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"Is this Eevee or Cycles?" is probably the most common question I'm asked, and there's a part of me that always wants to say, "it doesn't really matter much!" because with a little tweaking, most scenes can look fairly interchangeable.

This video goes through the basic steps to make Eevee flex a bit. If you're not already familiar with irradiance volumes and all that fun stuff, here we go!!

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Making Eevee Look Like Cycles (intro to Eevee)

"Is this Eevee or Cycles?" is probably the most common question I'm asked, and there's a part of me that always wants to say, "it doesn't really matter much!" because with a little tweaking, most scenes can look fairly interchangeable. This video goes through the basic steps to make Eevee flex a bit. If you're not already familiar with irradiance volumes and all that fun stuff, here we go!!

Comments

Anonymous

This is so great, thanks for the awesome tips Ian. I love work in Eevee, but sometimes i find it hard when things wont work like it does in cycles. But after learning about the way light bouncing i could fix up my project to get it to work in Eevee. So a massive thanks :)

Anonymous

Have you tried the the screen space global illumination addon for eevee

Anonymous

Can't wait for the episode!

Anonymous

wish you had talked about reflection issues in eevee and your workarounds

Anonymous

I've been having a whale of a time (pun) with my scene that includes a girl looking through a glass window in an aquarium at a whale inside a tank. I'm trying to get caustic light effects and shadows on the whale and animate them as part of a video clip. Nightmare in Eevee!

Dr sponge

Thank you for making this I’m new to blender and thought it was a dumb question nice to see the things that go into it

Anonymous

yaay!! <3

Anonymous

Thanks for sharing! What about emission shaders and animations? Is there a way to bake every single frame?

Anonymous

Damn 13 minutes flew by! And thank you very much! Definitely something that I had wondered but not enough to actually look into it.

Anonymous

2:03 :O

Anonymous

You gotta try out the SSGI addon. Absolutely changes the game and automates the whole second leg of the video(with a couple tweaks of course).:)

Anonymous

use ssgi

Anonymous

Grab your irradiance cube and give it a shadow mode of none then you can position an area light inside it and get a perfect Eevee emission object.

Anonymous

I really like the way you explain stuff! Thank you, Ian!

Anonymous

Ruddy marvellous. Thanks.... Monday morning for me... so cheered me up before having to smash my head against a wall all day :)

Anonymous

Thank Ian! I like this 'ground-up' style content. Blender is SOOOOO deep that I always find something new from these kind of videos.

Anonymous

Also good to know that bigger tiles decrease a little bit the render time when rendering with GPU. I often use square tiles of 128 px and it saves me between 5 and 10 seconds per frame in Cycles. No change on quality.

Anonymous

Bravo. Had no idea about the irradiance volumes or reflection plane! I do have an eevee question though. Does anyone know why with a sunlamp (cranked way up for space lighting) would produce black dots in the shadows? They kind of look like a halftone pattern. (Can provide images as I know that description is vague)

Anonymous

Cheers great info as always, was wandering if anyone has had decent results with plants using eevee, I have a scene with the ivy add on but the leaves look awful in eevee but great in cycles

Anonymous

If you are using irradiance volumes with a really strong light, then you can get artifacts around the "dots"

Anonymous

I love evee, saw the light volumes... what I wanted to ask- does the baking work when you make animations? i mean I have lights that change the power over time, does the baking work?

Anonymous

Hi. I hadn't been using IV until today. The dots were appearing with just using a sunlamp. It was strong though. Maybe 7? They aren't a massive headache. Just a small one behind one eye.

Anonymous

Perfect. Right as I'm sitting here trying to make eevee look like cycles.

Anonymous

Has anyone been able to render the Blender 2.92 splash screen?

Anonymous

I'm gonna have to try these. I've been having way too many fireflies in a Space station scene using Cycles.

Kai Christensen

To fix the reflections fading out around the edges of the screen, you can try checking "Overscan" in the Film settings of the render panel. To the best of my knowledge, it basically internally renders a slightly wider version of the shot, then crops back into the original resolution. Works like a charm for my Eevee renders!

Anonymous

Hello Ian, Thanks for this I had no isdea that multimple iradience volumes was possible. How do you make the seam video? I have been recording different steams and smokes but cant work out how you make them transparent. Is this a green screen thing?

