@RedPhantom - Lots going on there. What sort of special effects did you want to incorporate into it? I assume perhaps some fire or something?

@wolf359 - yeah, I think I understand what you are saying. There seems to be a contingency of people who are just looking at Blender as perhaps an alternative "free" render engine and may only be interested in the software for that purpose alone. There appears to be a very high demand for plugins and bridge addons that will port geometry and scenes created in other commercial software to Blender, then Blender would just be used to light and render those scenes. That's perfectly fine to do, of course, but I think people underestimate the rendering aspect of Blender and they may not realize that the render engines in Blender depend heavily on the overall workflow of the software itself. In other words, both Eevee and Cycles are just small parts of a much larger ecosystem within Blender that depend on other areas of the software to work efficiently. Especially in the case of Eevee, the render engine results will depend very deeply on the way the scene is lit and the shaders that are used. Settings in the Eevee setup depend largely on PBR maps and shaders, as well as lighting and volumetrics in order to get the most out of the render engine quality. So there is a rather large learning curve involved with Eevee that I think many people don't seem to recognize immediately. I'm sure some people do not wish to invest the time for that, in which case I could think of other render solutions that might be better. Although, those other solutions are not free so there will be a tradeoff of time vs monetary investments that must be considered.

Something like Marmoset Toolbag is very similar to Eevee in that it can be used to render some extremely impressive animations that rival path tracing in some cases, in near real-time. It's also extremely simple to use and contains some features that Eevee doesn't even have yet, like the option to raytrace AO or reflections and screenspace global illumination (although there is a build of Blender that does have that). Certain camera effects like lens flares, lens distortion, chromatic aberration, etc. are all built into Marmoset cameras as render features. People who are looking for real-time rendering solutions for their pre-built scenes or animations would love those types of realistic render features, but Marmoset will never be as popular as Eevee because it's not free to use. Unreal Engine 5 is perhaps the best real-time rendering solution in existence today, but from a hobbyist perspective, it suffers from the same monetary issue as Marmoset with the addition of a steeper learning curve.

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