Book Image

Shading, Lighting, and Rendering with Blender EEVEE

By : Sammie Crowder
Book Image

Shading, Lighting, and Rendering with Blender EEVEE

By: Sammie Crowder

Overview of this book

Blender is the most important up-and-coming 3D software package in the world. EEVEE, a state-of-the-art real-time rendering engine is a fairly new addition to Blender and provides the capacity to create artwork at blazing speed, almost 12 times faster than Cycles. Lighting, Shading, and Rendering with Blender’s EEVEE provides a high-level overview of what EEVEE is capable of, then teaches users about Geometry Nodes, Rendering Techniques, using shortcuts like Kitbashing and Alphas to speed up scene creation, volumetrics, reflections, adding lights, cameras and even special effects like fire and smoke, all in EEVEE. All of this is in the context of creating actual scenes that readers will work through from start to finish. By the time a Blender Artist completes the book, they will have created three separate works that have challenged them to iterate and design with the full power of Blender’s EEVEE.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Configuring in EEVEE – Mini-Project 1 – Stylized Scene
6
Section 2: Real-Time Rendering – Mini-Project 2 – Creating a Realistic Environment Concept
11
Section 3: Advanced Features – Mini-Project 3 – Creating a Sci-Fi Concept

Previewing render passes to inform our lighting decisions

It can be very valuable to be able to preview sections of a render before we render it. It saves us a ton of time and energy and will also result in a better product. There's a really cool feature built into EEVEE that allows us to see individual render passes in real time that can help inform our decisions when lighting a scene. Let's activate a different Render Pass:

  1. Make sure you're in Rendered Shading mode.

Figure 9.28: Rendered Shading mode option selected

  1. In the top-right corner, you'll see a drop-down arrow, right next to the Viewport Shading options. Click on the down arrow:

Figure 9.29: Dropdown for Viewport Shading

  1. Click on the Render Pass dropdown and select the Shadow pass.

Figure 9.30: Changing to the Shadow render pass

  1. We can immediately see only lighting information, without all...