Also, sorry, noob question here: Is EEVEE a replacement for cycles? Or is it equivalent to the “render” viewport in Blender 2.7 (where you see kind of a crappy speckled version of what it’ll look like when it’s rendered)?
it’s its own renderer… it isn’t a replacement for cycles. Often it will be good enough and blazingly fast compared to cycles and because they are both physically based the materials can largely be shared between both renderers. it could also be thought of as a “preview” though it will never match cycles exactly. It IS a replacement for blender internal though! 
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I just wanted to add too that it’s more a replacement for the old Blender Internal render engine. I think it’s also important as a tool for game asset look dev. It’s really good at showing exactly how the asset will actually look in game which is the best case scenario for that kind of work. It’s funny because a lot of other apps have been trying to have a Real-time mode for game dev but Blender seems to be way ahead of the curve here.
There’s also the potential for using this as a renderer for quick turn around content like animated TV/Web shows or little vignettes. Basically the animator previews could practically be used as final quality content. Another idea too is to just keep the animations as real-time content on platforms like Sketchfab. Now, that you can upload animated content, it kind of changes a lot of delivery options.
And lastly, once we have better support for VR/Head Mounted Displays (HMD) Eevee has a lot of potential for VR content creation. So as you can see, there’s a lot of potential here for new types of content to be utilized/created with Eevee. Cycles will still be the way to go for high quality content output. Things like VFX for film and TV or feature quality animation should still be rendered with it. The best you will get out of Eevee is whatever the current crop of game engines can produce. Which it pretty good now-a-days but not really meant to compete with photorealistic film work.
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EEVEE is mostly for game artsit. EEVEE is good for previewing how assests would look in game engine inside blender (without running game).
You can use EEVEE for animation though, I don’t think it will fit in large tasks. And it is not raytracing. But for small artsits and indivisuals, it will save a lot of render times compared to Cycles.
Eevee has blown through its initial targets though to become a serious choice for those who can trade off some realism (and some shading abilities) for super fast rendering.
The Tree Creature demo was placed on the Featured page on CGSociety (perhaps the first time I’ve ever seen work from Blender in that spot), Eevee is actually causing more and more people to consider Blender.
We also need to note that game technology is already being used for backgrounds in some movies (Maze Runner 2 for instance had assets rendered in the Cryengine)
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I’ve moved this conversation into a new topic - stay on-topic please!
Here’s a quick tip on how you can easily ‘reply as new topic’ in such cases:
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Eevee is pretty interessting for concept artist because you can fast iterate things without bother rendertime. It’s one of the reason why i switched from modo to blender.
And for that kind of stuff it will replace cycles. : P
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There is no clear answer to your question because of how easy it is to combine a render from EEVEE with a render with Cycles and you wont have to use any of the new 2.8 new features to do that. It’s something you can even do in 2.79 because of Blender’s extremely powerful compositor.
You are on the driving seat and you get to decide where to use EEVEE and where to use Cycles.
To some degree its a replacement to another degree it is not. It’s an extremely complex subject that highly depends on the experience level of the user. It also takes a lifetime to figure it out, so dont expect a clear answer any time soon.
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In short: its a replacement for blender internal. Blender internal is gone on 2.8.
In the strict sense Eevee is just a replacement of the old viewport rendering engine. It looks like a replacement because of its high quality graphics but it’s not the main goal just a byproduct of its technology.
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Eevee was the reason why BI was removed.
It can do everything BI could do, but better and a lot faster, which is why BI was redundant.
No, Cycles was the reason why BI was removed. It’s days were numbered since the day Cycles released, cause it lost popularity fast.
Eevee cannot reach the render quality of BI anyway, its a real time render engine, as I said.
Blender has grown more and more complex and something had to go, BI and BGE were the inevitable victims. Two extremely stagnated projects for a long time now that were living on life support.
BI was removed cause it was old technology, it had almost no new features and mostly because it was all over the blender’s code and that even disturb adding options unrelated to BI.
