I’ve been reluctant to use Eevee for 3 years, and I fully regret it. Now, we’re going to talk about how awesome it is.
https://www.amandasantini.com/02-eevee-is-better-than-you-may-thi
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Hi, very nice and detailed tutorial and the results are stunning, too.
Cheers, mib
Nice tutorial. Well done. I had no choice but to use EEVEE because my computer goes up in smoke trying to do anything with Cycles. It’s an incredible renderer and constantly getting better. (But I still miss Blender Internal!)
By the way, I really appreciate that you took the time to prepare a very-detailed written discussion – not just a video. I actually find it very tedious to have to watch a long video in order to learn something new.
Yupp, Eevee is impressive! And it’s getting better and better with the new DoF for example. But you still have to do a bit of manual tweaking to get what you get “for free” in Cycles, and some things are still impossible to do with Eevee. Just hope that that Vulkan and raytracing implementation ain’t to far away, because then I might use Eevee for real.
Anyways, real nice tutorial! Thanks for sharing 
Do you know which Blender version is the new Depth of Field?
2.93 alpha
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Nice article, thanks.
Have you checked out the new SSGI Build? It seems like it would address some of your biggest gripes about the Irradiance Volume and other Light Probes that I fully agree, are not at all well implemented currently:
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Thanks!
Sadly I don’t really care too much about SSGI, specially the newer builds as they’re tailored towards NVIDIA.
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I really hope that @hypersomniac will investigate or at least take a look at the new GI solution that is in Godot 4.0.
I posted this in another thread but wanted to share here too.
Eevee is legit, and has come along way from the Eevee of two plus years ago. 
Here is another example. This is an unfinished set for one of my scenes…
The First, Third, and Fourth images are Eevee and the Second image is Cycles. The last two are just Eevee.
I only used 500 sample for Cycles so that’s why it’s really noisy, but that took me an hour to render, so…
For Eevee I used the SSGI fork.
For the look I’m going for Eevee is definitely what I want out of these shots, and the shows look like they’re very close, even if I use higher samples with Cycles.
Even in the windows refections appear more accurate in this example with Eevee; including the two windows that have been slid open to double up in those ares.
Also the light coming in from the windows out of camera are lightly reflected in the widow near the dinning table in Eevee, and how it would look at this time of day.
In Cycles I think there’s way too much reflection for my taste for the inside vs outside litigating ratio. It could be the light portal messing with the reflection though.
This isn’t a great example to compare because the lighting was coming directly from outside through the windows with either an Hdri, areas, portals, or a mix of all. So I couldn’t just flip the switch between the two to compare like I would on a more open scene. I did need to make several lighting adjustment before rendering in cycles, and it still isn’t the same look; not bad or good, just different.
Something funky is going on with the couch’s material which I need to resolve; prior materials looked identical to Cycles.
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Eevee:
Cycles:
Eevee:
Eevee:
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Great article! It’s cool to see how powerful Eevee can be.
I often use grease pencil, so I use eevee all the time, but I often don’t even bother with Eevee for 3D for the same reasons you mentioned. Cycles is just a powerhouse.
That being said, it looks like this article has some cool tips. However its the overhead of adding reflection maps and baking lights that made me feel like it was not really worth it. Next time I’ll have to go in with an open mind.
I found an older but better Cycles render to compare the two render engines.
As I said the reflections in the Cycles render look better (the floor and benches are different materials now) and the HDRI in the Cycles render as been desaturated (on purpose) so the floor and ceiling bounces have less color to them.
In my opinion, neither of the renders are accurate as to how the room would look if lit only by the sun at sunset, but I’ve got to admit that I would probably pic the Eevee render. Pun intended.
Eevee SSGI Branch:
Cycles Different Angle:
Did you just open Cycles scene and switch to Eevee? Or did you take the time to configure Eevee scene in render tab, and with suitable materials for Eevee, light probes, etc?
No, I haven’t been able to do that with scenes like the beach room. Lighting from only outside really made me have completely redo the lighting. Mainly because cycles needs portals for an environment like this.
That’s why the first Cycles image is so bad because I couldn’t find my Cycles lighting blend file and had to resort to a quick adjustment.
The second cycles image at a different angle is from a earlier render with the correct setting (for me).
But more open scenes I can leave the lights where they are at and usually just adjust some parameters.
I’ll get in on this action, since I’ve been recently trying my best to replicate the fuller lighting Cycles provides in Eevee.
Both scenes are roughly the same, minus some lighting I use in Eevee to replicate some emissions and bounces.
Eevee:
Cycles - 250 samples, Optix denoising.
Despite the volumetric effect absorbing light more in Cycles, while the fog in Eevee takes on the color of the key light, both are actually fairly close. If I could soften some lights, I could come really close to matching the two.
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Ok, you where asking me for advice in the other thread… um these look outstanding. 
Since you where asking about shadow falloff…
By the way the shadow falloff on the ground looks coming off the two trees in the foreground I would say try the SSGI branch first. (With a diffuse bounce set around .5) The bounce that will enter those shadows should soften it up enough should bring it in line.
But if you want to stay with OG Eevee try adjusting the contact shadow bias; maybe .003
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Using the SSGI branch though, you’ll need to adjust the rear lighting by the alley brick wall (or vine wall) since it’s already brighter in the Eevee scene vs the Cycles render.
Or maybe that’s the Volumes boosting the overall global lighting.
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I’ll try that out.
The one thing I had to do to get the two to match was over-exaggerate the lighting in Eevee. Like my three light cones. Because of that nice GI bounce in Cycles, my cones don’t have to be nearly as wide there, and I can light things more specifically. To do the same in Eevee, I had to greatly expand them to get them to cover the same things, which made the lighting a little more stark than I’d like.
Even then, I still had to make compromises. Like look at the lamp post in the two shots. You can see exactly where the cone cuts into the geometry in Eevee, while it blends nice and smoothly in Cycles. Same with the side wall above the ice box. You can see where the cone cuts into the wall there. Plus, in Cycles, I get that nice glow on the roof that’s totally lacking in Eevee. Yeah, I could expand the cone more, or slap a point light in those places to fake the bounce, but my attempts to do so have ended up kinda janky.
And yeah, I’ve tried 0451’s SSGI stuff. The addon doesn’t seem to do anything except darken the scene a bit (and I’ve switched to using the principled shader for my texturing), and the Blender fork crashes when I try to load the scene. I’ve also tried using irradiance volumes, but they don’t seem to do anything either. I figured that if I could find a way to control the falloff on the cone lamps, I could get the best of both worlds, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I’ll play around with the bias settings in the meanwhile.
I’ve got a little point light back there to simulate the glow off the Christmas lights. I turned it off for the Cycles render.
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Try adjusting the “custom distance” with the cone lights; set for something like 2 to 3 meters. Cone lights have this adjustment too and I’m mostly curious how that would effect this particular scene. also Im sure you are aware of the blend feature with the come lights.
Ahh sorry that the SSGI branch won’t load, it’s night and day compared to the add-on.
If you do get it to load, first try iterations without baking the lighting.
IRV should help… try increasing the diffuse bounces with that too. Also play around with where the IRV box is i.e. to low, too big, to high…
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