right off the bat you may find the lighting quite a bit nicer than in the previous version however wait till you see this because in the settings here and sun and down here you can now activate the Shadows wow right previously it used to be that in Eevee the hdri didn't give you much lighting information and you could only dream about it casting shadows as a result I compensate it with using very strong spotlights instead of the hdri now this is something else isn't it let's go to the actual render settings of EV and here you'll probably immediately notice that things have somewhat changed some menus are new others disappeared and now let me address the elephant in the room the absence of Bloom in the previous versions you had all sorts of these lovely settings for this effect including size color intensity and more Bloom however was now moved to the compositor and put under the glare note I guess it's logical because the bloom is a compositing effect and of course you have to make it active here unfortunately in this note most of the awesome settings are now gone and so it cannot really match the previous Blue menu oh well it may seem like a trivial thing but I really loved it in the previous version precisely because it was so much better than these glare effects and now they've butchered my boy well this is unfortunately one of the things that are a clear downgrade in my opinion from the previous version anyway let's get back to the positive stuff because as you may have noticed the lighting looks significantly better than in previous EV version that's because lo and behold there is this Ray tracing option of course in case you don't know Ray tracing is a technology that computes how light rays bounce around the world and create realistic light spreading previously only Cycles could do it and it was very computational heavy however that has changed let's have a look in this example I have a cube here with a s sort of window and a spotlight shining through the world itself is completely dark so the only light in this scene is the spotlight well previously in EV you would only get this and if you'd want to sort of simulate how light bounces around inside a cube You' need to add more lights like for example a point light here again hardly ideal but in EV next all you need to do is to activate the rate tracing option and immediately you get this super realistic spreading of light and you achieve great results with much fewer lights in fact often all it takes is just one and what you can of course do is to decrease the resolution rate to get better results increase the number of rays that are computed or their steps and it will all give you less noise and more quality but then you will of course encounter some slowdowns even in this first version rate tracing is a big deal of course EV next retains all the awesomeness of previous versions when it comes to volumetrics something that would slow down any cycle surrender renders Lightning Fast here but how does it fair when it comes to characters as you can see there is a problem now with the eyes and that's actually something I haven't been able to solve yet you see for all my characters I'm using these wonderful auto eye asset by Lucas Falco and all I needed to do in blender 4.1 was was to switch on this refraction option here and the cornea started refracting the light this option is now gone and apart from some mentions in the manual blaming the new thickness output for it and suggesting to add value node of zero to the thickness here which unfortunately didn't work for me well apart from this I haven't been able to find any possible solution this in fact may be a bug or some missing option we'll see in the final release version anyway if I now just hide the cornea how does the render compare to the previous EV version as in previous case the engine takes so much more information from the hdri and it spreads the light more naturally draws nicer Shadows from it even makes it look softer and the rate tracing actually helps a lot even when it comes to human models the light bounce is simply at so much more realism so while the 4.1 version looks very artificial the 4.2 well I could probably use this for a final render and with some post production this could work by the way speaking of post production the compositor can now finally use your GPU which you can switch here and it makes everything so much faster oh and last but not least another option I was sorely missing was Shader displacement in Eevee that's now available as well not that much to it you just plug your displacement map into a displace note and then the displacement socket of your material and it works in real time so that was a very quick look at what's new in blender's wonderful real-time rendering engine and apart from some weird steps back when it comes to bloom and refractions I'd say the developers are on the right track to make Eevee a really great looking render one that could one day well yeah even rival Unreal Engine so go ahead people give eeve next a try you might be blown away by the results until next time stay creative my friends Martin out

Channel: Martin Klekner

Views: 45,861

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Id: nqa0tJszKSE

Length: 6min 48sec (408 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2024