Shading, Lighting, and Rendering with Blender EEVEE E-Book

Sammie Crowder

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 267

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Shading, Lighting,and Rendering with Blender EEVEE

Create amazing concept art 12 times faster using a real-time rendering engine

Sammie Crowder

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Shading, Lighting, and Rendering with Blender EEVEE

Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing

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To my mom, dad, and brother, who have always made life exciting. To Bremen and Paige, who didn't mind me playing with Blender for 4 hours a night during the graveyard shift. Without you both I would never have gotten this far. And to Jen, who inspires me every day and stuck with me through every chapter of this book.

Contributors

About the author

Sammie Crowder first discovered Blender 8 years ago, and she has been using it to create ever since. After self-teaching while working at a library for several years, she started using Blender as an educator, creating short - and long-form animations that explain complex scientific concepts for the University of Colorado. Following several years of developing that program, she transitioned to using Blender 3D to create synthetic data for machine learning applications. Her current focus is on education, using Blender and other tools to get underserved groups into technology and art-based industries. She lives in beautiful Colorado with a dog, two cats, a lizard, and her partner. When she's not working in Blender she likes to read, hike, and garden.

I would like to thank the generous developers at the Blender Foundation for creating such a wonderful software package and providing it to people for free. I would also like to thank the Blender community, who provide awesome content to learn this software and create amazing works of art that never cease to inspire me.

About the reviewers

Volodymyr Borovkov is an experienced freelance 3D artist who is currently working in the automotive industry and has used Blender since 2014. He also has expertise as a Blender teacher, UE5 real-time rendering artist, game designer, RaceSim modder, and 2D designer.

Stephan Seeliger is a 3D artist with over 10 years of experience in Blender. He is a full-time system operator and has been running his own 3D company (CG-Mechanics) for over 2 years, which deals with 3D reconstructions. At the same time, he regularly publishes German Blender tutorials on his YouTube channel Geblendert, helping Blender beginners get started. His technical background consists not only of many years of experience in Blender, but also of a degree in technical computer science. He tries to carry technical workflows with Blender and other programs into the industry and expand the 3D area there.

Table of Contents

Preface

Section 1: Configuring in EEVEE – Mini-Project 1 – Stylized Scene

Chapter 1: Introducing EEVEE – A Real-Time Rendering Engine

Technical requirements

What is EEVEE? EEVEE as a rendering engine

Why use EEVEE and what are the advantages of using EEVEE?

Limitations of EEVEE

Setting up – configuring the start of mini-projects

File structure

An overview of the mini-projects

Summary

Chapter 2: Creating Materials Fast with EEVEE

Technical requirements

Materials in EEVEE

Why materials are a little different in EEVEE

Quickly previewing lighting ideas for fast iteration

Creating our first image-based material

Two-click Principled Setup

Shader to RGB

Creating our first procedural texture

The base mesh

Texture creation with procedural nodes

Adding shading to the material

Summary

Chapter 3: Lights, Camera...

Technical requirements

Adding lighting to our mini-project

World lighting system

Changing to the world shader editor

Changing the HDRI to fit our scene

Adding lights to our scene

Creating and configuring cameras

Adding a camera

Camera properties

Learning about the Line Art modifier

Summary

Chapter 4: Non-Physical Rendering

Technical requirements

Adding clouds to our composition

Configuring Render settings

Sampling

Ambient Occlusion

Bloom

Screen Space Reflections

Film

Compositing Render layers

Final compositing

Summary

Section 2: Real-Time Rendering – Mini-Project 2 – Creating a Realistic Environment Concept

Chapter 5: Setting Up an Environment with Geometry Nodes

Technical requirements

Setting up the scene – adding grass and rocks to the Asset Browser

Setting up the scene – adding grass and rocks

Adding more complexity and applying the modifier to other objects

Adding rocks to the node tree

Customizing our Geometry Nodes system

Summary

Chapter 6: Screen Space Reflections – Adding Reflection to the Water

Technical requirements

Screen space reflections

Light probes – reflection planes

Advanced water – volume and transparency

Summary

Chapter 7: Faking Camera Effects for Better Renders

Technical requirements

Atmospheric lighting

Bloom

Ambient occlusion

Depth of field

Summary

Chapter 8: Using Alphas for Details

Technical requirements

Adding detail to the scene (with birds!)

