Light/Shadow problem with eevee

[ikorel]

Hello !
I’m brand new to Blender and recently decided to learn how to render on Eevee. I’ve only used Cycles so far because I preferred the style but I’d like to do some animation so I need to learn Eevee which allows me to render much faster.

So I decided to follow this step-by-step tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKZQaBkVcT4&t=1386s

I had no particular problems until I had to manage my lights in the volumetric fog…

Indeed, I was able to get a good result in my viewport, but once the rendering was finished, I had a scene with shadows flickering all over the place. Here’s an example: https://youtube.com/shorts/X-Ti2t_r8-4?feature=share

My other concern is that sometimes white dots appear and disappear where I’ve put pointlights in the buildings (visible on the GIF above).

I was very careful to hide each light behind a wall, so that they’re never in direct contact with the camera, but there’s no difference…

Also, in front of my ship, there’s supposed to be a kind of headlight that’s visible in certain angles in my viewport but invisible in the render, would you know why?

Am I setting up Eevee wrong? Are there any specific things to check before working with volumetric lights and fogs?

I’m using a MacBook Pro M2 max 32Gb RAM with Blender 4.2.2 Please let me know if you need more information about my scene or my Blender settings.

Thank you very much for your answers

[oo_1942 (Kim)]

It seems to be a problem with the reflective material, but please refer to the link below to see if it is the same problem.

Light Point Flickering in EEVEE

Ah, I see the problem now, I was thinking the main problem was the big flickering in brightness, I didn’t realize those were caustics. The white dots on the rocks are so small I missed them at first. Well, the problem here is that you are reusing the rock’s very dark color texture as roughness. This makes the rocks very shiny, and the way you setup your color ramp makes them even more shiny (the rocks basically have a roughness of 0 over their whole surface and their speculars are very sharp an…

Or, reduce the reflection of the material in that part.

If it’s another cause, I think we need to find the cause.
EEVEE is different from Cycles, so it is unlikely to be a problem due to rendering noise.

[etn249]

I think I see more than one type of flickering here.

• There seems to be flickering on the surfaces themselves. I would check the camera’s “clip start” and “clip end” values. It’s important to adjust them to the scale of the scene. The clip start shouldn’t be smaller than it needs to be (you don’t need to see objects 1 millimeter in front of the camera) and the clip end shouldn’t be much farther away than it needs to be (you don’t need to see things 100 km away). This is also a concern in Cycles, but Eevee is more sensitive to it.

• I see a big dark flicker in the volume. For this, you might need to adjust the volume settings. The first thing to adjust would be the range. Volumes in Eevee work on similar rules as the clip depth settings, the volume shouldn’t be visible closer or farther away than your scene needs, or you are wasting precious samples where they don’t matter and spreading the volume’s quality thin.

• Also, you may need to increase the quality of the main volume settings. This means making the “resolution” finer (ex. use 1:2 instead of 1:4), increasing the “steps” and the “max depth”, and possibly increase the main render samples, as it does have an effect on the quality of volumes.