Why can I not find any expert-level architectural visualisations, particularly exterior renderings, that have been rendered with eevee?
Probably, because that is costly for EEVEE and the opposite for Cycles.
You need to bake irradiance maps to capture indirect lighting from an HDRI.
That is a long baking process and setup for a large scale scene.
Transparency of material is complicated to set-up in EEVEE and can require a lot of samples.
Nishita model of sky texture is not supported by EEVEE.
In other words, Cycles set-up is simpler and quicker. It renders as fast or quicker.
And the end result looks better.
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Totally agree with you.
I was wondering what ever happened to all the hype when eevee was first released. Are there any plans for eevee development?
Iām pretty sure there have been and you just havenāt noticed. Cycles is better at realism with less effort, most users donāt know how to push Eevee to get decent realism out of it, and so itās typical to assume a photorealistic scene is Cycles, only to be periodically surprised and amazed when the description reveals it was Eevee all along (if you read the description, and if the description specifies which a lot donāt, and not everyone reads them). I donāt particularly care about archvis, so I donāt have any specific examples, but there has been plenty of very impressive work done in Eevee, including archvis.
That said, most sensible professionals invest in decent graphics cards that can render Cycles efficiently, and when realism is the priority Cycles is usually the better option as thereās more things that work āout of the boxā and less that require enabling certain settings or finding workarounds (plus no one likes light probes, and other solutions for GI are planned but not yet present in the official blender).
And then there are materials and nodes. For refractive or caustic materials, there are technical reasons why you donāt usually see that done photorealistically in realtime engines. Plus there are a number of nodes that simply havenāt been converted to Eevee yet. Still waiting on Nishita sky as well (Wilkie-Hosek just doesnāt cut it). HDRIās casting light? Nope, still waiting. So yeah, you CAN do photorealistic archvis in Eevee, and some people have, but Cycles is usually what people prefer for that sort of thing. Some of the missing features may be taken care of after the Eevee rewrite.
Please Note: Zeauro is incorrect, Cycles does not at all render āas fast or quickerā on most peopleās systems for most scenes. Thereād be no reason for Eevee if the average personās graphics card and system could handle Cycles in real time. Cycles is only āas fast or quickerā if A) the graphics card and probably overall computer system is exceptionally good, and/or B) The scene is poorly optimized for Eevee (and even then, better have a powerful system for even a poorly optimized Eevee scene to be slower than the cycles equivalent).
Gets even more problematic to keep cycles scenes rendering quickly for scenes that are especially noise prone and need more samples - especially if you use materials that donāt play nice with denoising. Thereās a reason I never used cycles until I got my newest computer, and I tried everything to get those render times down without having the images denoised to the point of uselessness. Though it would be nice if it had been just as fast as eevee - and that computer was no potato.
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Eevee has not been abandoned. Eevee is being re-written so adding new features wouldnāt be sensible at the moment, and the development team is small. In fact, itās one guy - which is understandable since Blenderās entire development team is small and the software scope isā¦ well, not. Thereās still plenty of hype for Eevee among the users who use it (particularly for the rewrite, Nishita sky being added - looks like that one is coming with the rewrite, and thereās also lots of hype for SSGI, as well as the potential for raytracing in the future). Blenderās development tends to be slow. Although, thereās a custom Blender build floating around that does SSGI.
Itās important to remember it was never intended as a replacement for the physically accurate render engine, but as a real time render engine native to Blender, in order to replace Blender Internal, which in addition to being dated was an unwieldy unmaintainable mess (lessons learned from that is probably why theyāre addressing issues with Eevee now and rewriting it). Another important thing to remember is that Eevee is much younger than Unreal and Marmoset, and again the development team is much smaller than those engines (though I am bitter about the lack of anisotropic - Iāll fully admit that).
Sometimes Cycles users forget theyāre not the only ones who use Blender, and that not everyone wants realism. There are after all a lot of Eevee users, all of which probably have feature requests theyād love to see fulfilled, but are happy enough not to switch to Marmoset or Unreal. Some do aim for and achieve realism (some are not there yet), and others specifically prefer Eevee because they donāt want realism, they LIKE 3D looking 3D (like video games or for other artistic reasons) or theyāre going for an illustrative look.
I should probably add that Iām naturally verbose, and none of this is intended to be ranty or hostile and apologize if it comes off that way.
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That sky model is not issue. It is easy to render sky to HDR or use HDR sky background.
What matters is that Cycles is cheaper for stills because it is easier to set up. Baking indirect lighting takes also longer time than rendering still.
However Eevee is cheap in animation but architectural visualizations are usually stills.
My electricity bill is raising 6x and I believe that Iām not only one.
It is likely that we see more workflows that doesnāt require a lot of electricity. Even rendering production animations using laptop. Iāve experimenting hybrid approach or even going full Eevee and only using Cycles for baking and stills to reduce costs. Iām looking ways to get that sweet spot of photorealism with lowest possible rendertime.
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For photorealism you may still want to consider rendering transmissive materials on large or important items in Cycles. Iām obviously a fan of Eevee, but Eevee canāt come close to Cycles glass, no matter what you do with the shaders for the most part (you can get something decent with the right node setup though). Depending on your needs, this may not be worthwhile for the frequency of or focus on glass objects in your scenes.
Oh and you probably want the unofficial but awesome SSGI build of Blender, unless you like light probes or need to stick to 3.2 even for renders (the developer is staying with 3.1 for now, there are details in the thread)
And ouch, it seems like everything is going up except wages. We definitely couldnāt afford a 6x increase in our electricity bill, thatās just too much. I really hope you live somewhere the cost is normally not too bad for that utility.
