Eevee: Live Viewport Demos
One of the Blender 2.8 features that is generating a lot of excitement is the new realtime rendering engine Eevee (no, not the Pokémon). Here are some videos that were made with it, and remember: this are all real-time viewport recordings!
Daniel Bystedt from Bläck studios (see our interview with him):
Dorian Zgraggen:
Юрий Жестников:
Martin Lindelöf:
Hardware specs?
Minimum (basic usage) hardware
32-bit dual core 2Ghz CPU with SSE2 support.
2 GB RAM
24 bits 1280×768 display
Mouse or trackpad
OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics with 512 MB RAM
Recommended hardware
64-bit quad core CPU
8 GB RAM
Full HD display with 24 bit color
Three button mouse
OpenGL 3.2 compatible graphics with 2 GB RAM
Optimal (production-grade) hardware
64-bit eight core CPU
16 GB RAM
Two full HD displays with 24 bit color
Three button mouse and graphics tablet
Dual OpenGL 3.2 compatible graphics cards with 4 GB RAM
source: https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/
It’s about 2.7x and not 2.8 as they are ditching legacy stuff and will go for OpenGL core profile. So those minimal requirements are outdated with GPUs that are not capable of using OpenGL 3.2+ .
So anyone that is using such cards will need to buy a new one.
Just one not very old graphic card:
https://developer.blender.org/T49012
It’s the same saying that everybody can render a Pixar 3D movie with a common, single, home PC supporting a 3D sw.
The question is not hw requirement for blender. The question is the hw used for making THIS videos…
Was used a 1’000€ video card? was used a 50€ cpu with 128 MB of RAM? or a 20’000€ pc’s cluster?
I do not understand what you mean. THIS video is actually THESE videos, and were made by different people with different hardware.
This is OpenGL. These video can be made perfectly with any gaming mid range card in real time. If you really have a low end card (but meeting OpenGL requirements), it will not be realtime, but taking a few seconds per frame.
*but taking a few seconds per frame.
This for final OpenGL render in large sizes. Maybe even low end cards are realtime in viewport.
i will test this with my chipset-embedded vga.
it supports OGL 3.3, but I dont’ think it can support any kind of live viewport render in “few seconds”…
@BLEND-IT: Please let us know how it went.
@ Ricardo Raimundo
Are you interested to a renderfarm with low-end crappy machines? :D
Worked for me..Intel HD 4600 integrated GPU, my gtx 770 clunked out on me a few months back, quite sore about it! and yes it is more laggy when using more materials and everything post process activated, but 1000x faster than a cycles render.
Nice to see Blender finally catching up with the industry in the viewport department!
Catching up ? Most of the big players in the modeling/animation space don’t have this yet.
I wonder if it’ll be possible to do the equivalent of the current OpenGL render and render out Eevee with antialiasing?
Just imagine, near full-quality animation previews written out in minutes rather than hours or days… ooops, I think I need a cold shower {8-O
Lol
Maya has something a bit similar with Viewport 2.0. Cinema 4D has it with PixelBerg. 3D-Coat has a real-time viewport for PBR painting.
Clarisse IFX’s rendering is so fast, essentially nears real-time viewport rendering.
Not sure if Max has it, and I know Foundry’s been working on it for Modo.
But these aforementioned others have had real-time viewport rendering for a few years now.
Though, Blender’s not particularly late on it. Not for 3D packages. It’s one of the times Blender’s keeping quite on pace with what’s out there. Quite ahead of some folks, actually.
I think real-time game engines like UE4 and CryENGINE have just been around longer, and 3D painting choices like Substance Painter and 3D-Coat have gotten popular for texturing.
Maybe they’ve made the real-time viewport concept seem like it’s been around longer, when really, it’s just been a few years since major 3D modeling software started embracing it.
Yes, maya has. But nobody uses it in production, we don’t as well (renderman). First – it’s glitchy as hell. Second – you need to build additional shader network to make it work, cause there’s a lot of render engines and viewport 2.0 doesn’t recognize their nodes. So it’s only suitable for marketing.
Blender on the other hand is going to make it production ready, easy to use and GPU accelerated, of course.
Don’t know about others, but Maya (industry standard) is faar behind it.
Finally, a viewport that makes you want to switch from Maya, cinema4D, Max, Houdini to Blender.
This is sooooooooo Epic
Are there any examples of a fully rendered animation using the Eevee engine?
Hardware specs?
Hardware specs?
Poly count?
It would appear that Blender is going to make more waves at Siggraph.
Freakin’ awesome!!
Hardware specs?
Hardware specs?
Poly count?
Glad to see it but, in my opinion, Blender, if wants to become a full professional software, needs to improve in other fields such as rigging/character animation.
