EV Express is an add-on that speeds up tremendously the workflow setting up a scene in EEVEE to showcase your model. No more hassle adjust all the render settings, shadows, contact shadows, probes, etc. You ever were in the situation that you quickly wanted to setup a scene but at the end it took a bit longer? Now you can be really productive in case you need a scene to showcase your model.
Add light rig with best settings known so far for shadow, contact shadow, etc.
Colour preset inspired by HDRI’s from Greg Zaal. Of course it’s not possible to simulate HDRI’s with lights in EEVEE but it is pretty handy to have some preset that are recognizable.
Add backdrops to the scene. For now, there is three kinds of backdrops.
Add volumetrics. Ready to render, so no hassle to set up material (or find the material) but just press two buttons.
Add keyingset for all the settings of the light-rig. This means that you can keyframe the rig and with that, you keyframe it’s colors, position, scale, and focus. Normally you have to keyframe each color for each light for example. now you can do it with one click.
Settings related to camera which are normally spread out across several places like Lock to View, DOF, Focal Length, and with one button you place an empty for the Depth of Field. The depth of field with be automagically enbabled. How convenient! I love it.
The global shader is now included (per 12 april update). This was a seperate addon but I merged it in the EV Express addon. See the global shader as a shader for the whole scene but has a colour scheme. With one button-click you can change the colourscheme. I stole these colour combinations from movies.
You need to be MUCH more patient with these things.
Most people don’t consult their forums everyday. You didn’t even wait for most parts of the World to have a chance to see the message.
I don’t know about Blender plugins (I’m just passing by, this is probably my first message although I registered ten years ago) but I’ve made several hobby software projects before and usually you post something and you don’t get much interest, and then a few month later someone send you a mail because they just stumbled upon your post and were interested. Gaining momentum takes a looong time, and then someday things snowball.
Manage your expectations. Persevere. Do it for yourself first. Have fun. Good luck.
I’ve been busy all day, missed your post, wish I could of been of some help.
I have supported all of your great work done documenting 2.80 addons list post.
Please repost your post so some of us who do not live at BA all day, can consider what you had to say.
As jobigoud said, you have to consider world time clocks, jobs, life.
@jobigoud@ElDirector@XYZero
My apology, What I saw is that 95 people saw the post and I didn’t get any response. I found that disappointing when an addon is offered for free to beta-test. (Well… alpha)
That was indeed a signal that there was something wrong with my expectations, whatever it is exactly. (presentation not good?, boring cover?, wrong title?, to much in Alpha-stage? to impatient?).
But if you are interested, give me a shout and I send a link to download in private message.
One thing to note is that I didn’t realize a user might not have probes in the scene (which I have per default when I start up Blender). So next thing is that I add a function to add a probes (with options for settings). But for now users have to manually add a probe and scale it. .
Well those 95 views were probably people who wanted to know what this was about considering the title might be a little bit clickbaity and don’t offer a lot of explanation what the addon does. This addon is mainly for lighting artists (which there aren’t many of here on the forums) and it focuses mainly on studio lighting which narrows the userbase down even further.
That’s not to say that your addon is not appreciated but you definitely cannot expect to generate a ton of interest in a mere 8 hours. I feel like social media has spoiled people in that regard to set up unrealistic expectations.
Sure… I would like to be your beta-tester, however I am not doing much heavy rendering of late. Hence I am not sure, how helpful my feedback and comments would be.
And have lot of patience while developing anything, bit a simple add-on or a relationship (which altoghther it’s on a different level). And one fine day, you would find it’s one of the greatest virtues we human can have.
I saw this earlier and would love to test it (if it was for 2.79) as it stands I’m not up to speed with 2.8 yet and what I do know of 2.8 is just modeling and rendering using Cycles. TBH I don’t like eevee, but probably because I don’t know how to use it properly. It’s a shame because I do quite a bit of product vis. If there is no great hurry I could alpha/beta test it for you but you’d have to be patient for the fedback. If you don’t get any more reponses then get in touch with me.
@Wig42, I’ve send you a private message.
Sometimes I don’t like EEVEE either but I think we all (98% of us) are not that familiar with it as we are familiar with Cycles which exist for a few years more. But I keep going on until I can control it like I can control Cycles.
See the link in your private message in case you want to “Alpha test” the addon.
Thanks and in case you use EEVEE a bit more I hope it’s useful for you to get more familiar.
Oh yes, definitely interested in this addon.
I have ZERO experimenting with eevee, just have had zero time to play with this yet.
This would be great to get my feet wet in this new render engine.
Have been working with 2.8 for 3 months now, so know my way around.
I’d be more than willing to help beta test this for you.
Drop me a PM!
I had the impression that nearly every-one started to use eevee. But as I read the replies here, it seems not as I thought. Tomorrow I will work on a video showing some tips on how to use the addon. The addon works fine, but still needs a lot of work.
Maybe it helps you experimenting with eevee. One thing is that there is no functionality to add probes and set them. That will be in a next update. So for you have to add a reflection cubemap and a irradiance volume before you are going to bake indirect lighting. A good thing is that there is a button “render settings” which will set a lot of settings in one click in the render tab. Pretty handy for those not to familiar with eevee. Also the light added are applied with the best settings I know so far like shadow settings, bias, contact shadow and it’s settings.
Thanks Peetie for the update link to EV Express and the introduction video.
Hopefully I’ll be checking this out tomorrow, spent the day today weatherproofing my huge deck.
Happy to see that your already receiving some helpful feedback.
Hopefully you haven’t had any setbacks with all the eevee fix commits lately, 6 today.
Later…
I didn’t check the very latest update. But qua coding I expect minimum of issues. To be sure I will check later. I didn’t get any reports yet. Thanks for reminding me. And succes with the deck.
Update: I checked the latest build: all is working correct. Just a little thing is that the backdrops show up hidden. That is probably because they are hidden in the blendfile. You can easily unhide them in the outliner. I will fix that in the next update.
Ah, I didn’t think of that. Thanks for reminding me. I’ll check if I can update it without to much spamming. It is still a pre-release. Meaning the addon works fine but has still quite a roadmap ahead qua optimization and some more props.
