Hey again, friends! Hope everyone is doing well. I'm just stopping bye to share my latest animation in Blender with you all. This festive little short was created entirely in Blender 2.91, rendered with Eevee render engine. It features, of course, my latest Gingerbread Man character in the "starring role". This was originally just a test of my rig, but turned into a cute little short animation just in time for Christmas.

Some addition information about the animation:

As mentioned, it was rendered with Eevee. Each frame was rendered out as a 2k (2560x1440 px). PNG file with all the Eevee bells and whistles enabled and tweaked for a balance between quality and performance. We have Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Depth of Field, Subsurface Scattering, Screen Space Reflections, and high-bitdepth soft shadow maps (4096 px), and motion blur all enabled here.

This animation consists of 3100 frames at a frame rate of 60 fps. It was rendered using a single Nvidia RTX 2070 Super card, and even at the larger 2k scale, each frame only took around 9 seconds per frame to render. It's not quite as good looking as Cycles, but I thought the results were decent enough to justify using Eevee here instead.

Hope you enjoy it and have a VERY Merry Christmas everyone! Thank you for all the support this year.

Oh Lux, that is just too cute for words!

Have a Happy Holiday to you, and the rest of our Blender users.

Very cool animation!! I would love to see/study the rig controls for the Ginger bread Character.

Also I agree the EEVEE is more than capable of producing final quality films ,as I plan to to use it for rendreing my planned series "Halo reclaimer"

Hey, that looks pretty good! The lighting and materials are great but noticed a few things maybe you can clarify for me.

In that opening shot I noticed what appeared to be shadows on the xmas tree suddenly pop on? Or maybe geometry was suddenly appearing out of nowhere? If you look close you'll see it as the camera is pulling away from the closeup. What is causing that? I've seen that kind of thing before in eevee animations so I'm curious why that happens. Also, what would the biggest differences be if you rendered this in Cycles?

Oh, I don't know if you realized this but your thumbnail says 4k UHD, but the highest setting I can watch it on youtube is 2k.

Great work LuxXeon

this is so cute. great job

Thanks, everyone! I hope the New Year is far better overall than this year has been for all of us.

@HMorton Eevee is definitely capable of the final output, especially where animation is involved. There are, however, going to be some glitches and issues here and there. It's always a tradeoff of speed vs. quality, but Eevee can get very close to Cycles in some cases.

Since Eevee is using "screen space" calculations to help speed up rendering for things like reflections and ambient occlusion, it will never be as accurate as Cycles, and you may find inconsistencies between certain frames. I think that is what caused the sudden shadow "flicker" as the camera is pulling away from the Christmas tree at the start of the shot. The AO is suddenly calculated differently because the screen space pixels are changing rapidly at that point. You may also notice that AO between surfaces will seem to appear or disappear based on camera angles whenever the camera is moving around an object. Again, this is the result of screen space AO calculations. Raytraced or path traced ambient occlusion would never have this problem, but it would take longer to render.

I think it would be great if eventually, we have raytraced AO and reflections options available for Eevee rendering in the future. Optional raytracing would allow the user to turn on path traced or raytraced AO for a certain shot to avoid this problem. I don't think Eevee will ever be used in a high-end production until these problems with screen space AO are fully resolved. It's not a big deal for smaller productions but could be a deal-breaker for studio work. We can, theoretically, reduce the visual inconsistencies with certain lighting tricks, but it's impossible to avoid them completely.

Adobe After Effects has a 3d plugin called Element 3D, which will render 3d objects and scenes in a composite from within After Effects. This addon has various features similar to Eevee, including screen space AO and reflections. However, it also allows the user to turn on high-quality raytraced AO or reflections if they wish. Obviously, doing this will require much more in terms of render time, but it helps avoid the anomalies associated with screen space effects rendering and can be used when trouble areas are unavoidable. I think for sure we will see this type of option in Eevee as well.

Thanks, lux. I'm curious how different this would have looked if you rendered with cycles. It looks really good, and if you didn't tell us it was eevee I would have thought maybe it was cycels.

HMorton posted at 1:01AM Thu, 24 December 2020 - #4408311

Thanks, lux. I'm curious how different this would have looked if you rendered with cycles. It looks really good, and if you didn't tell us it was eevee I would have thought maybe it was cycels.

Rather than explain, I'll give you a direct illustrated example.

This is a frame from the animation that was rendered with Eevee using the same exact settings and lights as in the video. Render time: 9 seconds.

