I have a 1080Ti+1070 GPU system, but I want to save time when rendering an animation.
My main animations are going to be architectural visualizations, but not the usual photoreal interior/exterior arch-viz, more like simple animations where I show historical objects, rotate them and parts of historical buildings popping up from the ground as the historical timeline goes forward.
In the past I’ve used Cycles to achieve this, with total render times up to 2 hours for no more than 10 sec. animation.
Will Eevee save render times for such projects, instead of Cycles?
Hi philosopher, did you finally try Eevee?
I work in your same domain (3D reconstruction and animation of historical buildings), and I’m trying to understand the feasibility/opportunity of switching from Cycles to Eevee, with associated limitations if any (the advantage is clear: tremendous reduction in rendering time).
Did you perform any test? What is your feedback?
The only thing to really keep in mind is that Cycles is physically-based, which means it calculates every singe ray of light you tell it to or let it. This leads to high computation times, and that’s compounded for every frame, or suffer through the noise. There are several ways to speed up your animations and render times in Cycles in compositing, and 2.79 also has a denoising feature.
Eevee, on the other hand, is an approximation of a physically-based method. It’ll calculate what you tell it to–and only what you tell it to. If you aren’t specific about what you want it to do, you can sometimes get unexpected results. However, it’s really not terribly difficult to tell it what you want, it’s just something to keep in mind.
I’ve tested eevee and it can do wonders, some stuff that as bothered me sometimes :
Many things are screenspace based (AO, SSR, Contact shadows) , so they tend to disappear toward the edges of the screen. In some cases it work quite well tho.
Shadows are sometime hard to get, as they aren’t raytraced you have to know well how they work internally to get the most of it.
As @ArtisticLee pointed out, it goes down to tweak settings, where in cycles it’s more straightforward, you have less space for mistake and the general goal is to speed up rendertimes and get rid of the noise.
