Ok folks, I gotta admit some frustration here – People keep going on about how teriffic EEVEE is and how it saves so much time and all, but in my book EEVEE doesnt work –
it frustrates me because the development project keeps sinking all kinds of time and money into this render engine, thus taking away resources from stuff that I perceive we really need, like a working asset manager (thats another arguement for another time)
To Illustrate my point, I have the exact same scene rendered in EEVEE and in cycles – admittedly the scene isnt finished, but the images illustrate my point sufficiently. The scenes are exactly the same, same camera, same lighting, same materials etc. The only difference is that in the cycles scene I used adaptive sampling 5000 max 32 min, and I used Super Image Denoiser. In the EEVEE scene I set it for 32 samples. The cycles scene rendered in about 1 minute 10 seconds. The EEVEE scene in 33.44 seconds. The time savings would be nice, but the quality makes the EEVEE scene totally and completely unusable. so am I using it wrong? or for the wrong thing? is it a game renderer only? or is the system flawed, and something I’m doing is exposing the flaw? or whats the problem – I once tried putting a camera inside a sealed box and rendering the view in EEVEE and light leaked in all around the top – and I know that aint right. – please someone – set me straight
We all like Eevee, but that comparisson against Cycles never existed. With some tweaks you can achieve a look similar to Cycles, but you can’t just swap in your render options. I’m quite sure that Eevee wasn’t mean for realistic render but to give Blender a better response for animations and big scenes. By the first time I saw it, I also got very impressed, specially with render time, and did dozens of renders tests to achieve realism. Eventually Cycles is a better option for realism, got a shadow catcher, render passes, light bounces, and many other features. The only test you need to do is to minimize the amount of samples needed for each scene, there’s always a optimal number.
WOW – thats impressive, I’ll say that – maybe I’m approaching it wrong – I assumed it was a replacement for cycles, and as such was sorely disapointed. I like cycles and for the most part either know or can figure out how to make it do what I want – but I have never even gotten close to that in EEVEE –
No, I didnt do that, from where I was approching things, I shouldnt have to, because I was assuming that eevee was to be a replacement for cycles and things should just work, the way they do in cycles – I may have been coming from the wrong starting point
I think you are definitely coming at it with a fundamental misunderstanding. EEVEE was never meant to replace Cycles. It started as the “viewport project” in 2.8 and ultimately replaced the Blender Internal renderer. Cycles will always be the more realistic renderer of the two.
EEVEE uses realtime, game engine techniques and produces a very good result for what it is. It is great in look dev, viewport previews and final renders and animations that don’t require the realism of Cycles (motion graphics? NPR? Some are actually using it for impressive interiors renders as well).
Cycles will remain the gold standard for realism and highest quality for final renders in Blender - hence the work on Cycles X to update Cycles for the next 10 years worth of development and improvements.
As for how much development time being sunk into it - EEVEE is largely the product of just one developer: Clement Foucalt.
Ok guys, thanks for setting me straight – I really did mis-understand what the thinking behind EEVEE was – compliments to the developer – thanks for clearing it up for me
These two renderers are completely different in their entire approach to the problem. The algorithms are completely different. Cycles uses the GPU as a math array co-processor, while EEVEE uses the GPU for its “intended” purpose.
Yes it still has a long way to go in terms of what it can achieve but you can get really good results if you know what you are doing.
To achieve something basic in eevee is alot easier than doing it in cycles. Think of the material preview also, no more waiting around for renders just to see your lighting setups.
Since the introduction of eevee weve seen a massive increase in productivity because of this time saving factor. I now think of cycles as the super premium engine… I only pull out the big guns when working on the super high end projects! For concepts, quick projects, eevee is the great!
There are other engines out there, however they are all different because of their applications. You need to find a good fit for you and your workflow!
