Eevee Next finally arrives in Blender
Animator and YouTuber Remington ‘SouthernShotty‘s video run-down of the key features in Eevee Next, due for its stable release in Blender 4.2 next week.
The Blender Foundation has published a blog post officially announcing Eevee Next, the long-awaited overhaul of Eevee, Blender’s real-time render engine.
The update, which gets its stable release in Blender 4.2 next week, improves the visual quality and stability of viewport rendering in the open-source 3D software, bringing it closer to the output of Cycles, Blender’s production render engine.
Key changes include a new Global Illumination system using screen-space ray tracing, support for displacement and viewport motion blur, and for unlimited lights in scene.
The changes are compatibility-breaking, so the developers have also produced a migration guide for porting scenes created in older versions of Blender to Eevee Next.
A long-awaited overhaul of Blender’s real-time render engine
Eevee Next has been in development for some time, having originally been identified as one of the Blender Foundation’s key develoment targets for 2023.
It made its first public appearance in early development builds of Blender 4.1, but was pushed back a version before 4.1 was released in March.
New ray tracing pipeline improves Global Illumination
Eevee Next improves the visual quality of renders generated with Eevee: both viewport renders, and when using it as an alternative to Cycles for final-quality output.
One very obvious change is the new Raytracing option in the render settings, although the online documentation still describes Eevee as a rasterization renderer.
Ray tracing is used in Eevee Next’s new Global Illumination system to increase the accuracy of surface indirect lighting, with the render engine now able to use screen surface ray tracing for every BSDF shader in a scene.
More stable, flicker-free renders
Eevee Next should also improve temporal stability when rendering with Eevee, with velocity-aware temporal supersampling reducing noise and aliasing issues.
In addition, shadows are now rendered using virtual shadow maps, which should reduce flickering, as well as increasingly maximum shadow resolution.
Support for unlimited lights, displacement and viewport motion blur
Eevee Next also removes some of the restrictions when rendering with Eevee, compared to Cycles.
There is no longer a limit on the number of lights in a scene – although only 4,096 can be visible at the same time – and lights are visible through refractive surfaces.
In addition, displacement is now supported on materials, and a new Thickness output improves the visual quality of refraction, translucency and subsurface scattering.
Motion blur is now “partially supported” in the viewport – it uses a simpler algorithm than when using Eevee for final renders – and depth of field has been optimized.
World volumes are no longer limited to render clipping distances, which means that they can completely block the world background and sun lights.
The update also reworks Eevee’s interface, adjusting the panels and properties to make them closer to those of Cycles.
However, the two render engines are still some way from feature parity: you can find a list of remaining limitations in Eevee Next in the online documentation.
Not backwards-compatible with previous versions of Blender
As a major overhaul of the renderer, Eevee Next is a compatibility-breaking update.
The online documentation includes a migration guide explaining how to convert scenes created in earlier versions of Blender for rendering with Eevee Next in Blender 4.2.
System requirements
Eevee Next is part of Blender 4.2. It is currently available as a release candidate. The stable release is due on 16 July 2024.
Blender is compatible with Windows 8.1+, macOS 11.2+ and glibc 2.28+ Linux. It’s free.
Read the post announcing Eevee Next on the Blender Developer blog
Read a full list of new features in Eevee Next in the Blender 4.2 release notes
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