Faking volumetric mist

Using an image to create a background

Summary

Section 3: Advanced Features – Mini-Project 3 – Creating a Sci-Fi Concept

Chapter 9: Lighting an Interior Scene

Technical requirements

Troubleshooting a common lighting error

Designing the lighting for our interior

Previewing render passes to inform our lighting decisions

Summary

Chapter 10: Working with Irradiance Volumes and Cubemaps for More Accurate Rendering

Technical requirements

Implementing an Irradiance Volume

Implementing a Reflection Cubemap

Summary

Chapter 11: Kitbashing – Adding Details Fast

Technical requirements

Kitbashing with small objects

Using Geometry Nodes to create sci-fi panels

Summary

Chapter 12: Special Effects with EEVEE – Fire and Smoke

Technical requirements

Creating fire with Quick Smoke

Tweaking the shader for fire and smoke in EEVEE

Optimal EEVEE render settings for the smoke and fire

How to combine renders in Cycles and EEVEE

Summary

Chapter 13: Exploring the Wide World of Blender

Technical requirements

Review of the main concepts covered in this book

Further reading (or watching)

Learning more about: Geometry Nodes

Learning more about: The Asset Browser

Learning more about: Physics simulations

Learning more about: Character animation

Learning more about: Modeling

Learning more about: Materials

Learning more about: The Grease Pencil

Learning more about: Sculpting

Learning more about: Scripting

Add-ons for further improving your workflow

Free

Paid

Further projects to tackle

Environments

Characters

Grease Pencil

Studies

Summary

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

3D animation has always been a difficult art to master. First, there's the complicated software, the artistic sensibility required, and the need for expensive computer equipment. However, as the discipline has evolved, more and more people have been able to clear these necessary hurdles to learn 3D and advance the overall complexity and ability of animation and design. Nothing else has quite brought the art form to the masses like Blender 3D. Officially created in 1994, Blender 3D has evolved over the past years to slowly become the only open source 3D application available for free to any user who cares to download it. The open source aspect facilitates a truly amazing and supportive Blender community. I myself started using Blender as a hobbyist and, thanks to the superb support of the Blender community, managed to learn and grow enough to transition to using it for work and have been working as a 3D professional ever since.

Over the years, Blender has gone through a great many iterations, adding a truly crazy feature set: not only can you animate, but you can also rig, texture, simulate, video edit, and much, much more. The most groundbreaking release of the last few years was the 2.8 release, which changed fundamental aspects of the UI, but also added some amazing features that we, as artists, can leverage to create work faster and with improved control.

Who this book is for

This book represents an intermediate-to-advanced look at a specific part of Blender: The EEVEE rendering engine. This rendering engine is a specific and unique part of Blender, but also interacts with every other aspect of Blender on every level, which is why we'll still be covering Materials, Lighting, Cameras, and every other aspect you may have learned about before in 3D, but from another angle. We'll also cover some brand-new aspects of Blender, including Geometry Nodes, the Asset Browser, and more, so there's something for everyone. I want this book to show you how to do things faster and with more direction. This book will provide practical tips that will guide someone already familiar with Blender to make huge strides with EEVEE in a small amount of time. It doesn't matter whether you're a hobbyist, a 3D artist, or a developer looking to expand your horizons, I know firsthand the frustration of having something not turn out how you want it and having to start your 748-hour render all over again, along with the annoyance of having a bad computer and not being able to make the things you want owing to that limitation. I want this book to help you overcome those problems and make cool art and design work that you can put in a portfolio or show your friends, with them not believing how easy it actually is to use EEVEE.

