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

Ambient occlusion

In this section, we'll investigate ambient occlusion further, even though we already talked about it briefly in Chapter 4, Non-Physical Rendering. We'll activate ambient occlusion (often initialized as AO) and then talk about some important values to change. Let's get started:

  1. Go to the Render Properties and check the box next to Ambient Occlusion.

Figure 7.16: Ambient Occlusion preferences

  1. You should see immediately that the rocks close to the camera become darker where they occlude with other rocks. Ambient occlusion is basically shadowing that we take for granted in real work but can be very computationally heavy in a rendering engine. In EEVEE, we approximate it so that we can see it in real time.

Figure 7.17: Ambient occlusion taking effect on the rocks

Refer to Figure 7.16 to see the properties available to tweak for Ambient Occlusion in the Render Properties panel. The...