After over 2 years of development, the EEVEE Next project has produced a major evolution of the Blender viewport system, set to be a key feature of the upcoming 4.2 LTS release.
Project goals
The EEVEE Next project was aimed at modernizing viewport rendering, address technical debt and overcome existing design limitation. The main target of the project was to improve performance and visual quality of viewport rendering, leading to a better user experience while building, animating and rendering 3D scenes.
What changed
The viewport system is now more predictable and supports a wider range of lighting and shading corner cases. A new shadow system was introduced, providing more stable and higher quality shadows, while remaining memory efficient. Other noteworthy features are a new global illumination system, unlimited lights in a scene, improved volumes rendering, motion blur and depth of field.
More detailed technical documentation is available in the Release Notes, while the functionality is described in the User Manual.
Here are some overviews from the community.
Compatibility issues
Significant efforts have be made to avoid breaking compatibility with previous versions, but given the magnitude of the change, and the number of workarounds used by artists in production, some issue are expected.
A migration guide is available to mitigate these issues. If you are encountering undocumented behavior, please do share your findings and help to improve the guide!
Next steps
This is the foundation of a new interactive lighting pipeline. In the next releases we can expect improved performance, both for rendering and shader compilation, and hardware-accelerated raytracing.
Congratulations to Clément, Miguel and Jeroen on this milestone. Special thanks to the community of contributors for working on stabilizing and integrating on several platforms.
Thumbnail image by Hamza N. Meo.
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Do you have plans to add image input socket to “Image Texture” and “Environment Texture” nodes for EEVEE/Cycles?
Just as it is done for “Image Texture” node in Geometry Nodes.
Where is the default optix and Odin Denoise option. its removed or rearranged to some other tab?
The biggest rendering features I’d love to see in future releases are 1. panoramic camera capabilities, so one can render an HDRI in EEVEE, and 2. an easy way to make the glare compositor node actually work with equirectangular projections; currently, I can’t find a way to make it wrap around, and so it’s impossible to have a bloom effect in an HDRI.
Great job. That viewport is better than competitors that cost thousands of dollars.
Blender is getting closer and closer to be production ready.
Next step, an outliner that is USD compliant, and a nodal rendering management.
O blender pra mim, além de entretenimento já começa a ser uma fonte de renda extra. Estive muito ansioso para testar o eevee next até ontem, quando testei e percebi que esta bem estável. Parabéns aos desenvolvedores
EEVEE Next is very important for 3D software with wideband rendering in general.
EEVEE is the most important feature in Blender.
I have been using Maya for over 15 years and moved to blender.
EEVEE is by far the biggest motivator for that.
It’s great to see the next generation of eevee finally coming out.
Congratulations.
Outstanding job, im greatly impressed by the work done! Thank you, team!
Hoping Shadow to RGB refraction will get fixed in the next release :)
Congratulations to the Blender dev team! The new EEVEE is an amazing step forward in the right direction! We are waiting for hardware-accelerated ray tracing now 🙏
Thank you so much for all the work!”👏👏👏🍾
I’m excited for the new release
But I want to add a note about a problem that no one wants to solve
This is the lack of writing support for the Arabic alphabet
This problem has been reported for years, and despite the existence of libraries that support Arabic letters and writing them correctly within the program, the matter is ignored.
According to my simple understanding, Blender was built in the form of components, so in theory adding support should be possible and not affect the program. I hope that a solution will be found because it affects millions of users, whether Arabs or non-Arabs, because some businesses depend on that.
Thanks
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