Oh, I see what you mean. Isolate on its own view layer, then that layer itself can be your post source. Yeah, I think that should work and doesn’t seem like much extra overhead.
Might involve a material override, also not that big of a deal… Sorry just thinking out loud…
Unfortunately, the ShadertoRGB node does not work properly with raytracing. Once you plug the diffuse shader into the ShadertoRGB node, all Raytracing (AO or GI) disappears.
Which makes it pretty useless as a shadow catcher. Having it at least retain AO would solve a lot.
BTW, I actually don’t need transparency or Blended mode. I use the World color in the floor shader instead. This keeps the floor opaque and it clips anything penetrating, similar to Cycles’ shadow catcher (image above has Suzanne penetrating the floor).
But the problem remains, as this method also needs the ShadertoRGB node to function properly. I fear I’ll have to wait for a proper shadow catcher in the future.
Good day to everyone! I have a question. Does Subsurface only work with light sources, or can it also receive scattered light from an HDRI card, similar to how it works in Cycles?
Should work. Suzanne below is lit only with one of the HDRIs that come with blender. No light.
No idea about the best settings, but I had to set the Thickness value lower than 1 in the Material Output.
As much as I love EEVEE Next, it struggle a lot with high light count compared to EEVEE Legacy and the viewport performance is just abysmal (A scene with ton of point light in EEVEE Legacy managed to pull 10-15 fps but with Next it’s only 0.5-1 fps and somehow)… Also doing stuff like adding a material, turning on/off raytracing(or any other settings) in EEVEE Next cause Blender to froze for a solid 5-8 second or just straight up crashing.
Wish i can show the comparison between Next and Legacy,but i’m not allowed to upload file because I’m a new user
Regarding Bloom
Compared to Legacy Bloom in the Render Properties, the new Bloom in the Glare node has very little options.
The new Bloom:
To me, the old and the new Bloom seem like 2 different tools/functionalities. Is there a reason why they cannot co-exist?
I have a pipeline that is based on simplicity and efficiency, so the ability to quickly set Bloom and Color Management in the Render Properties is great.
If the reason is ‘because almost everything in the compositor can be visible in the viewport’:
I truly hope Bloom can come back in the Render Properties, as it’s such a powerful functionality for the real-time ‘experience’.
Try the latest version 4.2 blender release, they fixed the problems with a large number of light sources, in Next there are no restrictions on their number (64 thousand light sources), and in Ivi Legacy it is limited to only 128
And enable Max Shader Compilation Subprocesses in > Preferences > System
This should speed up the compilation of materials many times over
A few months ago Bloom only worked in compositor GPU mode… the CPU one was the old version… which is rather confusing… how is that now?
But here’s my Bloom setup to have it close to legacy:
…before was good!
The point of having Bloom inside the the compositor is that you can choose how it is composited and it is possible to have it for any render engine.
There were discussion to add a small compositor preset with a few common functionality (vignetting, bloom, distortion etc) eventually right into the viewport shading panel or as compositor setting. This needs some more design and some developer to tackle this.
At least a dedicated Bloom node would be nice… now it’s lost inside the Glare… 
A Bloom node with at least the Legacy features would be great.
The problem is that we were used to be simple and now feels complex…
The old bloom was better in every way. The new one uses the glare node which under certain circumstances introduces posterization and aberration of colors. I reported it as a bug but devs pointed that it was expected behaviour, alas it’s what we have to live with
Feels worse… no point in putting it softly… one can live with it but feels worse.
Legacy bloom gave it that cinematic feeling that this one doesn’t.
It feels less of a choice when it becomes so much more complicated (ironically, by removing it from the Render Properties it gives us even less choice).
There are certain things in blender that make things easier, despite there being a sense of redundancy.
Examples:
Having all these options actually makes blender so great.
Strange behavior in simple scene
I must’ve missed the part where @fclem mentioned ‘into the viewport shading panel’.
Then the questions would be:
No need to answer, just throwing it out there.
Mind you, I appreciate the effort to return some of the old functionality. But my concern is that the old system is removed before a proper replacement has arrived.
We don’t have any ETA about a more convenient system.
The current implementation of the Bloom node in compositor is indeed working as expected and can replicate the legacy Bloom, but it needs more setup around the node itself.
We acknowledge that this is less than ideal but will provide the equivalent node setup in the migration notes.
