ambi: very well said, i heard too from somewhere that Blender 2.8 one of the goals is to be great for media production. Let game engine companies maintain game engines as that is their main focus and they have big resources for it.
Nothing prevents game engine âcompaniesâ to do their stuff. But nothing prevents volounteers to work for free. And if a newb like me is able to turn eevee into an âalmost workingâ game engine writting 1000 lines of code, more experienced coders can do miracles with eevee. I tested it enough to be sure it has a very strong potential as game engine. So it would just be stupid to not use this potential to do a great game engine, as there is not so much work to do to have it, as there are several people who could help to do it for free, as there wouldnât be any annoying export/import process.
- BGE exists since Blender creation, the BGE community was one of the most important in Blender, many people supported BGE development (with work and I guess money donations too). So I personally donât see any âvalidâ or âstrong enoughâ reason to NOT do a game engine in 2.8.
The Conâs of Eeve is that its not suitable for production use and it wont be probably till the end of the year. We expect an extremely early release around August because Ton wants to have something to show in Siggraph and that is pretty much it.
Unreal is king, the fact its also open source it has exploded its feature set introduced in each version so at this point is far beyond any other game engine, Unity included.
Making a movie depends highly on the skill of the artist. The fact that is impossible to say what game engine was used , or what render engine , for a specific footage just by watching it should be enough indication that without high artistic skills , no game or real time render engine will ever be good enough.
Also a game engine is not a good candidate for making a movie, especially a photorealistic one, as no real time render engine can ever compete to non real time render engines like cycles. The more time it takes to render, the better the result.
Will Eeve be considerably better looking than Unreal or Unity, no certainly not, especially against Unreal its stand no chance. Unreal has a lot of full time developers hired from Epic to work on the engine and also a very active open source community of contributors. Unreal is moving forward at extremely fast rate and it has too because its a generic tool.
Eevee in particular is meant to be used inside the viewport and that is pretty much the end of story. The good news is that we will get the author of cycles to work on Eevee which is very nice if the funding campaign goes as planned which already has.
But yeah dont throw Unreal or Unity to the trash bin yet.
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kilon: just a fix, Unreal is not open source but open code, but anyway it is true that openness is greatest as everyone has access to it and if you do free game then you can distribute free and if you do paid then you pay 5% which i think is fair as big company needs to maintain huge engine codebase.
Not everybody does photorealism. Iâve been disappointed in some of the things Cycles restricts in nodes on the basis of, âBut why would you want to do that??â You get the feeling that arms had to be twisted to get even the add shader in. And when I looked at Unreal a couple of years ago, hoping to be able to write some shaders, it semed to me like Unreal was great if you wanted to render like Unreal wanted you to render, but otherwise, you were on your own in a lot of ways.
I havenât had a chance to check out Eevee yet (hear itâs pretty buggy still). But Iâm still looking forward to it a lot. Iâm coming to Blender from Miku Miku Dance and I really miss realtime output, really miss getting to say things like, âPut THIS color in THIS pixel and no backtalk, computer!â Am I going to expect the performance of Unreal? Hell no. Am I going to expect that all of the shaders youâre going to need will already be written? Hell no (but give it a few months, they will be.) But I am going to expect a lot more flexibility in modelling, animation, and output than I could get with Unreal, combined with a lot more speed than I can get in Cycles. Since Iâm somebody that doesnât need realistic caustics or per-pixel refraction or more than two bounces, that sounds great to me.
As a developer I never heard of open code, of course its open source. You register for it , it provides the code⌠that is open source.
Itâs not free software in the essense of Blender. It has a strict license that you have to obey. But anyone can contribute via pull requests which is the norm and they host the code in Github which is the equivalent of heaven for free software. The vas majority of free software projects are hosted on Github.
You have to make more than 3000 dollars per quarter if I remember correctly to pay 5% of the profit. If not its completely free. Its also free for anything non game related, even if it makes millions.
kilon: Because of licence i said open code so basically i still meant open source with a little catch 
Unreal + Blender will be greatest combination ever in upcoming years. OP can search from Youtube âUnreal Sequencerâ , make sure you do not look old Matinee videos that was previous cinematic tool.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Sequencer/Overview/
Hi, as the last post is from february, I use this thread to ask my question as I think improvements have been made since. I made animations with EEVEE. I struggled a bit with glass materials, especially when 2 objects with glass materials are in front of each other and with some reflections but I was able to make something ok.
I would like to make interactive virtual tour at short term. Do you know if either of those solutions are planned in Blender 2.8 :
- export the scene from Blender to some kind of an .exe which once launched will allow us to navigate in the scene in real time
- Blender will have is own engine (an update of the Blender Game Engine perhaps ?)
If not, is Sketchfab a good alternative at Unity/Unreal for interactive virtual tour ?
No clue from anybody ?
Not sure of the exact plans but there is something called âinteractive modeâ being developed, which may allow for what youâre looking for. There is a discussion in the developer forums, but there doesnât seem to be any solid plans yet.