A lot of the principles we're going to cover also have applications in game design. Game Engines are real-time renderers by necessity. Most things inside EEVEE have a direct crossover to Unreal Engine or Unity. If you want to start creating your own games, it's a great idea to learn EEVEE so that you can understand how Game Engines work as well as use Blender to make assets.

Whatever your reasoning, Blender's EEVEE real-time rendering engine is one of the best innovations to come out of the Blender Foundation in years.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing EEVEE – A Real-Time Rendering Engine, talks about what makes EEVEE important to an artist, and why they should consider using EEVEE for their art, while also introducing the mini-project format.

Chapter 2, Creating Materials Fast with EEVEE, explains how to quickly create materials that can be used in enabling you to come up with different ideas quickly. This will include making procedural and non-procedural textures, as well as using Blender 3.0's Asset Manager. They will then apply those materials to the first part of the mini-project.

Chapter 3, Lights, Camera..., describes the basic settings of lighting and how to use a camera to render a scene in EEVEE, This way, you will have a base-level knowledge of why it is different from a ray-tracing engine and become familiar with the quirks of a real-time engine.

Chapter 4, Non-Physical Rendering, demonstrates how to finish off our non-realistic scene by using different techniques to what will be looked over in the later chapters dealing with realistic renders. We'll configure rendering settings, show how to integrate other aspects of Blender (compositing, grease pencil, and the like), and finish off our mini-project.

Chapter 5, Setting Up an Environment with Geometry Nodes, heralds the start of a new mini-project. This time, we'll work on some more realistic subject matter by undertaking an outdoor environment scene. This chapter will be about prepping our environment (ground plane, lights, and camera) and then using Geometry Nodes to scatter a number of props around the scene.

Chapter 6, Screen Space Reflections – Adding Reflection to the Water, provides information about Screen Space Reflection functionality, while also explaining how to use Reflection Planes and Reflection Cubemaps. This will allow us to enhance the realistic rendering of water in the scene and provide a much better output.

Chapter 7, Faking Camera Effects for Better Renders, discusses the render panel at length and talks about the various ways to fake realistic effects that EEVEE offers. This will cover ambient occlusion, bloom, depth of field, shadows, indirect lighting, and other aspects that can help to fine-tune a render.

Chapter 8, Using Alphas for Details, includes a lot of miscellaneous tips and tricks for getting EEVEE to work a lot better with an environmental scene by using Alphas to fake birds in the scene, fake volumetrics, and more. We will then walk through the render settings for a realistic scene.

Chapter 9, Lighting an Interior Scene, covers how, in this chapter, we'll look at ways to make lighting faster in EEVEE, how to troubleshoot some common lighting problems, and how to create some cool effects with the lights.

Chapter 10, Working with Irradiance Volumes and Cubemaps for Accurate Rendering, demonstrates how to make Irradiance Volumes and Reflection Cubemaps, how to position them, how to work with the lighting to get the correct result through baking, and why these tools are needed to achieve close-to-realistic lighting.

Chapter 11, KitBashing – Adding Details Fast, in this chapter, by using simple assets pre-prepared for the user, we will work through the idea of using smaller pieces that can be duplicated to create intricate sci-fi designs. We will also introduce the concept of trim sheets and talk about shortcuts to use in creating materials for sci-fi scenes.

Chapter 12, Special Effects with EEVEE – Fire and Smoke, includes a brief workflow for simulating fire and smoke inside of EEVEE. Because there aren't any great ways to do this as easily as in Cycles, this will also include some tips to create a better shader in volumetrics, how to utilize the quick smoke function for faster results, and how to cache the simulation to keep working on the scene better. A brief overview of how to use Cycles and EEVEE together will also be provided.

Chapter 13, Exploring the Wide World of Blender, endeavors to provide you with a jumping-off point, along with suggestions on how to further the knowledge that has been acquired in this book, including personal projects to tackle, further books to read, and other resources to get more information on this topic and others related to it.