Here is that same frame, only this time rendered with default Cycles in GPU mode. Render time: 52 seconds.

Obviously, when scrutinized side by side, the difference is striking. Notice the Cycles render contains much deeper, richer shadows and there's a major difference in reflective surfaces. Notice how the glossy materials now have reflections from not only the objects directly near them, but also objects that are not directly nearby. The colors also appear richer because of the color bleeding from light bounces and GI.

However, notice also the difference in render time. Eevee only took 9 seconds per frame. Cycles took almost 52 seconds to render that same frame on the same GPU. That's a huge difference. So to me, the improvement in quality here was not worth that extra time. Perhaps if the animation was for a commercial purpose I would have sacrificed the extra render time, but even then it would depend on how much the client expects and how fast I need to get this done.

Great explainations of the advantages of EEVEE or Cycles

For a paid commercial animation, I personally would show the client the Differences and if they insisted on Cycles quality I would just use the render farm service "Concierge" and fold that cost into my total fees.

For my personal sci-fi/action oriented stuff I actually prefer the Bloom of glowing elements in EEVEE over Cycles and when you factor in camera movement and motion blur alot of the anomolies are less noticable by most laypeople at least. As far as the Ginger Bread animation goes my only (anal retentive)? critique is that I would have added more subdivisions to the table top edge bevels.

@wolf359 Yeah, I agree about the bloom and glowing stuff. And the motion blur is very smooth as well. I was thinking about SSGI when I saw your post, so I decided to do a test of one of the frames using the SSGI addon, just to see the difference there. Here's the result of that.

Notice now that we have more color bleeding and more accurate reflections, especially on the cookie sheet. The shadows are still way better in Cycles, but SSGI brings Eevee even closer to the Cycles output. The only disadvantage here is that it adds some extra render time over the vanilla Eevee output. The SSGI version took 26 seconds per frame. Still way better than Cycles would have been, but significantly more than using Eevee without it. So if you need that extra special detail while still maintaining speedy output, SSGI does the trick nicely, at the expense of some additional render time.

One thing I didn't like about the SSGI version is how it handled the wax paper. Notice that it almost disappears in the SSGI version, and I can't explain why that is. The colors also look slightly less saturated. I'm sure perhaps this can be adjusted, but I just used the default settings here.

I can not get my eevee renders to look this good. I wish you share the secret here. Whihc leads me to the question, does the graphics card matter when it comes to eevee? I heard it is using only cpu for the rendering.

OMG! I loved it ... he was doing the Davy Dance!!!!

Boni posted at 9:22PM Wed, 03 February 2021 - #4411802

OMG! I loved it ... he was doing the Davy Dance!!!!

You know, I knew it looked familiar, but I never knew the name of the dance.

I believe originally it was called the skate ... but everybody of my generation adopted the title "the Davy Dance" after the video for Daydream Believer.

Boni posted at 2:14PM Fri, 05 February 2021 - #4411955

I believe originally it was called the skate ... but everybody of my generation adopted the title "the Davy Dance" after the video for Daydream Believer.

Ahhhh, yes, the skate. I think that's what I remember it being called.

I noticed i'm not getting email notifications from Rendo anymore. Strange. Thanks, @Miss B and @Boni. I remember The Monkees Daydream Believer video. It was a little before my time, but The Monkees had a resurgence of popularity on MTV back in the early 90s, and that's when I caught on to it. My parents were big fans of The Beatles, and I remember especially my mother liked The Monkees too.

HMorton posted at 8:34PM Sat, 06 February 2021 - #4409776

I can not get my eevee renders to look this good. I wish you share the secret here. Whihc leads me to the question, does the graphics card matter when it comes to eevee? I heard it is using only cpu for the rendering.

That is incorrect. Eevee is using your OpenGL drivers to render a scene, so it's using strictly the GPU for that. However, your CPU is still being used for the viewport geometry as well as the preparation of each frame being sent to the render engine. So CPU is still useful, even with Eevee. Even if you do not have a GPU card in your computer, you may still be able to use Eevee, because some modern CPU have an onboard GPU as well, which can often support OpenGL drivers up to a certain capacity. The reason some people can not use Blender 2.8x and up is due to the fact they may not have a GPU in their motherboard that supports the necessary OpenGL version (I think 4.2 is the minimum?) But CPU is not being used at all in the renders aside from sending information to the GPU.