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

Depth of field

Depth of field is something you might already understand implicitly, even if you don't recognize the term. It's available to use in Cycles, so you might have already used it in Blender before. Depth of field is a photography term that describes how close the sharpest object in the frame will appear. So some part of the frame will be in focus (sharp) and the rest of the frame will be out of focus (blurry). We can use this effect to highlight the parts of the frame that we want viewers to be looking at. It's also an effect that happens with taking a picture in real life, so if we use it in 3D well, it can add to the overall realism of the shot. The more we can mimic what happens with a real camera with our 3D camera, the more real the shot should look. Let's add some depth of field to the shot, keeping the rocks in the foreground in focus and the rest of the frame out of focus:

  1. Head to Render Properties (I know, again) and scroll down to the...