I come from softimage and, compared to it, i see a huge need of an improvement in its rigging and expressions system.
Also a good schematic scene view would be a basical but killer feature to accomplish serious TD jobs.
I’m sure, in the future, they will improve that too ^^
like every other feature :p
Baby steps. man.
Real-time visuals is a big deal right now, in all 3D industries, so this is nothing to sneeze at, towards industry concerns. This is a great step in the right direction.
Besides, it’s evident that visual performance improvements takes waaaay longer to develop than other stuff. Best to tackle it opportunistically.
Other aspects like rigging are variously progressing (Bendy Bones) and on the agenda for the future development.
But right now, EEVEE is a big leap for Blender, and it’s been a long time coming.
Come on, having stunning realtime visual without a robust core it’s like having a beautiful car with a crappy engine.
If i need the best real time visual quality i use unity, unreal or even marmoset but, if i need the best animation system in terms of reliability in a big production i don’t know if blender is the right choice at the moment.
The developers are focusing to much on the visual side that make a lot of hype but the program still lacks of a good hierarchy view or even a good undo system. Without an addon it’s also impossible to do a mesh multiediting and, also with the addon, there is no fast way to accomplish this task.
On the rigging side is almost impossible to create a good shadow rig without pains and bendy bones are good but, at the moment, is not what i need when i work in the videogame field.
I’m not saying that Blender sucks, i use it every day and, for free, i can’t pretend anymore; i’m just saying that, before adding new features maybe is better to focus on the very basic needs of a CGI production.
sure not run in my laptop gma crad …well done
Well, i think it’s inevitable. If you want to do 3d graphics you have to stay tuned for hardware. And as Blender goes to big industry, it’s a good thing. Anyway, how are you going to do graphics on a slow machine?
my blender is my hobies . i have asus with 4gb ram, bad gma vga intel, harddisk 500 gb. bad processor too centrino, but my blender is work fine and im still making thing without any trouble except time to render, well i thing its nothing gona change with my hardware.
I have been playing around with EEVEE and just scratch the surface. the builds are a little buggy and crash but the results are WOW!
On the June 12, 2017 6:57 pm
Supaworst wrote :
«[…] I come from softimage […]»
Isn’t softimage cold dead ? Even with hes far better [put whatever you want here] tools…and the price they *used* to charge for…
Blender still very hot & alive….[and free & open source]
Mouahahahah [evil’s vilain cartoon laught]
Ok, it’s cold dead and, as a matter of facts, i switched from softimage to blender just to avoid autodesk and its policy to embrace the open source philosophy.
Anyway, softimage had in my opinion the best tools for TD and a really robust core while blender has a lot of issues related to strange or bad initial decisions such as the inverse matrix system or the z-up coordinates orientation.
I’m not talking about the new viewport, that is a cool feature. I just want to say that blender has problems where a 3D animation software should be solid-rock and i really think the character animation should be the main goal.
So, the global perception i’ve of blender is that there are a lot of “wow effect” features (cool realtime viewport, matcap, gpu accelerated engine…) but also lack the basic things such as the reliability that needs a production proof animation software.
Blender is almost for everything. It has game engine and will do laundry for you. So don’t expect that devs will fix/improve some areas of usage because you need them right now.
I could have exactly the same approach and say that it lacks many archviz/cad feature.
It’s totally free so I’m totally ok with those tools it ships.
Actually, If you want to talk about game engines/videogames, rigging, character animation and all the technical stuff related to 3D math play a big role in the industry.
If you want a CAD use a true CAD but, if a 3D software is advertised as a program to make assets for cartoons and games i expect that all the technical part under the hood is perfect; and for perfect i don’t mean bug free but at least well engineered.
Anyway, since is a free software, i can’t expect miracles and, after all, is my choice among all the 3D software on the market so for my works could fit.
I’m just saying where in my opinion the software should be improved.
hardware specs probably aren’t going to be much different than they are now. though i’m sure eevee is going to be more forgiving than cycles.
eevee is a realtime pbr based engine (think unreal or unity). so it renders like a video game but unlike a video game where low frame rates are a real issue we can deal with low frame rates when rendering an animation and just let it render slower than 60fps with still nice looking graphics. it’s really not a problem because while with eevee your end results may look just like they do in the viewport, your end result isn’t actually the thing you see in the viewport but all of the combined frames you can play back at full speed later.
we can also hide things in the viewport to help speed it up while we work. which is where viewport performance is actually a legit concern.
as far as graphics cards go it’s very likely to be more about vram than cuda core / stream processor count since it’s going to rely heavily on various texture maps to get instant or dang close to instant visuals rather than long render times to clear out noise.
this doesn’t have the wow factor as the ones up there do but it does demonstrate a lot of different things in a single scene.
https://youtu.be/mM4vvSZmABs
the most relevant for the comments here being that even some fairly old hardware can be used.
that rendered at 1 frame every 2 seconds according to the info on the video.
so in the end eevee is likely going to be the go to option for those of us on a budget to still have nice visuals.