Anonymous

I think if you film the element against a black backdrop, then you can use a blend mode to make the black transparent. From memory it is either Multiply or Overlay. Also, lighting the element without spilling any light onto the backdrop will help it work a lot more smoothly. Not sure if that's what you mean, but hope it helps.

IanHubert

Yeah! Unfortunately blender doesn't let you use blend modes in the viewport- ALTHOUGH, if you hop in the shader editor and use an "Add Shader" to combine the video with a transparent shader, it'll simulate a screen or add type blend mode, which is REALLY handy. This video's maybe not the best demonstration, but I think I walk through it starting at around 5 minutes here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/tutorial-working-37050460

Anonymous

Occasionally I like to tweak things to make Eevee look more like Cycles (for example, adding point lights that only get turned on in Eevee mode to fill in for the lack of emissive textures). But since manually enabling/disabling them every time I switch render modes is annoying, I like to use drivers that set their values based on the render engine property (https://i.imgur.com/UEq73Ha.png) One minor drawback is that it can't tell if you're working in Cycles mode with the viewport set to Material Preview mode (even though it's using Eevee to display, it still sees Cycles as the selected render engine), but it works great for renders. (It would be nice if I could use drivers for the visibility properties of collections, but so far I haven't found a way to do that.)

Anonymous

I'm really curious how you get this grainy effect in your EEVEE renders. It reminds me of something I would see in octane or houdini. You have a great way of making things not look sterile. If you understand what I'm tying to say I would absolutely love to you hear you talk about that.

Anonymous

Was also going to mention this. It's so easy to get things looking alot more like cycles without the need for the irradiance volume. here's a demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_yJHuDACOQ

Anonymous

These scenes look so big. What are your system specs? How big are these scenes? How do you get such lovely performance out of Blender?

Anonymous

It’s a noise texture composited over the final render. I could be wrong, but I’m 100% sure that’s what’s going on.

Asyouare

( I am editing this here, just wanted to say that it is, most likely, just me being to old now) Dear Mr Hubert. In 2:00. I think you are emphasizing camera movement waaaay too much. I know that it feels like something is more alive if there is movement in the movement but it also makes it reeeeally annoying for the eyes not to be able to "grasp a scene". Whenever I was confronted with something that "took my breath away"(meaning got all of my attention and just made me put myself on the backburner to be able, try, and completely take somethingin, like at the beach, in the mountains, on a high building, in a museum, ect) I could not have appreciated it, even 50%, if I would have kept moving at the same time. I think this is a matter of trust in yourself as a storyteller, as a visual storyteller. I know you get A LOT of compliments from people(rightfully so) but you need to compliment yourself sometimes, that you have a great vision for a great "frame". That should would have been much, much better if it was not moving. Yes you could have added the additional features. Maybe. But the movement made it very superflous. Just another shot in a row of shots. Until the story is over. Seriously. I actually really admired what you framed there and I believe that you are developing, more and more in a really good marrige between the fully organic, the mechanic and what has, through reasons of weathering, age, entered a kind of inbetween stage. The cinematic, I believe, every now and again(like in literature) needs a big, still(not lifeless) image for us to reflect upon, if even only for a moment. To let us catch our breath. You are of a different generation. I am sorry if you feel that I do not understand what you are trying to do.

Asyouare

But honestly, I wish I had all of your stuff on on dvd or something so that I could look at it whenever there is no connection where I am. I know this sounds a little bit stupid, but it would be cool. I mean come on, it could even have a cover and that stuff is always hell a cool when things made become a real part in a real reality.... do a vhs recording of a few of your movies and see what it looks like on an old tv. Might be very interesting. Kind regards.

Asyouare

I always thought, if you have nothing to say, you "impress" people. It is a brute force approach. But if you have a story to tell, the story always puts in all the fx and sfx and anlges and lines of dialogue in wherever and whenever they are needed. And that is trust in yourself and this progresses the "art", at some point, into "high art"(there is a difference). There, another bunch of advice you never asked for(or need). I cant help myself.

Anonymous

where did you get the steam???

Anonymous

What GPU do you use??

Anonymous

I'm really late but I'm pretty certain that in compositing (in After Effects) Ian uses FilmConvert which is a plugin that emulates real-life film stocks. You can find grain overlays online that are similar, but even though FilmConvert is paid it's really top-notch