To get the most out of this book

From a basic technical perspective, it's important to have a working internet connection, some storage space on your computer, a three-button mouse, and hardware that is compatible with Blender (learn more at https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/).

This book is an intermediate to advanced level overview, so it assumes that you have some basic knowledge of Blender and have worked with the program before. That's not to say you should know every single thing about Blender (which might be impossible!), but you should at least know basic modeling, how to add objects, how to add materials, lights, cameras, and how to render (generally). There will be portions of the methodology that I will skip over to get to the meat of the topic quickly, so if you don't have some of this basic knowledge, you might struggle to use some of the more complicated tools. If you don't have all the knowledge suggested, I suggest looking into other Packt publications (Blender 3D by Example, by Oscar Baechler and Xury Greer, is highly recommended) to learn some of these base skills because we will be building on top of them. Or, if you're a fast learner, feel free to work through these mini-projects and then do outside research on any aspect you feel isn't covered to your satisfaction. The great thing, as I've said, is that Blender is very community-focused and someone on StackExchange (https://blender.stackexchange.com/) or BlenderArtist (https://blenderartists.org/) will be more than willing to answer your question. All the information is out in the open, ready for you to assimilate and deploy it. If you're not quite sure you have enough background information to start the book, I would recommend working through Andrew Price's Beginner Series to give yourself a better foundation for the mini-projects we'll be completing. That beginner's series is available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewPPrice.

PureRef and Krita are optional (free) downloads, but I find they are useful in planning and editing images.

Download the example code files

You can download the supporting files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Shading-Lighting-and-Rendering-with-Blenders-EEVEE. If there's an update to any file, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781803230962_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in the text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In the Chapter 12-Start.blend file, I have hidden our Hangar from view so that we can create the fire without Blender having to render the entire scene plus the fire at once."

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "Next, go to the Object menu located in the top-left corner (next to the Add menu) and click on it."

Tips or Important Notes

Appear like this.

Get in touch

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Preface

Section 1: Configuring in EEVEE – Mini-Project 1 – Stylized Scene

Let's jump right into creating a scene. In this section, we're going to learn how to optimize materials for EEVEE, create lights and cameras, and render the final scene. After finishing this section of the book, you should have the confidence to create your own stylized scene.

In this section, we will cover the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Introducing EEVEE – A Real-Time Rendering EngineChapter 2, Creating Materials Fast with EEVEEChapter 3, Lights, Camera...Chapter 4, Non-Physical Rendering

Chapter 1: Introducing EEVEE – A Real-Time Rendering Engine

With the 2.8 release, Blender has added another rendering engine to its already impressive software: EEVEE. EEVEE is a real-time rendering engine that allows artists to preview their work quickly and accurately, as well as cutting down render times and a need for top-of-the-line GPUs or expert experience. This book will be an intermediate/advanced look at EEVEE, detailing the many ways you can use EEVEE to create awesome, fast concept art and get to your final render faster, with more ability to iterate on style, content, and direction. This book will go through three different mini-projects that will introduce various styles and content that will be immediately applicable to any project, for any user from professionals to hobbyists.

Figure 1.1: The Blender UI

We'll be using the Blender 3.0 release, which has some completely new and fantastic features that even industry pros will want to know more about. EEVEE has been updated in this version to be faster and expand the array of features already available. As more and more studios make use of real-time rendering and other ray-tracing shortcuts, the tips and tricks in this book will become more and more essential to animation as an industry, setting you up to be ahead of the curve when it comes to creating fast, interesting, and flexible art.

In this chapter, we'll learn what EEVEE is and configure Blender for our upcoming mini-projects.

