Hello Blenderists!
Been playing around with the new EEVEE lately so I wanted to push it a little and test it on a complex scene. I have to say I’m pretty satisfied with the results, although there are some main issues, developers are doing an incredible job. I think in one year or so (hope before!) it will be ready to challenge Lumen, if it’s not already…
Modeled and textured everything except for the human’s remains and some of the wooden beams and boards which are Megascans. Inspired by RPG creepy games and movies, this is my (late) Halloween render! 
WEAR YOUR HEADPHONES FOR THE BEST EXPERIENCE 
Hope you enjoy
The video is rendered in QHD at 100 samples on a 4080. Renders pretty fast but can be better.
Speaking of what can be better and what is already “next” level, I’ll go over some issues I encountered and what I loved so far. Also for the benefit of someone (maybe).
Raytraced lighting and shadows are just incredible, if just one year ago I wouldn’t have said it, now for realistic renders EEVEE can be used and abused. Just have to experiment with the various type of lights/settings and you’ll get really close to photorealism (realtime compositor is a big boost). Also down here I’ll throw some Cycles comparisons.
Main issue I found here, if you want softer shadows with the sunlight, having angle values different from the default can cause artifacts during shadow sampling when rendering animations (I had to re-render some frames due to this issue, which in the viewport is not quite detectable). There are workaround and anyway for still renders would be just fine. Volumetrics are improved and fast to render (used to be btw) compared to Cycles, a bit laggy in the viewport and samples are not to be abused here. Speaking of reflections also we are not quite there yet, but it’s the same with every render engine approaching to real time GI I noticed.
Big question, real-time? not really. I mean yes it is, but especially with scenes like this, with a lot of procedural textures, a lot (millions) of polys, and volumetrics, you have to keep samples low for a smooth viewport (duh) and anyway hitting play won’t even get to 24 fps (not even close) on a 4080. Turning off volumes would give a smooth viewport, but in areas with heavy procedural texturing everything will slowdown a lot.
There are issues with some geometries (flickering) meaning that if you have a lot of istanced objects, some will disappear in rendering, but I guess this is not (entirely?) depending on the renderer, because I encountered this issue also in solid mode while flying around. Well, devs, something to think about for the future. BUT, but, finally I can see in real time the same results of Cycles when texturing (AO, edges, displacement…)! And this is honestly huge.
What you see is all vanilla Blender btw, and this results, for me, by now are just very good and promising.
EEVEE/Cycles comparisons 
One thing I am really happy with is the wuality of textures behind volumes and in underexposed areas. In EEVEE these are mantained much more better than in Cycles. You’d have to render things separetely on the latter and then compose later (duh), but it was out of scope for this one.
Can see this better here, where also the noise produced behind heavy volumes in Cycles is important.
Here for example i definitely prefer the eevee render. The bottom of the building is much more visible behind the volumetrics and this is honestly what I was aiming for. Here godrays produced from the main light are barely visible in Cycles (not sure why), but the bottom part is well visible.
Well, I guess that’s it for this post. It’s a long one, but I wanted to share everything I could on this experience (I know by now there are also plenty of videos discussing of EEVEE, but whatever).
Hope you like it anyways.
Artstation for more shot details: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8BmaBE
