#eevee renderer

So today I finished modifying Axi Gerfa's Fiat 127 model to have a rig more constant with my inhouse props, and I've put the vehicle into the cyberpunk scene. Since this will be doing a drive-by I parented 2 lights onto the car.

Since I needed to have the headlights to glow to show where the lights are coming from: I decided to go the SFM-route and create material overrides to create the glow. The material itself uses a gradient to have the brightest point in the middle instead of being uniform. I did something similar for the rear lights. By default these elements don''t glow as outside of this specific use case, I don't foresee needing active night lights for this prop for the majority of times moving forward.

So last week I had an operation that temporilarly stopped progress (I'm fine BTW, it was nothing major), but for the last few weeks I've been working on adding some cars to the road at the end of the street to give some more life then just being empty. Took me longer then I car to admit to override 1 of the car models to change the livery to give some variety... But I think at the angle the camera is at that even just having 3 cars on the street has made the area look less barren.

Now I want to be clear that I didn't model these cars! That would've been too time consuming for something that has already gone over my time budget. So instead I took a page outta the demoscenes made in UE5 and downloaded some free models such as the VW Touran model by Igor Schmidt, the Mercedes Benz S-series by Brabus/Prynex3D, plus 1 additional model I plan to use as a "drive by" car which is the Fiat 127 model by Axi Gerfa. All I did is quote unquote "port" them to use the same rigging and grouping system as my inhouse models - but I can't take credit for actually creating them!

So quite a few things has happened since I announced I was back! On the first day I started downloading material assets to use with ArmourPaint as the cloud system doesn't work for me, and I much prefer having that sort of thing local anyways... But that would be a kinda boring thing to post here!

But after that it's where it has started to get interesting: For the last week I've been wrestling with Blender to create a particle system for the rain element of the cyberpunk scene. I'll be honest, this took longer then I anticipated to get looking right as I couldn't get the splash quantity correct and the rain droplets themselves just didn't look right in EEVEE and not enough were in frame to give the effect I wanted... I hoped to have done it by Wednesday, but I think the extra time I put into it has been well worth it. The splashes themselves I kinda cheated and took a page out of Source's book - they're just an animated decal texture a few mm above the ground mesh, and I think the end result is pretty convincing honestly!

Hey everyone! Long time no see as always! Earlier today I discovered that the upcoming 4.1 release will have a massive revamp of the real-time renderer "EEVEE" (Codenamed "EEVEE Next"). This will result in easier implementations of features moving forward; however, the immediate benefit of this new build of EEVEE is support for Real-Time Raytracing (a long awaited feature for me)!

Even though the video shows it working, I still left wondering if EEVEE now supports light being cast from "Emission" textures... To answer this question - I downloaded the latest Alpha build of 4.1 and dragged 4 models I made back in 2021 that I know emits light into a scene with the skybox being black: and it totally works! You can see all the models are casting light onto the floor and it is bouncing as expected... It looks super sweet!

The caveat are due to the fact RTRT uses "Screen Space Reflections" to work; any emission texture not in frame/view doesn't emit light. The other Light in general also doesn't pass through textures that has "Transmission" enabled.

So because the current project I'm doing relies both work like in Cycles pretty heavily for how the scenary be lit: I won't be using EEVEE Next to render it as you can bet your boots 4.1 will be out by the time that project is ready to render... But all the following shorts will be using Next, and I cannot wait in all honesty! This experiement has spawned further questions how this performs on platforms that doesn't have real-time raytracing hardware (Pre 20-series/RDNA 2/ Apple M3), but as it stands it's a pretty exciting development for Blender! ^^

I can’t believe in during my usual parade of posting this to social media, I forgot to post it here! So here it is! XD

Twilight Trouble took a lot longer then I thought it would, considering the sillyness of the short. But I’m more or less happy on how it came out and the reception I’ve gotten from friends has been positive, so that’s good! =)

So I’ll be honest: This morning was completely hectic and I didn’t get to start lighting until 1100hrs, which is a full 2-3 hours later then I wanted!

So I’m very surprised that I managed to get the lighting done today as that was never on the plate to begin with, and I was convinced that I wouldn’t get it done tomorrow either...

In terms of the lighting itself - I’m happy on how it looks with the ambient light giving a nice gradient right-left of Twilight, with the rim lights giving some definition around the outer edges. Playing back the sequence shows that any imperfections in the placements are pretty much hidden... Again, not having to render out the shot to see the end results really cuts down the amount of time working on this shot... =)

Hey everyone! Been a while since I specifically posted an update regarding the current animation project, but over the last few days I’ve been getting on with the refinement process for Unicorn Twilight’s animation!

So over the course of the last week I’ve been lighting shot 3, and to say progress is slow would be an understatement... The main problem being if the walk cycle has resulted the lights needs to be moved every 1-3 frames, which is a very time consuming task.