The main topics we'll be covering are as follows:

What is EEVEE? EEVEE as a rendering engine Why use EEVEE and what are the advantages of using EEVEE?Configuring the start of mini-projects

Technical requirements

This chapter is mostly an introduction to the technology, but having the latest version of Blender downloaded from https://www.blender.org/ is recommended to be able to start exploring the world of EEVEE, and can provide a useful point of reference as we talk about limitations. Another great point of reference is Blender's docs: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/index.html.

We'll go over many of the things covered inside the EEVEE official docs, but reading through and being familiar with the various terms will help you to pick up some of these concepts faster as we encounter them in our mini-projects.

What is EEVEE? EEVEE as a rendering engine

Before we dive headfirst into the absolutely astounding feature set that EEVEE provides, let's cover a little bit of what makes it so great, but also touch on some of the limitations.

EEVEE is an acronym that stands for Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine, though originally it was named after the evolution Pokémon, Eevee. EEVEE is a real-time rendering engine. By real-time, we mean that we can preview our animations and designs in real time (or as close to it as physically possible). We can make changes to materials and instantly get an idea of what exactly is happening with those materials. We can move lights and cameras freely to understand what we're framing and how we're framing it. As you can imagine, this ability to see things in real time is a game-changer. But EEVEE isn't the only real-time engine being implemented in state-of-the-art graphics programs. Other real-time rendering engines that work similarly to EEVEE are Unreal Engine and Unity. As you may know, both of these are game engines, and as such are primarily used to create video games. As it utilizes the same rendering system as a game engine, it's very easy to see how EEVEE can be much faster than a render engine of a different style.

Most 3D artists are very familiar with ray-tracing. This is the most common method of scene calculation, where light rays are shot from lights then bounced off surfaces a specific number of times, providing illumination, material properties, and camera initialization. Being a real-time rendering engine, EEVEE does not perform light calculations like a ray-tracing engine such as Cycles would. EEVEE performs its scene calculation through a method called rasterization. Rasterization is a scene estimation model. This estimation model takes the scene information and provides a visual of what the scene should look like, not what it actually looks like. With this scene estimation technique, we can fake effects such as reflections, volume, and global illumination, but it is just that, a fake. We'll go over the optimum ways to fake some of the more advanced results that EEVEE can provide in our three mini-projects, because after all, 3D is all about how to make something look real, while in reality, it's all just pixels on a screen.

While EEVEE differs a lot from Cycles, it is also similar in some ways. EEVEE uses the same shading type as Cycles, which allows an easy transition from Cycles to EEVEE and back again. Most other render engines use this same type of shading, the Physically based shading model that has been the industry standard for many years now. Physically based shading or physically based rendering (shortened to PBR usually) is a way of calculating how light reflects off objects. It assumes that all objects will reflect light, some more than others, and their reflection values will make them shinier or more diffused. This allows light to be bounced off the objects in a scene. Because EEVEE uses PBR, we can use material shaders to determine how the light will bounce off something, or how the light will pass through something. These principles directly transfer from Cycles or another ray-tracing engine, so having some familiarity with those principles is recommended if you want to get the most out of this book.

Side Note

The Blender Foundation hosts a variety of demo files on their website, https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/.

A fantastic way to understand the speed and utility of EEVEE is to take any of the labeled EEVEE files for a test run. Taking inspiration from the way other people have used EEVEE for different kinds of projects and in different production environments can really open your mind to the possibilities of the engine.

Why use EEVEE and what are the advantages of using EEVEE?

EEVEE is an absolutely fantastic set of tools when put in the right artist's hands. This book is a crash course on how to use the tools provided by Blender and EEVEE to create stellar artwork, and one of the first things to learn about a tool is when to use it and when not to.