Very very good! But what the hell with the shadows ? it’s “jumping” on the surface of the monster.
So it looks, like Blender will be able to achieve similar results as Substance Painter soon. We will be able to paint our PBR models inside Blender with ease. If exporting of all required channels (albedo, metallic / smoothness, etc.) will be easy enough – it may make me resign from my substance subscription ;). After playing with Dyntopo, I’ve already sold my ZBrush license some time ago, as Blender sculpt tools are sufficient for my needs. I really hope the same will happen to my Substance Painter license.
I just tested a scene with 8 million faces, with an 8K HDRI world background. The viewport could be manipulated completely seamlessly at any speed, madly rolling and zooming the view. My two Titan Black GPUs registered about 20% usage while I was doing this, so I guess any GPU of the last 3 years would have no problem maintaining a completely smooth viewport, For reference, my other PC’s current Zotac GTX1060 6GB renders a scene in exactly the same time as a TITAN Black.
And this is a kind of info people were expecting to hear/read.
I wonder how 1060 drivers works on Linux as windows is not my platform of choice.
I am trying to understand how Eevee will affect my workflow.
Does real time rendering mean that one won’t have to go through a separate rendering process to come up with a high resolution still image or animation sequence?
How will the still image or animation sequence be expoorted out to be furthur processed? How will the export image / movie resolution be determined?
WIll Eevee make cycles obsolete?
Do we stop putting time effort and money on Cycles as a rendering solution?
What is Blender Foundations plan on Cycles, vis-avis Eevee?
Whew! so many questions. :)
from what i’ve learned the answers to your questions are
yes and no, yes in that it uses the same process (not a separate one) as you’ll see in the viewport no in that it will re-render based on your settings in order to give you a high resolution.
there’s already a “viewport render” option in blender eevee used that to render last time i checked. personally i hope they’ll eventually set it up to render with the regular option so we can still just hit f12 and it just do it’s thing based on what render engine you’ve got selected.
resolution will be determined the same way it is now, from the render settings in the render tab of the properties window.
no, cycles isn’t going anywhere. eevee is going to look quite nice and be much faster but it isn’t going to look quite as nice as cycles is capable of and for certain things like particle hair rendering it’s not likely to be able to compete with cycles visuals even if it looks much nicer than what we’ve got now in the viewport.
if this sort of thing would make render engines like cycles obsolete you can guarantee that pixar and disney would have moved over to it already from their own ray tracer rendering engine. they spend a ridiculous amount of time rendering their 3d animated movies and that costs them more money. that said, they do have some very nice viewport technology for while they work rather than while they render and that’s what eevee was originally meant to be for us blender users.
it’s gonna be sometime in 2018 before an official release with eevee is here and while 2018 is only a few months away that doesn’t mean you’ll get 2.8 on the first day of the year. it could be late 2018 for all we know.
a single nice gpu is probably the best case for eevee since it isn’t using openCL/cuda to render. that said, cards that are better for Cycles will likely also be better for eevee but for different reasons. so if you’re talking about just upgrading a single card you’re still perfectly okay to do that. also, if your current card has enough vram to not crash your gpu renders as long as you’ve got a power supply in your computer that can power both your new card and your old one then keeping it around as an extra gpu compute card is still going to benefit you while you use cycles.
maybe we’ll get some openCL/Cuda compute for calculating some of the various sims (cloth, softbody, ect) sooner or later and additional cards will then be useful for people using eevee as their main render engine. until we do, eevee users may only benefit from crossfire/sli configs rather than extra compute cards but i doubt if that’ll actually be worth the cost there since eevee is already much faster to get it’s results.
so not spending more time, effort and money towards cycles as a rendering solution might be okay for some people but it might not for others.
as far as cycles vis-a-vis eevee
eevee was originally meant to be mostly an updated and modern viewport thing though a lot of us are planning to use it as our main render engine.
that being the original intent, and still an entirely legit purpose, they’ve set it up to work well in combination with cycles as a better and faster viewport estimate of what your scene will look like fully rendered. it’s been a little bit since i played with a 2.8 build and i didn’t play with it much but if i remember correctly they have it set up where you can switch between cycles and eevee using the same node setups.
you’ll still have cycles viewport rendering as an option though it would be better suited only for the fine tuning of materials and such after you’ve done most of the work already and are getting ready for your final cycles renders.
I’m upgrading my video card soon and am wondering if eevee will run better on CUDA or OpenCL. If it’s a toss-up i guess i’ll go with a GTX 1060 card.