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Thank you for your reply. I totally understand all you saying. I am glad to hear that there is a rewrite coming.
Where can I access the SSGI or rewrite development version?
regards
John
Iām sticking on UPBGE 0.30.0, whitch is essentially Blender 3.0 and seems to be solid.
I actually like lightprobes or baking indirect light to emissive material. Screenspace effects sucks easily when camera moves.
Iāve looking simple solution to render every animation frames twice, one for Eevee and one for Cycles and then composite them without manually adjusting double amount of scenes. It should be easy then just adjust material shaders.
Yeah, Iām eagerly awaiting EEVEE Nextās SSGI implementation. That will narrow the realism gap between Cycles and EEVEE.
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I donāt think that matters much while indirect lighting is mostly static. And when there is something moving that affects environment, that is super easy to fake by adding shadowless light location of dynamic object. Just choose color and emission to match light it should emit.
I donāt believe the official development version has SSGI yet (for the most part theyāre focusing on feature parity first) but you can find the thread for the unofficial SSGI build by @0451 that Blender has credited as the reason theyāre going to add official SSGI here. Thereās no Blender 3.2 version yet, for reasons that are outlined in the thread.
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I donāt do a lot of animation (virtually none) so admittedly donāt have any experience with that, but I know that under some circumstances screen space GI is not ideal, so thatās why I said āunless you like light probesā - because some people do. I just want to make it clear that was not at all sarcastic. Since I do stills (and Iām lazy), SSGI or another automatic GI is my preference.
I expect that Blender will have both light probes and SSGI available as options when they add SSGI, and I would expect UPBGE to follow suit, for newer builds at least. I donāt think theyāll remove light probes, because I believe I remember Blender explaining that the reason they initially opted for light probes over a more automatic GI solution was because of the shortcomings of screen space based GI under certain conditions, and only changed their mind because the popularity of the SSGI build showed that for a large number of users, SSGI was still preferable and worth it. So I expect both approaches will be supported.
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The question is about a specific kind of scene. I had seen a lot of architectural visualisations of interiors on this forum. So I just commented with exterior scenes in mind.
That is rarely the case for exterior scenes of architectural visualisations where 2 bounces can be sufficient.
No. EEVEE is made for GPU rendering rather than CPU.
If you only have a CPU at disposal, Cycles can be faster because it will use it more efficiently.
There are things that are requiring more samples to be well rendered with EEVEE, and you can not do anything to optimize that.
Cycles has medium quality settings by default. You can do a lot to optimize Cycles renders.
Decrease bounces, Define light path limits per shader, Use Culling, Use Scrambling distance, Use Tiling, Use Denoiser.
With EEVEE, you tweak settings for quality. Any lowering of settings as an immediate visible impact on quality.
Except, default samples that can be decreased for most of cases. Basically, everything is disabled by default. Most of time, you will have to increase cost of settings to obtain desired quality. Increase Irradiance volume resolution, Increase shadow maps size, Increase SSR and AO precision, Increase Volume and SSS samples, etcā¦
Baking from Cycles is basically the only way to optimize an EEVEE render without loosing your time.
But it has same problem as baking of irradiance volumes with shadows of dynamic objects.
I talked about Nishita model of sky texture, because it is superior to other models of sky texture available in EEVEE.
I mentioned HDRI. In Cycles, use of an HDRI produces instantly global illumination of your scene.
In EEVEE, you need Irradiance Volumes baking to have some.
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There is EEVEE Next development; which is already available as an experimental option found under User Preferences, as well as a promised port to Vulkan (currently the engine is based on OpenGL).
I use EEVEE because my computer heats up very quickly when I try to use Cycles, such that I am afraid that I could physically damage it. (Semiconductors donāt like heat ā¦) Therefore, Cycles is literally useless to me.
So, Iāve learned how to use EEVEE to quickly generate results that are āmore than good enough for my purposes.ā I adapt my projects to work within what EEVEE can easily do.
I am very glad that, in blender, āTMTOWTDI = āTim Toadyā = Thereās More Than One Way To Do It.ā¢ā
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Using computer full load should raise temperature and that is normal. Computers are also designed to work full load and that doesnāt damage them. It is good idea anyways to disable all kind of speed boost features when using hardware at full load. Those features are raising clock frequency short time to get lower latency and works for usage profile where computer is most of time idle. So it is good idea disable those and enable some powerlimit. As far as I know, there is watt limiting/limited nVidia geforce cards. Like Geforce 3090 can take 450 watts but it can be limited to 300 watts and that is better to use 24/7 usage.
So these need to be remember, disable speed boosting and use watt limits when using 24/7 what is common in rendering. Also need to know that laptops are not for 24/7 full load usage. They just collect dust when cooling starts and that may shorten computer life. Desktop computers and servers are easier for maintenance to remove dust inside computer and they can work decades on full load.
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The computer is a MacBook Pro (2017), which has always had problems with heat in its design. āThe fan turns onā when running a number of different āintenseā applications.
I find that EEVEE, and Workbench, satisfy my needs for rendering, and I am entirely used to it by now. Iām very glad that these other rendering options are available in Blender. (But I still miss āBI!ā)
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Eevee is good for a lot of things but not arch vis. Its great for animation. Its great for creating game graphics. Non photoreal renders. Its kind of sad that the moment blender got a solid real-time render engine was the same time its game engine diedā¦ i wander if this has anything to do with a cupple of game-engine companies funding Blenderā¦?
In fairness, blenders game engine was not that good, reliable ā¦ didnt work in browser or on mobile ā¦ etc.
Wathing tv quality 3d animation - it looks like its rendered in something like eevee. This is where it shines. Style over realism, with a huge advantage to what you see on screen while animating being what you get as the finished thing.