I’m mostly someone interested in animation rather then environments or characters. And rendering animations in Cycles was pure torture for me. Like seriously, the noise, the rendertimes…So freaking annoying.
So I ended up using UE4 for my animations most of the time. Which for me was superior to Cycles simply due to the lack of render times.
So when I finally started using EEVEE. Bam. Love at first sight. As of now I made two animations on it and it’s awesome. EEVEE has great quality easily capable of achieving photoreal results in many many scenes. And it’s all in Blender!
I see so many people around here saying EEVEE is just for previews. It’s not for previews, it’s an alternative to the noisy hell known as Cycles. Specially for animators EEVEE is going to be the main rendering engine, at least for me I have completely abandoned Cycles and am focusing solely on EEVEE.
When I still used Cycles I could not get rid of the noise. I just couldn’t. Clamping, caustics and other tricks did very little. And the denoiser ruins the quality of everything no matter how much you tweak those settings. The only solution is increasing samples to stupidity. Hell, I’ve had scenes with 5000 samples and it STILL had noise!!
For me to be able to render an animation in an believable way the render times need to be less then 5min otherwise it takes too long.
And yes, I know Cycles is a ray-tracing engine and has more features bla bla. What’s the point in all that fancy stuff if it takes me 10 hours to render a noise free render? Not everyone is interested on just making pretty pictures of houses, cars and characters and nothing else with them. For these things all you do is set samples to 12000 and leave it rendering all night. All you need is just some pictures.
I often need to render 1700 samples, good luck doing that in Cycles without noise and not taking half the year for it.
Ambient occlusion, reflection, SSS and so on looks good enough on the Eevee. I just feel like the precise shadow work is missing. I’m hoping that RTX line of nVidia cards will implement that and somehow AMD will make something similar.
The same way Cycles does not suit your needs.
EEVEE may not suit needs of people having access to renderfarms and able to produce animations that are taking one hour per image.
They will use EEVEE for previews.
That does not mean that EEVEE is forbidden to everybody else for rendering a final product.
Glass Half was rendered using OpenGL render of 2.79.
We still have that and can make a movie in wireframe mode if we want.
Renderfarms are to expensive and I deslike sharing my blend files with others. I like doing everything myself and being fully indpendent from everything and everyone.
So I don’t consider renderfarms viable for single users and only for studios. However, if I was able to build my own renderfarm at home then I would use Cycles. But that too would be very expensive.
Eevee is going to be perfect for explainer videos and similar things. 3d Budgets for these are usually in the very low thousands and they usually dont require a strong degree of realism.
And each frame was 10 second only rendertime? Or was it more like a minute or two?
And this example is bad. Create a full photorealistic environment like a living room or a nature scene and then place the tiger in it with fur particles.
You won’t get away with 200 samples+ denoiser without losing most of the quality and details. And the render times will suffer greatly regardless.
EDIT: And the EEVEE shot is like the worst. xD He is not using EEVEE as it should and most effects are turned off. Proprely configure the scene for EEVEE and it would look identical to the Cycles render since the tiger doesn’t seem to be using anything complicated.
But one minute rendertime is nothing. Everything under an hour is usually acceptable for me and the budgets I tend to work with. I guess it is similar for other freelancers.
The denoiser is great. Perhaps not for your spcific scenario but for 99 percent of all product viz, explainer vids, arch viz and similar things it lowers rendertime without compromizing qualitiy.
Perhaps your noise problem comes from not respecting energy conservation in your shaders.
Anything above 5 min is not acceptable to me. I make the animation in whatever scene I have with whatever Character’s I’m using and I want it done within a few days maximum. Leaving my computer on for over 48 hours is to much for me. Other freelancers might do it that way, but I don’t. 5 min tops, always.
Everytime I use the denoiser and I have a surface with smudges like finger prints and watnot. Those details disappear and become all blurred up. Samething with smaller skin details, floor details. The loss is to great.
I don’t really understand what you mean by energy conservation in my shaders, but I’m no node wizard so I end up using really simple node setups around the Principled shader.
I don´t leave my computer on either. I just send it to a renderfarm. You save so much time on optimization that the cost of the farm is easily outweighted.
Anyway, this is getting pretty off topic, so back to EEVEE:
I wonder if there is going to be any trouble with rendering EEVEE on render farms.
Oh, I am sure we can crank up the rendertime if we put enough stuff, fancy shaders, high resolution, a bunch of samples and what not into the scene.
I mean, lets say we get render times of one minute.
If i have 2 minute explainer video at 25 fps i have to render for 3000 minutes or 50 hours. There is no way I´m letting my machine render 50 hours straight.