There are four main ways we can use EEVEE when we're going about creating a 3D scene:

The first is to use EEVEE to preview our scene, and when we're ready for the final render, switch to Cycles for a more realistic final result. This can save a 3D artist a lot of time by sacrificing some accuracy in the development stage. This is something that we will only cover briefly in this book.The second way of creating with EEVEE is to preview and render inside EEVEE. The pros of this are increased speed in previewing and in the final render, but because EEVEE is not a ray-tracing engine, the final render inside EEVEE will potentially be less realistic. This is the type of work we'll be doing in all of the projects that we create in this book.The third is the ability to see volumetrics in real time. We'll be exploring volumetrics in great detail in this book, and you'll use them in all the projects we'll work on.The last big advantage that we have in EEVEE is the ability to see emissions accurately in the viewport. We can use this as a shortcut to see the results of our light shaders without needing to add them to the compositor later. We'll use this in the third project we work on.

So, for extreme realism, we're always going to want to use a ray-tracing engine. But for speed? The ability to update and preview a scene in real time in the viewport is immensely helpful, particularly for more complicated scenes. It means that you can update, view, and make changes in seconds or minutes, rather than the slower workflow of updating, taking 20 minutes to render for a preview, make changes, and repeat. As artists, we can gain a better understanding of what exactly is happening in our scene, we can apply design and color theory more accurately, and provide the changes our art director wants, faster.

Limitations of EEVEE

In terms of the limitations of EEVEE, we'll cover specific points as we come to them, but when getting yourself set up to start our mini-projects, you should be aware of a few things:

Firstly, EEVEE works with your GPU to render. While having a beefy GPU isn't exactly necessary, it should be noted that an older or less powerful GPU will slow down your render times a little bit.Secondly, because of how EEVEE evaluates lights and materials, there may be points that it fails, situations where you're using too many lights, too many refracted materials, or your GPU gets overloaded and crashes. This won't come up in the mini-projects we're working on in this book, but it's important information to know when you're working beyond this book on your own projects, or in a studio utilizing EEVEE in its pipeline.Shading is also a little different in EEVEE. Because we're using the GPU in EEVEE you'll probably run out of memory in EEVEE sooner than Cycles. In shaders, running out of memory will probably look like a texture that turns up pink. Don't worry about this for our projects though, we aren't creating complicated enough textures for this to happen to us. EEVEE also isn't able to utilize Particle Info nodes or bevels, but it does have added nodes such as Shader to RGB that we will explore.

Side Note

A great resource to read through for more information on where EEVEE is weak is the limitations page in the Blender documentation: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/limitations.html.

At its current development stage, EEVEE is not going to be the cure-all for every single problem you face when using a ray-tracing engine. The decision to use EEVEE should always be made with the following in mind:

Do I need extremely realistic lighting or materials?Do I need to work on my CPU exclusively?Am I creating effects that need extensive volumetric rendering or similar?Do I need extremely complicated materials or utility nodes such as Bevel, Particle Info, or IES Texture?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, use Cycles for your final render, but consider using EEVEE to preview your work. If none of those features are a concern, EEVEE is the way to get results quickly. An alternate third approach is to combine rendered aspects from Cycles and EEVEE, rendering the aspects best done realistically in Cycles and everything else in EEVEE.

As stated previously, many game engines use very similar techniques to EEVEE, so if you're interested in creating game art inside of Unity or Unreal, you'll have a much easier time transferring that knowledge from the concepts we'll cover in this book to your engine of choice.

Before we start implementing the mini-projects, we need to set up and customize Blender.

Setting up – configuring the start of mini-projects

If for some reason you don't have Blender already set up on your computer, let's walk through the steps to install it and talk a little bit about general settings to make your life easier.

Download and install the latest version at blender.org. We'll be using the 3.0 release in this book, but if you have computer compatibility problems with that version, feel free to use 2.93, being aware that some aspects covered herein are not available in version 2.93.

After downloading and setting up, we should be ready to roll! Blender is a highly customizable program, though, so if you also want to take time to set up a different color palette or change your viewports, feel free to do that. Some important add-ons to activate in Blender that we will get a lot of use out of are good to set up too.

Navigate to Edit in the toolbar, then select Preferences.

Figure 1.2: The Preferences window

Let's add Import Images as Planes and