Some old links:
https://code.blender.org/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and-beyond/ (2013)
https://www.blender.org/press/18-anticipated-blender-development-projects-of-2015/ (2015)
As far as I understand the point of EEVEE is to visualize PBR setup in real-time. Just like many modern tools do. Itâs not a game engine, so comparing EEVEE vs UE4/Unity is pointless.
Thanks for your answers. Iâm gonna searching on the web for archviz virtual tour on a web brower and will come back if I have any questions.
The ideal for me would be an add-on that exports a Cycles or Eevee scene to an .exe with baked textures.
This is a classic real-time computer graphics problem that is far from trivial to solve.
Hereâs a good writeup on the topic: https://blog.sketchfab.com/real-time-transparency-make-fast-beautiful/
For that you might want to look into UE4 and its HTML5 export.
Thanks, Iâll give it a try at UE4 + export in HTML5.
Ok ambi, Iâll read the article, thanks too.
Itâs not a bad time to review this topic. EEVEE has come far over the last year. Hereâs my 2 cents.
Both Unreal and Unity are at a close parity rendering wise. In expert hands, they are both capable of creating production ready renders and animations-- consider this Unity short created by a noted Hollywood direcfor Neill Blomkamp.
EEVEE is not there yet.
One of the amazing things about Unityâs Adam series is, given the right amount of computer horsepower, they all render in realtime!
And of course, if you think about it, they are game engines and as such, that IS the goal.
For the most part, EEVEE has less such restrictions. EEVEE can take as long as necessary to render a given frame, which is a PRO. Still, all programs tend to be limited by the power of eachâs GPU.
Another PRO for EEVEE is the integrated modeling, texturing, animating, compositing, NLE environment. Thatâs a huge PRO, and as someone who had to struggle with three versions from three different vendors of shader node editors in Unity, I am much happier with EEVEEâs node editor! Big PRO.
How about some CONS?
Both Unity and Unreal have more sophisticated lighting models. You can control more variables, and most importantly, edit individual light probe locations-- a huge win!
(Have an EEVEE light probe end up inside a wall with the resulting light leaks, and youâll see why immediately.)
The lack of quality temporal antialiasing in EEVEE is also a big deal. Itâs difficult to render an EEVEE animation without popping in the scenes.
And DOF control in EEVEE is quite limited compared to the other two-- making it rather difficult to render proper rolling focuses and subject based DOF shots.
And then the others each have some neat features like event animation and support for AR and VR and LOD.
Still, after digging through both Unity And EEVEE, Iâm very excited about how far EEVEE has come and expect to see great advances in the coming versions!
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To my way of thinking, Eevee is not intended to be a gaming solution. Instead, take an extremely close look at Armory3D.
This revolutionary very-new system, fully integrated into the Blender environment, leverages the Haxe cross-platform language to create something the likes of which we have never seen before. This will be the future of gaming, and Unity/Unreal are likely (IMHO) to be completely blind-sided by it.
Armory uses its own rendering technology which is closely patterned after Eevee but which is a conscious simplification of it ⌠but, not by very much. Armoryâs renderer is designed for âFPS.â
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How long would you say it would take to learn this ârevolutionary very-new systemâ (to the point where you can get creative with it)? Also, what are the minimum hardware requirements for it (say, if you were making an âFPSâ game that you speak of)âŚ?
Itâs hard to say â youâre you, Iâm me. Iâm a professional computer programmer, are you? Iâve used Haxe for years before I encountered Armory, have you? And so on. So, I guess itâs really impossible to say.
But I do think that Amory has a tremendous âace in the hole,â not only because of its leveraging of the entire Haxe ecosystem, but because it is very tightly integrated (as a plug-in âŚ) with the Blender environment. You donât have to âimport/export.â Materials and so-forth work mostly the same way they do in Cycles/Eevee. So, the ânatural impedance mismatch,â as an electrical engineer might say, between the two environments is much, much less. You donât have to switch in-and-out of your Blender environment to see results, or the results of your changes.
More-or-less following the tutorials at this point but also peering behind the scenes, Iâve been able to follow along very easily and to make changes pure-visually. At the same time, when I as a programmer study the source-code of the Armory3D, iron and kha projects which actually make up this system, I see a lot of complex and as-yet poorly documented stuff.
On the one hand, âitâs a game engine, and every game engine is like that once you take the shiny covers off.â But this system âis a whole lot like Blender.â And, in the end, thatâs what I think âthe fuss will be all about.â
Existing projects and many existing studios wonât âswitch to Armoryâ because economically speaking they probably canât afford to, but in a yearâs time I think that âArmory will be the ânewâ thing that everybodyâs talking about.â
I agree. I cannot speak from the programming side, and in general I donât have much experience with game engines, so I am not sure where exactly armory places itself in terms of ârawâ features at the moment. However the fact that it is the only engine (as far as I know) totally integrated in a full 3d package, gives it a big feature over any other competitor. If it manage to grow enough as a project I also see it having an impact. And sure hope so! 