Classroom Benchmark from Cycles to Eevee

Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
1

I will describe my general process in converting Cycles scenes into Eevee.

Here are my main tips that I use to get started:

  1. For proper setting for shadows see link on Light Leaks.

  2. Lighting workflow see HDR lighting.

  3. Multiple or nested IRVs see link on Nested IRVs.

  4. Do a Cycles render pay close attention to the lighting specially the shadows. Shadows can be sometimes difficult to create accurately in Eevee but are critical for realistic rendering. Lastly material differences like glass. This will be good a reference starting point for your Eevee scene.

  5. In the Classroom scene turn off “Compositing” for rendering it crashes in Blender 2.80 and it’s effect is quite overblown.

Lighting changes:

  1. Added a world node of gray for general ambient light.
  2. Adjusted all the lights including area window, all points for the ceiling fixtures, black board, corridor, exterior fill and sun with correct Eevee settings. I paid close attention to highlights and shadows to closely match the Cycle reference.
  3. Enable and adjusted the ambient occlusion settings.
  4. Enable screen space reflection make sure to turn on “Refraction”.
  5. The window portal is creating some unrealistic lighting in Cycles notice that the window blinds have highlights underneath. This is a sun lit scene from above the blinds highlights should be from above. Disable the portal and created an angle area light into the window for better lighting. Put into a separate collection to be excluded from indirect lighting baking.
  6. Created an standard 4x4x4 irradiance volume probe into the center of the room.
  7. Added an nested irradiance volume probe under the teacher desk for realistic shadow.

Material Changes:

  1. Make all the link objects “Single User” to allow for material editing.
  2. Modify the texturing and created materials for the student and teacher desk it was overly complex for Eevee.
  3. In the clock glass material color it was blue tinted to reverse the yellow natural color light this made the face clock white to match the cycles render. I created the frosted windows by the door.
  4. In the dust bin material enable SSR, Blend Mode to “Alpha Hashed” and transparent shadows to “Opaque”.

Enable “Depth of Field” and adjusted the camera aperture settings.

The Cycles raw render:

classroom
classroom1920Ă—1080 1.11 MB

The Eevee converted render it took only 8 seconds:

classroom_eevee
classroom_eevee1920Ă—1080 535 KB

Here is the blender Classroom scene file. See Classroom Blend.

Edit: Update the Classroom blender file with some tweaks and minor improvements to better match the original.

10 Likes
2

Dude! Amazing results and I really appreciate information you have given. It’s like a bible for eevee in connected posts.

2 Likes
3

staughost,

It’s like a bible for eevee in connected posts.

That is exactly what I was trying to accomplish. Thank you noticing it.

Coming soon I have scenes that I done in Eevee from the architectural interiors series from Evermotion. I probably post it in the “Blender Tests” section. I will have comments about the problems and solutions in doing different types of realistic architectural scenes in Eevee.

2 Likes
4

I started my realistic architectural series from Cycle to Eevee under “Blender Tests” section.

5

Good job there in that conversion to Eevee!
This is one of the first scenes with which I had tested Eevee, but I have not returned to work with the scene for some time. You did a very good job. Even your scene is much more stable for animation than mine (with default camera animation on the scene).

6

I can definitely tell which one is Cycles, but the eeVee render looks great also. I’m not a photo-realism junkie so the eeVee render would be good enough for me. I’m more of a time-savings junkie. I guess the trade-off for the time savings is way more than valuable than the minor bump in detail and quality with Cycles.

7

I just update the Classroom file with little closer match. Their is always going to be some difference between Cycles and Eevee. In this scene Cycles is using a light portal on a window which a little harder to match in Eevee.

My main goal is to push Eevee to create realistic rendering specially in ArchViz.

If your are interested I have a number of Eevee realistic ArchViz scenes that I have done from Cycles. See my ArchViz series at this link Realistic Archviz.

1 Like