Bloom Material

* @Alex * Is there a tutorial for this? My method seems like it would make the process super simple honestly. Just add a bloom material to what you want to bloom and then add the same settings as you would for any other bloom.

* @Alex * Sidenote: Being able to choose a bloom color would be nice as well. Hell if you want to say the bloom is for the environment then let's have an alternative called glow material. If you have a scene with neon signs and you want some to be broken while the bloom is happening in reflections a certain way you will end up with a very very large photoshop file or a long long process of post-editing. You can otherwise just add glow to the object, choose the width, intensity, color, and so on.

Now you can just add the broken neon sign color to one, the fixed to another, allow environmental bloom to work on reflections.

That way you do not spend hours fixing it.

With glow color you can have a pink neon sign give off a blue glow because why not. You can have an object that emits no light giving off a glow because again why not. We all have an imagination where this is applicable. Customization is key. We could have nodes to hook up to it like the ramp node to make a unique gradient glow.

Honestly, I have some trippy worlds I make where this option would be perfect.

* @crop.circles.studio * I think there is a misunderstanding here. Bloom is not a volumetric environmental effect. It is simply how light bounces around the lens mechanism and has no presence in the scene. It should never be reflected on any object, it is computed in a fullscreen quad pixel shader after everything is rendered using a tonemap threshold based on irradiance intensity. There are many technical reasons why this would cause issues, From a PBR standpoint a bloom material should not exist. Perhaps you are trying to create a volumetric haze rather then lens bloom. You can place an spherical gradient volumetric object around the surface you want to give a glowing haze to. Otherwise ditch eevee's quick bloom post effect and use the compositor to give you full stylistic control over the final image. Look up some tutorials on using the compositor, you can make all kinds of localized, adjustments, filters and color changes.

* @Alex * I would want the haze to be a specific color, be x amount of intense, and I think I have an idea. Bloom seemed to have reacted like high intensity emissive, or reflection equals x amount of intensity then apply algorithm according to abc inputs.

I figured you could at least control some of those offering a glow material or a bloom one. Much like if you added glow in photoshop. Still would be quicker to do it this way than a volumetric object. Much like solidify vs extrude. However, I can see how to do it now. So I probably will test it later.

* @crop.circles.studio * Yeah, the result of a render should be treated as a rule of thumb like an unprocessed photograph. This is why I disagree with eevee alone having a builtin bloom feature at all, (doesn't offer any other effects). Feels clunky, feels like it came from early in eevee's development to match other lookdev tools. The purpose of blender's compositor is to allow you to "Photoshop" your animation to give it those kinds of tweaks. With a bit of python knowledge you can probably create a tool that automatically adds glare nodes and masks it to specific material IDs via the compositor if it is something you find yourself doing often.

* @Alex * Actually I know of a way this could be simply done if someone could code it. The thing is this would require no reworking of the current system. Bloom would not be even needed in this case. I tried to learn python but it went into one ear and out the other. Wish I could get python developers to work for free lol.

* @Alex * Never mind glow material would work better. My idea which is based off yours would not work. Is not working. I am making a volume object for the glows and editing it to make a custom glow if you will. However once they reach a certain size they just become a weird block.

* @Alex * Now I remember C4D has glow per material. That is where I recall it from. C4D is a very stable creature great in a few areas but god awful in a lot of others.

Basically glow material because small volumetrics do not work at all (I am trying but if 64gbs of ram and a 6gb graphics card is getting sluggish with me trying to make a small sphere look like a sphere instead of a cube then no other computer will).

Eevee seems to be the fantasy renderer at least that is how I see it and cycles is the big daddy serious one.

I think Blender creators want Eevee to become more like cycles. I think it should become more like itself. We have cycles for realism, and then we should have Eevee for over the top fantasy whatever we want no limits type thing.

i.e a tree glowing for no reason lol. I think that is the issue Eevee and Cycles needs to become two different render engines one for one style one for another.

Cycles Daddy. Eevee Grandma.

* @crop.circles.studio * Eevee volumettics currently doesn't support arbitrary shapes. Its based on the bounding box. You need to use shading nodes. A gradient plugged into the strength of volumetric emission will do quite nicely for an artist placed glow. Blender internal used to have a point based "halo" material for glows and particles, but that is 90's tech. Eevee and cycles are not different for stylistic purposes. If that was the case the internal would never been abandoned. Cycles works on multiple CPUs/GPUs using general purpose compute and targets physically accurate offline rendering. Eevee is built on top of blender's longstanding OpenGL viewport with the introduction of PBR shaders, screen space light approximations and IBL/probe data and temporal accumulation. It aims to replicate cycles as a ground truth but at interactive frame-rates running on the host's graphics device.

* @Alex * and to me that is the issue. If you going to have two different renderers why not allow one Eevee to have its own unique personality i.e. full customizability. With a little loss for realism. I know it sounds stupid but Eevee could be something more if we just allowed that. Glow Materials is a start but plenty of trippy additions could be added in the future. I know I know Blender creators want Eevee to be Cycles but super fast. However, I just feel like more could be had if we decided Eevee could be a fantasy render with parts of cycle in it to allow for realistic renders if need be however if you want to go all out with crazy you can. Art is about unlimited imagination and Eevee could be that route. Instead of choking it out or making it hard to run with your imagination. I know boo me. I admit I suck at explaining myself.

* @crop.circles.studio * By "fantasy" renderer do you mean NPR? Because even Cycles has a Toon Shader Eevee doesn't have (due to not being able to match gather). There are other projects to make NPR renderers for blender. Eevee and Cycles (and Arnold, and UE4, other PBR rendering tech) already have the ability to produce nearly anything your imagination can think of... you just have to use a compositor and play with shaders a bit. There really isnt any lack of functionality as you are describing it just takes a little bit of set up.

* @Alex * No I mean allow Eevee to grow with it gaining some cycle properties as it does but add a lot of features that would not be part of a typical realistic renderer. For example glow material, the ability to color shadows, the ability to make multiple shadows with or without a light source, the ability to make shadows glow even etc. Stuff that would not be considered realistic even remotely. Of course, take feature requests from the audience as well.

Allow Eevee to be more than a fast clone render engine of Cycles.

I think we are clipping Eevee's wings. Albeit many people here as stated would boo and hiss at the notion but I think if you going to have two render engines why not make them different. Some also seem to think I am suggesting to change and remove features from Eevee even though I am not suggesting that.

I think we can just do more than we are.

* @crop.circles.studio * I would say it would be nice if eevee could be a lot less hard coded and open to end user modification without having to dive through a ton of complicated C code and low level abstraction layers. Things like a procedural render dependency graph which is opened up to the user for compositing in realtime using the gbuffers and lighting buffers of each stage would be excellent. It feels like that's probably the kind of thing you are after rather than continuously adding weird hacks to make everything glow.

* @Alex * I can't code myself out a wet paperback sadly so it would be useless for me but if you speaking of addons for it it has potential.