If it weren’t disturbing blender development it probably woudn’t be removed.
Is EEVEE replacement of Cycles or Internal?
Lets use analogy:
Well if we wanna drive a nail, but we dont have a hammer, however we have a shovel (or screwdriver) so to drive it we just use what we got. Then we got finally hammer, is the hammer replacement of shovel?
Yes and not. We can finally use tool that is meant for a job, but we won’t use hammer to dig a pit. Hammer will replace shovel with the jobs for hammer, but it wont replace it completely since old tool is still superior in job that it was mean to do (digging).
Interlal is fast offline rendering
Cycles is realistic offline rendering
EEVEE is meant to be realtime rendering. It can get functions that are only meant for offline renders, like UnrealEngine have options only for Cinematics. So in further feature it actually can replace Internal since it is gone.
In the end all those engines produce images, so theoretically they share their purpose, but they are more specialized with task, cause we don’t have enough compute power yet to produce fast enought images with some king of raytracings.
There are plenty of tasks that don´t require the quality or the techinical features of Cycles. A lot of projects do not require realism or even WANT realism. A lot of projects just have to look decently good, be cheap and produced pretty quickly. A very good use case for an engine like EEVEE are explainer videos.
For a couple of years now every company and their dog have been wanting explainer videos for their products. The visuals of a good explainer video are usually good looking but also cheap and easy to produce which means that you don´t go for realism but some sort of simplified, abstract, perhaps comic type of style.
Here are couple of examples of explainer videos which reach a professional quality and could probably be done with EEVEE:
https://blog.advids.co/20-excellent-animated-3d-explainer-video-examples/
Explainer videos are not the only use case, though. A lot of things in advertisment are produced similarily.
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Eevee is going all in on realtime raster technology instead of trying to be a clunky hybrid like BI was. It doesn’t quite have all of the raytraced effects BI can do, but it can do a host of things it could not. Technically though, Eevee has “some” raytracing built into it, but it’s largely to assist in effects like reflections.
Before Eevee came along, the idea was to remove BI was controversial because it could do some NPR rendering not easily achieved in Cycles and even Eevee for a number of months (but Eevee has that magic Shader to Color node now so it’s no longer seen as a loss).
EEVEE is a hybrid renderer as well, and ray-tracing is becoming viable for “real-time” graphics in at least some situations. Since EEVEE for final rendering doesn’t actually need to be outright real time - even more so.
My point being it will likely have plenty of opportunity to include more and more ray-tracing where it makes sense as time goes on.
Here’s a direct comparison between Cycles and Eevee. Same scene, same materials (I suspect I may have had different Filmic values or something going on mind you). Cycles took just over 2 minutes to render the still image. Eevee did it in under 6 seconds. There is a noticeable difference in quality, but I think Eevee has managed fairly well. All I did in 2.8 was switch to Eevee, turn on screen space reflections and DOF and set the glass material to use refraction.
For me it makes it possible to render animations of 2000-3000 frames without breaking my computer, which is way past its best. Eevee’s real time stuff is great for getting instant feedback when tweaking materials and lightning. For rendering animations I don’t need it to be real-time. I just need it to be considerably faster than Cycles.
At the moment not at all, since the engine is only in its early days. But it is possible that, in the future (like 10 years from now), EEVEE will be so powerful that Cycles will no longer be needed. Time will tell.
Absolutely NOT. They’re not even meant to compete with each other.
Also not a substitute for blender render (that’s cycles’ job IMO)
It’s an advanced viewport. it makes gorgeous previews, but they lack the accuracy of an renderer that simulates light bounces.
People giving examples between cycles and eeve with simple materials is kinda of pointless.
Eeve does NOT look good as cycles and its a mere game engine for previewing, which is helpful for that (so you dont need to render again and again). Eevee renders are fast, but the result isnt on par with similar engines like UE4 or even Unity.
You will see a big difference in lighting quality between cycles and eevee. At least I can on my renders, but understand how eevee can be useful in previewing/editing stuff.
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