Blender used to be

What? You haven’t found the button yet? I mean, it’s right there! How could you miss it?

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Not sure if I understand what you mean by intent.

I have not tried the daily builds, I’m kinda busy to try it now, but 2.91 performance is disappointing me.

Viewport is weirdly laggy when dyntopo is enabled, and it takes ages to toggle from object mode to edit mode and vice versa on a moderately dense mesh.

Also, deceptions me that I’ll probably never see some blender render features in EEVEE such as light groups, ray traced refraction and reflection and animated indirect lighting and Z-offset. For those who say, “just use cycles”, you can’t do much cell / stylized shading in cycles due to ray tracing limitations or in EEVEE due to missing light groups but in blender render we could do crazy render tricks to get almost any stylized effect.

did I mention, multires and subsurf are also weirdly slow, making all character rigs also slow?

BI was pretty awesome in many ways, it was however limited in terms of design and hardware acceleration, at some point a module like BI can become a mess of solutions on the source side, strange hacks and use of util methods, hard/impossible to digest or maintain. It was dropped for good reasons In my opinion, much like the game engine, although the feature is useful, it actually hindered development progress.

It was dropped for good reasons and replaced for a cool modern engine that is way less capable, and now we have a modern but less awesome engine in its place.

For as modern EEVEE is, its not on par with blender render, Devs had promised that EEVEE should be able to do anything BI could but its FAR FAR from what BI was cappable of.

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Ultimately EEVEE doesnt have the same amount of dev time put into it yet, Im confident blender foundation will make good on their promise, and when they do we will have something superior to BI in every way, especially in source.

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I understand the pain BI could be to maintain but they are not investing a single drop of effort in bringing back the awesomeness of BI to EEVEE. And I know from experience that some of these features are not even that hard to implement in eevee with a few changes to the Shader code and some extra nodes.

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There is more to it then just implementing things though, for example with BoxCutter we take the time to feel out the features and consider implementation details such that ideally we don’t need to touch it again and if we do it is digested easily enough to improve, pulling the trigger too soon, that’s one of the primary reasons an engine dies years later; as it keeps you from adding a feature or component without a refactor or rewrite for ideal results.

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What are those features ? I almost haven’t used BI, when I came on the Blender ship for good Cycles had just been released

Just to name a few.

Z-offset - literally just adding a number to gl_FragDepth from fragment shader

Light groups - a few loops and a ID to identify and ignore lights from shader

light data node - same as light groups but make it a node and expose the light vectors and colors to closures.

material override - a few if statements in the code that picks which shader to use for each object during render layer caching.

Those 4 alone would make sylized rendering so much powerful.

Yes. Light Linking is a recurrent request from people, familiar with other render engines, who never used BI, too.
That is a request that Cycles developers have heard about since its debuts.
Nobody is surprised that the same request is done about EEVEE.

The feature has been kept for Cycles.
During a long period, EEVEE did not have passes.
And initial plan was to have that available through dynamic overrides of a collection.
Nowadays, library overrides are per object, not applied to all objects of a collection as once.
That would make sense to make UI consistent between EEVEE and Cycles by adding an Override panel to EEEVEE UI.

Does this bring an object closer to the camera ?

No, just makes it be drawn on top, as if it was closer but stays the same size,

quite useful for stylized faces and hair that dont obey real life rules about self intersection.

I found a hack to archieve a similar effect by taking advantage of the limitations of alpha blending but it is not practical for real characters.
https://twitter.com/Jeacom256/status/1278836265367076865

@joshex hello. Preferences are a hard thing to argue, but features are not. Based on my experience and from what I see, you have some statements inaccurate :

is not true, Workbench (or solid-shade) is limited, but Eevee (in the vp) will show you just about everything, heck cycles with Optix denoising is so fast you get raytracing in the vp.

Not in general. Do you mean with old material setups? How old?

Blender 2.91.0
image

Nice, I would love to have this in Eevee. I’m doing a cel-shaded short movie this month, and I haven’t quite nailed the workflow for rendering yet. Seems like this is something that would help (right now I use the solidify technique to create outlines).

Yeah, faster edit mode is pretty much in my Top 1 list of features I’d like to have. I also tried animating medium poly stuff like the UE4 mannequin and the experience is far from smooth.

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Have you tried BEER?
https://blendernpr.org/beer/

No, I havent.
Although I think it’s a cool project, I’d like to see just a few features in EEVEE so its more useful.

I feel like it was the lack of completeness from EEVEE that has led to the creation of BEER.

But I think I’m going to use the classic method of rendering a rough image and then painting over using an external program to achieve the effects I need.

Oh man Amapi - that was an experience. Amapi pro was so promising too.

The truth is that when we rotate we will only be able to rotate around 180 degrees each direction and not be able to circle 360 anymore!!!

One proposed suggestion was when in a front view to only allow 90 degree rotation along z so the view at the end will perfectly align with the left and right view.

When releasing the mouse then the view port would switch to that view.

This means switching from front to back view will require two 90 degree rotations.

I think in the end the devs realized that this would be too crazy and just stuck with the 180 degree rotation lock limit.

Good decision.

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I am not sure - QAnon for 3D ? There is literarily no other explanation.

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