Eevee - Shdeless Materials and Render Passes

I assume (maybe wrongly) that Eevee has replaced Blender Internal. I used Internal a lot to make VFX (composting 3D rendered animations with real footgae). How can I do these kind of things with Eevee? There’s no way to hack his PBR nature. So I cannot have shadeless materials, or separated render passes (as specular, vector, shadow). I can’t see a way to use Eevee as I used Internal. And Cycles requires too much render time to be used in animations (if you don’t have a render farm). I’m a little stuck… can someone give me some reassurance… please? :slight_smile:

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Okay I will gladly reassure you:

  • you can now use the new Cryptomatte feature to do all sorts of masks a lot more convenient
  • You can totally hack Eevees PBR shading by not using the principled shaders, but by using diffuse, glossy, mix nodes in creative ways
  • You can also use the Shader to RGB node to basically do crazy compositing stuff within the Shader itself.
  • Use an emission node or simply plug a RGB value into the Shader output to have shadeless materials.
  • Shadow catchers and at least some of those neat passes will probably come to Eevee in the future. Until this is the case, I recommend trying to get creative with materials and view layers.

I’ve played with Eevee for a bit and it’s just so much fun. The Engine is incredibly quick and allows for some pretty neat tricks and bodges. Due to its fast real-time nature it’s also easy to do rapid prototyping.

You’ll probably have to find some new solutions and learn a few new tricks, but at least you already know the node editor (assuming you used it for compositing) and I can tell: I had a lot of fun learning Eevee
All in all I think you’ll probably get faster and better looking results with the new engine, you’ll just need to get a bit creative sometimes.

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Ohhhh … I just realized I think Cryptomatte is only available with cycles for now. :scream_cat:
But you can still use it by making a copy of your scene using Cycles and only emissive materials to save on render time. That will get you a quick result even with cycles and you can use different scenes within the compositor. So you have an ugly fast cycles scene you can use for masks.
But check, if the Cryptomatte is also available for Eevee, I might be wrong about it…

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I don’t think Eevee is “the replacement for Blender Internal”. It’s more that Cycles was the replacement for BI (it just took a long time to happen) and Eevee could be though of as a real-time version of Cycles (though of course that’s not the best description of Eevee).

So there’s no particular reason you should feel like you ought to be using Eevee over Cycles (or some 3rd party renderer even). They both have their own strengths, and Cycles might be the better solution depending on what you want to do (with the new Cryptomatte support, etc.)

Okay Zoot, it may be that the fact that Internal died on the day Eevee was born is just a case (sorry for my english :-). Anyway internal was a lot faster for animations than Cycles. There no way with a middle spec PC to work at a 1500 or more frames animation, without getting crazy. Eevee is now the fast engine, but it lacks in compositing abilities. As Internal has died, Cycles could not be its replacement if you need to do animations withouut a render farm at your fingers. IMHO.

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Cycles was actually more of an addition for internal. Because they are very different engines. Eevee is now more of a replacement, that kind of technically works a bit like internal but more modern and with focus on real time, but this time they tried to keep the look and feel (regarding how it works from a user perspective) closer to cycles.

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I’m sure in the future EEVEE will get better support for compositing, cus i think in the future vfx will all be done in realtime.

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Ok, I agree with all of you, here. Internal was a really old engine, it was biased and it had nothing to do with PBR. Cycles is newer and more realistic, becasue of a lot of factors, and can handle PBR materials. Eevee is the first real time engine (not totaly correct, because we had GLSL, but it required some hack and lot of tweaks), and it’s also PBR based.
The problem, in my opinion, is that Blender 2.80 (maybe it’s too early to judge, because we are in alpha) as it is right now has a strong weakness, compared to 2.79. Because 2.80 doesn’t have a fast render/compositing pipeline for making VFX. 2.79 had it (it was Internal/compositor). So I hope that @Quinten123 is right. Because I really need a fast option for animated VFX: it has not to be real time, but it has to be faster than Cycle and more adaptable than Eevee (as it is right now).
And just to clarify, for me Eevee is a sort of magic, I’m making things that I couldn’t do before, because of its skills to show PBR ambient in real time. So I love Blender, and I confide in the community of coders that are working hard on it.

Ok, I will try this, thank you!

I just want a shadow catcher, please, give me a real shadow catcher! :smile:

First of all: I’d probably do it in Cycles anyways, because Eevee can’t to totally accurate shadows.
But you can totally make a catcher in your own by simply rendering a white object twice once time with and another time without the shadow casting object and then use a mixRGB difference node to get the shadow…

@betalars Yes, this can be a way if you have to render a simple picture. But you can’t apply this to a complex animation, this is not the solution. I’m talking about a render option to activate (On/Off) on each single material or object, not a trick.

Please quote me so I can see, what your are referring to. If you are referring to the white material “trick” I see no reason, why it won’t work on a bigger scale… You pretty much just have to make two additional layers and with Eevee that’s not that big of a problem…