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

Adding lighting to our mini-project

Lighting is the cornerstone of any good render, and in this chapter, we're going to work through the process of adding lights, tuning them to suit our overall environment, and then making sure they work properly inside of EEVEE. I'll cover both the artistic and technical aspects of what we're doing. We'll add a world lighting system and a few simple lights and then consider some of the ways EEVEE can be used for better lighting, especially in the compositing stage.

World lighting system

If you've been following along (or downloaded Mini-Project 1-Chapter 3), you should have something resembling what I have here, a scene with a lot of materials but not a lot of lighting:

Figure 3.1: Scene with minimal lighting

Let's start to fix up our lighting by adding a world lighting system and tweaking it so we still get some good shadows inside the scene:

  1. The first step is to disable the...