I’d take BF’s usage of “real-time renderer” in their documentation for Eevee with a grain of salt – probably they did not intend for it to be literally true. What it does do, without a doubt, is to provide "right here, right now rendering" in the 3D viewport. (But, “right here, right now” is not an industry term.)
If it doesn’t get the job done in 1/120th of a second, it doesn’t matter: that’s not part of the requirement for Eevee. It should get the job done "fairly instantly," and it should always run well on “consumer-grade hardware of recent vintage.”
Meanwhle, the Armory3D system – which is tightly-integrated with Blender, open-source and right-now available – uses a custom-made renderer which is based on Cycles/Eevee techniques but with some things left out so that it is “real-time” in the game-programming sense of the term.
(And the entire thing, including the “iron” and “kha” sub-frameworks, is [Haxe …] open-source and cross-platform, supporting many platforms and engines all at once. Haxe Is Awesome.™)
The technical underpinnings of Armory3D are generalized enough that it could also be used for virtual-reality, real-time visualization, and other such purposes. So, there’s no need to ask Eevee to do this.
And here, also, Eevee is helping the Armory3D game designer see how a scene will look on game hardware, without obliging the designer to constantly “move it there to have a look.” You can visualize your change instantly – “export/import” is a thing of the past.
Havent read thru the whole topic here but an obvious one is accurate refraction and reflections. And I think photorealism overall will always be a job for Cycles. Eevee is a great tool for game asset development and stylized animations
Well, there will always be [business] requirements that call for different levels of detail and therefore different approaches to rendering. If you need, say, “accurate refraction/reflections,” then, yes, your choice is made, and render-time is just the price you pay to get it.
But the beauty of Eevee (and of this style of rendering in-general) is that … sometimes, you don’t. Sometimes what you need is "good enough, right now." And what Eevee can produce for you is … precisely that.
There will always be details that this-or-that renderer doesn’t do, or, doesn’t do well enough. But, will you and/or your clients and/or your audience actually see or care? Quite possibly the answer will be, “no.”
Hey I’m not talking smack on Eevee, i very much like it in fact. I’m just replying to the OT I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Eevee can’t do refractions, or fully accurate light bouncing / shadows, reflections, emissive materials etc because it’s more powerful in other ways. But that’s not what the thread was about.
it can be real time if you disable some of the effect and lower the quality a bit, so it’s real time if you want it too .
Also next release is the first release for Eevee. In due time with more optimization and maybe more developers the gap between quality and speed can change for the better again… People keep acting as if 2.8 is the end of the road when It’s only the beginning
Don’t forget that one major reason for the viewport under-performing in areas is due to a lot of that code being single-threaded. Clement is working on getting all of that multi-threaded, so Eevee, WorkBench ect… should become a bit nicer to work in within a few weeks.
I think that “project scope” is always going to be an important consideration for something like Eevee – there’s always something else that someone will want to put into it. But to me it is already “hugely important” because, what it does do (which is a very lot), it does Q-U-I-C-K-L-Y.
Fopr me there seems to be a bug when I render out a png sequence and then choose ‘View Animation’ from the render window - I have to minimize it and maximize it again to see the animation play.
Very interesting thread. I have a few comments as well as some things I believe are missing in EEVEE.
I recently finished authoring an EEVEE course https://gum.co/EEVEE and in the process learned a lot about the limitations of EEVEE especially when compared to Unity and Unreal ( @masterxeon1001 and I recently finished an 18 month stint in Unity ).
While I don’t consider myself an expert in game engine photoreal rendering, I have spent quite a bit of time researching and posting my thoughts on it.
First off, w/regard to the notion of real time rendering, it is my opinion that EEVEE does cut it, especially if you consider both Unity and Unreal realtime renderers. Both of them can take more than several seconds per frame when outputting rendered images or animations.
So here’s my list of things EEVEE needs improving upon:
The most important for me: Better temporal antialiasing. AFAICT, the is no way to get rid of the incessant popping of highlights and other significant tender artifacts due to frame to frame renders. If someone knows differently, please do speak up.
For a long time, Unity had this same problem, and Unreal animations looked much better because of their superior handling of intraframe AA. Sometime in Unity2018 it got fixed. I pray the Blender Devs will look into this sooner and not later as there’s nothing that says “not ready for primetime” more than these type of rendering artifacts.
User configurable irradiance probes. The ability to adjust the geometry of irradiance probes beyond a rectangular shape is critical to accurate Indirect Light baking. Unity has a pretty good way of doing this where you can adjust the position of each probe independently.
Better control of DOF. Currently achieving reasonable render with DOF is difficult and many times impossible as there is only a single focus point and not focus planes which help define a region to be in focus. Again look at Unity and Unreal for examples.
Nice to haves would be event based animations like Unity has (incredible!).
And even better a really nice implementation of VR with teleporter and controls API.
All that said, I am overly excited about how far EEVEE has come and expect only great things from it!!!
It would be more accurate to say Eevee needs any temporal AA at all. At the moment it only ever samples the current frame. I agree that until the glaring image quality issues are sorted, as far as replacing the old BI, Eevee just quite cut it.
In your experience, is there anything Eevee is better for when compared to the game engines? Like, let’s say a small studio is looking to produce an animated show for Youtube or TV, is there any reason why they might actually want to choose Eevee at this point over the game engines?
The fact you don’t have to import and export stuff (this always eats a bunch of time), and Blender’s altogether much more powerful animation system (unless you’re doing particle systems, lol).
I mean, animation-wise you can do most of the stuff Blender can do in Unreal as well (no idea about Unity), especially if you decide to go through Alembic, but it’s just so much easier in Blender.
Right, valid points. Preference will also be strongly determined by the different tools available for the 3D pipeline in general.
Though my question was specifically regarding the features of the rendering engines.
@chippwalters did a comparison of the engines and listed things Eevee is lacking. I was wondering if Eevee has anything that make those engines feel lacking. Or if it’s pretty much just Eevee playing catch-up.
Well, rendering wise, Eevee’s dynamic soft shadows are neat and the other engines don’t have them (because it’s not really a realtime technique if it requires 50 samples to converge). Other than that I can’t think of anything terribly important.
Eevee is a very fine viewport renderer, but Unreal has had several years and millions of dollars in resources thrown at it, so I don’t think Eevee is beating that anytime soon.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Eevee can’t do refractions, or fully accurate light bouncing / shadows, reflections, emissive materials etc because it’s more powerful in other ways. But that’s not what the thread was about.