Eevee / Cycles Hybrid?
Kind of "Out there," idea, but after learning about how most game engines nowadays are implementing "real time ray tracing," it kind of made sense.
So in case you don't know, most Real-time Raytracing that is done in game engines isn't full ray tracing, but only uses raytracing for reflections and maybe some global illumination, but the rest of the rendering is done traditionally.
With Blender having both Cycles and Eevee, with a shared materials system between the two, it would be awesome if we could get the noise free rendering of Eevee, and be able to raytrace true reflections and GI. If the Reflection pass and GI pass were done at a lower resolution, it could produce "pretty good," results.
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I did an exact similar topic. it was just an intuition because I have zero knowledge about this. title: Hybrid render motor Open GL/ray tracing for light and shadows only
OPEN GL will be actual EEvee
ray tracing for lights with very low setting by default (no rebounds) and reflections pass and glossy pass => it will works behind and the result will be only added when calculs are finished to eevee result. [x]show rays could be uncheked and another [x] only render rays same thing about shadows... so in fact render motors could be 1>2>3 and 4 workbench>eevee>evee+rays and cycles
google it. i found this topic for example: imgtec.com/blog/hybrid-rendering-for-real-time-lighting/
and few hours later i saw this he is explaining at 50 min how it's working youtube.com/watch
Jason van Gumster
This puts Eevee in the same territory as Blender Internal. Unless planned for in advance, experience shows that can get really messy (read: difficult to maintain and extend) on the code side of things.
zgorg2004
zgorg2004
* @Jason van Gumster *yes but this is the position of Eevee is reaching anyway, trying to find his place in a 3D creation software, with nodes and things like that... that's why blender render was this mix, but in a motor as cycles the light is calculated at each loop and first step of the loop are the same. so maybe it could be possible to create a motor with a break in the loop about those steps and still working with cycles but having a minimal quality about reflections lights...this is what they try to have same shaders for the 2 motors
so I erase my subject...
Dynamic overrides will make this a possibility, given the right scene structure and compositing workflow. I would love to see, however, more settings for render-time in EEVEE. Maybe there could be ways to improve visual fidelity when using EEVEE for offline rendering, such as baking lights for each object in a temporary cubemap or something like that.
* @Josephbburg * yes dynamic overides seems good but in fact the first part of what is doing a motor such as cycles could be more like Open GL and the part about lights not calculated as a loop but more like in Blender render? so more a Open GL like, but compatible with cycles, and every nodes. but with a minimum of quality for shadows reflections and emission...
* @zgorg2004 * That sounds like it would involve a lot of work on the back-end. And aren't they planning to port to Vulkan at some point?
* @Josephbburg * Vulcan is the next step but not enough. a mix between cycles and open GL will be needed for light shadows and reflections. a mix depending on options
* @zgorg2004 * I don't like the idea because it's not generic. What about all the other render engines? What if I wanted a hybrid LuxCore/EEVEE, Appleseed/EEVEE, RPR/EEVEE? Especially since they're planning to open Lookdev mode up to other render engines in the near future.
so hard to find in the search function I typed hybrid eevee/cycles but no... so I recommand to read the pdf that you can find on google "Hybrid ray trace in real time"
This was commented in the chat, but though the viewlayers (renderlayers), could be incredibly usefull for the people who needs microdisplacement for example, but also fast volumetrics.
Technically this is probably something you can already do yourself in Blender using linked scenes with passes and the compositor. The problem is that you might not get that much of a performance improvement since rendering reflections in a raytracer like Cycles means rays have to bounce all over the rest of the scene anyway.
* @Jason van Gumster * this is quite the same topic in fact. I will copy my subject there. he is telling "most Real-time Raytracing that is done in game engines isn't full ray tracing, but only uses raytracing for reflections and maybe some global illumination" and shadows. if we could do it ourselves dev will ever foundnd a better glossy, some real emission, better reflections and things like this. and nodes as bevel pointiness would work... but maybe I don't understand well the subject