Eevee/Workbench development updates

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
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This thread has been started due to Clement beginning his Eevee development plans for 2.81 and beyond. Nothing has been committed yet, but Cycles has a thread on general development so…

In the planning stages for Eevee.

Pointiness support
https://developer.blender.org/T68479

Better world lighting.
https://developer.blender.org/T68478

Parallax Occlusion
https://developer.blender.org/T68477

Better quality bumps in general.
https://developer.blender.org/T68476

Faster and better quality volumetrics
https://developer.blender.org/T68475

Custom Light Shaders
https://developer.blender.org/T68472

Clustered Light Culling
https://developer.blender.org/T68474

Better Shadow system
https://developer.blender.org/T68471

Shadow Buffers
https://developer.blender.org/T68470

Better DOF
https://developer.blender.org/T68468

Deformation blur
https://developer.blender.org/T68467

Motion blur for objects, and high quality motion blur in general
https://developer.blender.org/T68466
https://developer.blender.org/T68465
https://developer.blender.org/T68464

Dynamic Indirect Light Cache
https://developer.blender.org/T68463

Multiscatter glossy shader
https://developer.blender.org/T68460

Dedicated hair shader
https://developer.blender.org/T68459

Velvet shader
https://developer.blender.org/T68458

Shadow catchers
https://developer.blender.org/T68456

Holdout shader
https://developer.blender.org/T68455

Better transparency
https://developer.blender.org/T68454

Anisotropic shader
https://developer.blender.org/T68453

To note, all of this won’t be 2.81, as developing all of these will take a substantial amount of time unless other devs. step up to help. This thread will be updated when commits containing features go in.

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Thanks, interesting! Many promising initiatives.

I’m particularly looking forward to these improvements:

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can’t wait to see the IES light fixtures in EEVEE
that would save me a lot of time LOL

happy EEVEE

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Thanks for the overview .
Wow stuff.

Dynamic Indirect Light Cache

Clustered Light Culling
https://developer.blender.org/T68474
Googles Filament and Unitys HDRP do this great.

Better Shadow System

There is an Unity Extension

who does everthing right in terms of PCF shadows. Is the best productive and stable solution i ever used. Lots to learn and nice to play around with.

Also hope the irradiance probes and reflection probes get exposed to python api. Would be cool allowing to export these to e.g Unity.
Little tired to calculate non working ones there.

up to the point this advanced stuff is finished…
I really like the LightMap generation addon

It calculates the LightMap with Cycles and for static geometry it is working really great in EEVEE.
The biggest benefit it can easily exported to other Engines.

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i thought he was working on porting to vulkan first maybe he is planning things in parallel, the list looks promising though!

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Vulkan port is another Ultra Marathon to prepare and run.)
The activities above levels EEVEE with latest PBR rendering tech.
The absolut hard work transforming the PBR branch to EEVEE is done.
Must be fun now to extend this great base further.

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For the “Better Shadow system” Clement has put a link in it to this article.
Looks pretty good but in the article they are talking about a defered system so it’s a bit unclear how it will work with forward rendering.

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An impressive list.
Unfortunately, Cryptomatte is not on it.

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Wow, great list, thanks for the effort, Ace. I’m especially looking forward to better lighting and shadows and better bump quality. Exciting stuff.

Also: great thread, thanks for starting it. Bookmarked.

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What do you mean? Cryptomatte is available in the compositor. Is it cycles only?

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Right now cryptomatte passes are only available in Cycles.

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Cryptomatte only works with raytracing/pathtracing. It wont work with a raster engine.

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I know ChriseyBoy007,
but over the years with Blender, I kept hearing that’s not possible, and this one does not work, and then someone came up with a brilliant idea and got it working.
Hope dies last.

Edit:
Maybe a hybrid solution, like the one with the shadow (first Post - Shadow Buffers https://developer.blender.org/T68470)
or with the light cache (first Post - Dynamic Indirect Light Cache https://developer.blender.org/T68463)

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Some of Omar’s GSoC work is for Eevee too.

New nodes, Map Range and Clamp.
https://developer.blender.org/rB71641ab56d0f0cb52c301b83ff499699029fa032
https://developer.blender.org/rB313b78928970a82ab547b07f21f04fc032491ca1

Since these nodes just work with values, I don’t think the result should look any different compared to Cycles.

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Improved Transparency is in.
https://developer.blender.org/rBd5002f007e8d770dea15f0881cd9d0a4f3aaf824

So is support for the Holdout node.
https://developer.blender.org/rB67c10dbf1322bd09945c82354d5d3a9004e06bcd

By the looks of things, the easier items on the todo list are being committed first (ie. the low-hanging fruit).

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You could use ‘details’ to group the task links to neater post.

[details= Details header tittle][/details]
Task Summary

List of tasks
1.
2.
…

But yeah exciting times ahead for EEVEE

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Clement is now working on high quality bumpmapping, take a look at his example image.

1243×1275 348 KB

It probably won’t be ‘free’ as far as processing time goes, but it will really boost Eevee’s ability to use procedurals and general greyscale textures in production scenes and animation.

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for comparison, here’s the current bumpmapping (best guess based on provided image, also my screen is lower res):

eeveenormalcomparison
eeveenormalcomparison574×636 268 KB

I think the main take-away is that it’s going to be less pixelated?

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yes that the point !

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Workbench; Specular Lighting in matcaps.
https://developer.blender.org/rB66700196074ad168f3322f2766846a0a07f7a00f

This will mean users can get highlights without making everything look metallic.

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