Shading, Lighting, and Rendering with Blender EEVEE

Sammie Crowder

• Verlag: Packt Publishing
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781803239620
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Computer Science
• Thema: Computer Graphics

Get to grips with new real-time animation techniques and tricks to improve your artistic and technical skills in shading, 3D rendering, and scene creation using Blender 3.0Key Features• Learn real-time rendering engine concepts by creating three projects• Understand how to update workflows to Blender 3.0• Explore intermediate to advanced-level tutorials on creating art inside BlenderBook DescriptionBlender is the most important up-and-coming 3D software package in the world. EEVEE, a state-of-the-art real-time rendering engine is a fairly new addition to Blender and provides the capacity to create artwork at blazing speed, almost 12 times faster than Cycles.Lighting, Shading, and Rendering with Blender's EEVEE provides a high-level overview of what EEVEE is capable of, then teaches users about Geometry Nodes, Rendering Techniques, using shortcuts like Kitbashing and Alphas to speed up scene creation, volumetrics, reflections, adding lights, cameras and even special effects like fire and smoke, all in EEVEE. All of this is in the context of creating actual scenes that readers will work through from start to finish. By the time a Blender Artist completes the book, they will have created three separate works that have challenged them to iterate and design with the full power of Blender's EEVEE.What you will learn• Explore EEVEE Render Properties for optimal outcomes• Focus on shading processes, including those that are both traditional and more cutting-edge• Understand composition and create effective concept art inside Blender• Discover procedural workflows to shorten the artistic process instead of getting mired in details• Understand intermediate Blender workflows for working in a professional environment• Develop art in different styles and learn why each style has different workflows and conventions• Create interactive, rapid changes in Blender's EEVEE engineWho this book is forThis book is for 3D animators, sculptors, modelers, and concept artists who want to use EEVEE to speed up their work in movies, TV, and game design. Readers are expected to have a basic to intermediate-level understanding of 3D programs and ray-tracing engines.

Chapter 12: Special Effects with EEVEE – Fire and Smoke

In Chapter 2, Creating Materials Fast with EEVEE, we created an animated material that involved smoke. In this chapter, we're going to spend time creating a physical simulation of fire and then compositing it into our spaceship scene. The fire we make is part of the physics simulation suite that comes built into Blender. Physics simulations can cover anything, from fluid to smoke to dropping objects and having them shatter. The workflow for physics simulations is a little different than other workflows in Blender. First, the simulation is created using the parameters that we input, but we don't get to directly create the fire like we would when modeling. We can add or subtract forces from the simulation, change gravity, and add effects, but ultimately it's the computer that calculates each frame for us and then caches it so that we can play it again. This leads to more experimentation when creating physics simulations. It's prudent to change a value in the simulation and then test the simulation to see if it reached the desired outcome, and then try again and again until you get something that looks good. With more practice, you'll start to get a better feel for how each factor affects the simulation and need to do less testing, but I recommend experimenting with every step that we take in this chapter to really get the fundamentals of fire physics.

We're going to go over how to utilize the Quick Smoke function for faster results, the important aspects of a fire simulation, how to create a better shader using volumetrics, how to clear the cache of the simulation to keep working on the scene, and finally an example of how to use Cycles and EEVEE together.

The main topics we will cover are as follows:

• Creating fire with Quick Smoke
• Tweaking the shader for fire and smoke in EEVEE
• Optimal EEVEE render settings for the smoke and fire
• How to combine renders in Cycles and EEVEE

Technical requirements

As usual, you can download Chapter12-Start.blend from GitHub, or keep working from the file you created in Chapter 11, Kitbashing – Adding Details Fast. In this chapter, we will need some room on our drive for the fire cache, so make sure you save your files somewhere with a little bit of room to store the cache files.

The supporting files for this chapter can be found here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Shading-Lighting-and-Rendering-with-Blender-s-EEVEE-/tree/main/Chapter12.

Creating fire with Quick Smoke

Creating fire inside of Blender has never been so easy. While it can be immensely gratifying to create your own simulation from scratch, the Blender developers have done all the work for you with the Quick Effects menu options. With these options, you can really quickly create a smoke or liquid simulation, an explosion, or fur. As our recurring theme is how to do things quickly, we're going to use the Quick Smoke option to create our fire. While on the surface, Quick Smoke doesn't initially seem very logical as a way to create fire. But you know what they say, where there's smoke, there's fire. So let's jump into creating some fire with the Quick Smoke menu options:

1. In Chapter 12-Start.blend, I have hidden our hangar from view so that we can create the fire without Blender having to render the entire scene plus the fire at once. You'll notice the only object visible in the scene is the FireObject. This object is the exact size of one of the thrusters of our spaceship. We're going to use its geometry as the basis for the size of the...