Eevee Improvement Ideas
So I recently thought about some features that could be quite appealing with Eevee.
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SSR Influence: An option where you can change the influence of an object and or/material inside a SSReflection, for example a emissive material so that it is more prominently shown inside the reflection, also, the abbility to hide it from the reflection completly. I recently stumbled on this that I really wanted to boost the influence somehow, but I couldnt, not even the SSGI build can do it
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Shadow Intensity: the abbility to set the intensity of a shadow cast by a lamp, I know not really realistic or so but for example in other Real Time Renderes like inside Unity I do this quite often to get my desired result.
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Light Nodes: Light Nodes are something I really miss every time when Im lighting a scene with eevee, the only reason is that I cant use the Blackbody Node to get proper Color Temperatures. So it would be so helpful if we can have at least a small supported number of nodes inside Eevee, or even better a drop down to choose between color and temperature, this could be also helpful with Cycles.
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Render Order: able to set the render order for different materials and/or objects. Sometimes it happens that depending of how the outliner is ordered a transparent object is drawn on top of a object that is physically on top. So a way to "fix" that behaviour like in many game engines would be helpful, also you can exploit this and create cool trickery stuff with it. Unity Example:
this could be added in the same "Settings" spot were we already change the blend mode.
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Vector Pass: Yeah I know its probably a double, but I think its important, the new Motion Blur is nice but it would be nice to do a clean Motion Blur in Post with the Vector Pass.
Thanks for listening to my tedtalk... 😜
Joshua 👋
7 Comments
Ran into an issue two days ago where client asked to reduce the reflection on the glass material on a bevel. Tried to do it in post with aov or render passes but learned that they don’t work like other materials. So had to do a mix shader with transparency material. Having a slider would have been useful and time saving.
I was curious so downloaded Unity to check (I am UE user). By shadow strenght you mean this slider (left side)? IMO just adding "non cast shadow" spot duplicate work better (right side).
Yes exactly. I dont know what you mean with a spot duplicate works better, I dont want duplicate lights, they will increase the light level. I just want to control the shadow intensity. Example: I cant use two suns to brighten up my shadows because everyhting else would get brighter aswell. For Spots you can get away with it but not with a directional light. Also this will ruin anything you do with Light Probes inside Blender Its just another artist friendly way to control the look you want :) Also I would guess if you just duplicate like 10 lights your render time will increase 🤔
No no. I just asked did you mean this featre. Then I just said that in particular Unity case light duplicating result looks way better (IMO) than this slider result...
Big YES for light nodes! If you find some time it would be great to see this expanded with examples/screenshots/diagrams of how these could work in Blender. It may be quite involved, but at least at that point the devs have a good indication of how the features fit into the current interface and have a better launching point than a feature list.
If you don't have the time, no worries! These are all good features and it would be exciting to see them picked up.
On a different note: the biggest pushback I could envision you having is the fact that Blender's renderer goal (as far as I'm aware) is to be physically accurate and maintain consistency between both EEVEE/Cycles. A lot of tricks that are possible in a renderer like EEVEE aren't possible in Cycles or aren't physically accurate. Worth keeping that in mind, since while these things are very welcome in a game engine (for efficiency's sake) they may not be all that needed in an animation/rendering software.
We already have Light Nodes, but they dont work with Eevee. So no need for a screenshot.
And I agree, that Eevee should match Cycles as closely as it can get, but I think were over it, Eevee is matured an people actually rendering stuff with it, so more control is always welcome, the default should be cycles look a like, everything else not. And for example the render order will improve how close eevee can get to cycles because we dont need to trust the engine to sort stuff for us, we do it on our own.
Considering that NPR is a priority and EEVEE is a large contributor to that, I think you're right: the concern is probably misplaced. Also I misread Light Nodes as Probes. We already have irradiance probes but lack the ability to place them manually like in Unity. Apologies for the confusion!