Workbench's cavity overlay in EEVEE
While the workbench renderer is able to apply a cavity overlay as a screen-space effect in the viewport, no such feature can be found in EEVEE. I think as long as we don't have a proper pointiness or bevel shader that works in EEVEE, enabling the cavity overlay for EEVEE would at least provide SOME way to make edges more pronounced (and even give a little faked bevel-like effect).
I can't imagine it being too much of a stretch to simply have it work exactly like in Workbench - just being able to toggle it on and off in the viewport's shading settings.
Having it selectable as a render pass would be a nice addition as well. This could just be overlayed on top of the cavity-less rendering (by having everything else in the image be 128/128/128 grey), and this way it could be masked out to only be applied to certain objects.
The ultimate addition would of course be having this as an actual node in the shader editor, but right now it looks like only the AO node is an EEVEE screen-space effect that's available there (and it doesn't work too well either, since it's always using the same settings as EEVEE's viewport AO settings).
8 Comments
This is the most important asset of substsnce painter in my opinion. All texturing are probably improved by this kind of shading.
I saw this thread a few days back and decided to make an addon for it. Today i released the addon for free on my gumroad. It allows you to render out the cavity pass in just one click (Using viewport render). You can find it here if you are interested: gum.co/CavityPass
The way this is handled, cavity will be a screen-space render pass, like bloom. Still, I really want to have it available, since right now I render out a viewport render with cavity. I guess you could have a workbench render setup for compositing, but that's a lot of steps for a simple effect.
* @Limarest * Sure, you can do it with two separate renderings - one in EEVEE, one in Workbench. After all that's how I've created my mockups in the opening post. But that is unnecessarily complicated and should not be needed.
If I understand it correctly both EEVEE and Workbench use the same rendering architecture, so I still assume it would be a relatively quick addition to EEVEE. For a (again, relatively) quick fix this would improve EEVEE's render quality for hard-surface stuff a LOT.
I am a bit disappointed in Pablo giving this thread only a quick glance during the last Blender Today, waving it off as unnecessary and pointiness being the actual thing to fix. But pointiness is only working with high density meshes, whereas the cavity overlay works independent from vertex density and is only looking at edge angles (which is the way to go working with hard-surface models, CAD-data and low-poly objects).
* @jan_hofmeister * Yeah, I guess we should mention this again next week
Also add to that the ability to bake it to a texture!
We need that, would be very useful !
Actually... yes please. For Hard Surface renders, this would be awesom, saves on beveling everything or using a somehwat buggy bevel material.