Original subtitles

Hello and welcome back everyone to Stylized Environments with Blender for Geometry Nodes.

In the last lesson we left ourselves off with a nice setup for the ivy to be going to give

us more greenery, a bit of an extra organic look to this overall setup.

We're going to continue on with this and finally get ourselves the render for our stylized scene.

I'm going to hide mannequin now. We don't really need this guy. I'm going to put this in a gray box like so.

And all we need to do is set ourselves up with a bit of compositor, a nice render view.

And before doing that I'd like to go over the basics of what Cycles is and what's different about it from a real-time renderer called EVE.

So I will play a quick introductory video that hopefully will explain a little bit more.

In regards to the renderer setup itself and then afterwards we will look into the compositor and

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how to enhance the visuals of this type of a scene. So that's going to be it from me.

Thanks so much for watching and I will be seeing you in the next lesson.

Welcome everyone to the Eevee and Cycles part of the course and this is a full guide on both the

Eevee and the Cycles renderer. So the first one we're going to approach is the actual Eevee and

you can see at the moment I have a scene set up like this and I'll be using this to go through

the various options and after which you can give it a try yourself. So the first thing at the moment

is we're on actual shading object mode and we want to be on the Eevee renderer so I'm going to

click that on. Now you will notice at the moment I have a sun and I have a area light over here as

well for the other demonstration. So first of all let's come to this actual object here.

And what I want to do is I want to first of all go over to the right hand side where the render options are, and you'll see this is actually on Eevee.

Now the first thing I want to discuss is not the sampling, we'll come back to that in a minute, it's actually the ambient occlusion.

If we turn our ambient occlusion on, you will see that we're able then to actually make much much better shadows within our actual scene.

So for instance this actual cube here, if I turn it off, you'll see that all of those shadows disappear, and if I turn it on, it enhances the shadows.

We're also able to go in as well, and we're able to come over to where the distance is, and turn that down to zero, and you'll see that makes them all disappear.

And as we turn it up, we end up with more and more actual shadows on there, up to a certain point as you can see.

But you can see now turning it off and on makes a real difference to how your scene's actually going to look.

So basically what I'm discussing here is the setup of Eevee, and then we're actually going to go over and actually render that out.

Now let's move on to the next part of this demonstration, and what we're going to talk

about now is the actual samples. So if I come up and open this menu up, you can see at the moment

that we have render on 64 samples and the viewport on 16. Now not only does this give you a better

quality of image, but also the main reason is that we can actually get a lot more definition

on these actual shadows. You can see if I zoom in here, these shadows are kind of pixelated,

but if I come in and let's say put this to 300, you will see now it makes a real difference in

how the shadows look. It makes them much more realistic and much better when you actually come

to render this. So now we're actually going to discuss the other powerful thing with Eevee,

which is screen space reflections. So at the moment if I turn that on and I come to my ground

plane here, let's actually mess around with the actual roughness. If I turn this down, you can

see we end up with loads of reflection on here.

If I come then over and turn off Screen Space Reflections, you can see that all of those reflections don't actually reflect on this ground plane anymore.

So this is why this is so powerful, especially if you're doing things like really, really shiny objects or metal, you really want on Screen Space Reflections.

Now let's just go back to my ground plane now and just turn it back down on the actual roughness, so let's turn it up a little bit like so.

And then we've got some reflections and let's move over to the next part.

So we can see at the moment we have this light, but it doesn't look very good at the moment.

We can see it has got a bluish tinge reflection to it, but if we come back over to Eevee now and what we can do is we can actually turn on Bloom.

And now you can see that we've got some really, really nice light and also the reflections enhanced as well.

We can also open up the Bloom and the best thing about the Bloom is we can actually control how much this is going to actually bloom.

How much fogginess it's going to have to it. You can see the range that we can put on there as well.

And you can also see that we can turn up this intensity all from within the actual Eevee options.

Now there are a load of options within Eevee and to go through all of them honestly would be like

doing another course. But what I want to show you is just one more thing within Eevee which is where

we have shadows. If we open this up we will see that these shadows actually come with their own

resolution map. And at the moment they're on 512. The higher I turn this up the better the actual

shadows are going to be. So if I put both of these on 4096 you will see now that when I actually come

to render this out these shadows are going to look even better. They even look better in the actual

viewport. So now all I've done is I've brought an actual camera in place and I just want to show

you one more thing before we hit that render button. If we come back to our monkey and we

click on our light. So let's click on our light here.

You can also come over to the right hand side and you'll have something that says Shadows.

Just open that up and click on Contact Shadows. And you will see now just how much nicer, especially

around these eyelids, how that looks. So you can see the difference in how that looks.

So all these things together, including the Ambient Occlusion, the Bloom, and the Screen

Space Reflections, can make for a really, really nice render.

Now it's important to remember though that Eevee is designed as a real-time renderer,

so something like in a game, like Unreal Engine or Unity, that is where a real- time

renderer will be used. Whereas Cycle, on the other hand, is not actually meant for that.

It's meant for getting really, really high quality images or animations. It's not meant

for actual real-time.

So now what we can do is we can actually go over and hit that Render button. So it's just

Render Image. And with Eevee, it's not like Cycles where it builds up and up and up and

then you actually get your final render. It actually is just there.

So when it's not...

Now depending on how many samples you actually ask Eevee to actually render out is how long it's actually going to take.

So you can see at the moment this has took around three seconds and this is another reason why you might want to use Eevee,

because it's very very fast at rendering things out.

So let's close this down now and let's move on over to our Cycles render engine.

Now the first thing to note is when I actually turn this over to Cycles,

it's going to be much higher demand on your actual system, especially when we're in the viewport view.

You'll also notice as well that it's pretty grainy at the moment,

and this is because we just need to turn on the viewport denoising.

Although this requires a lot of performance from your machine.

But you can see straight off the bat that this is looking really really nice already.

The only thing is whenever we turn around, because it's not a real-time renderer,

it's going to take a little bit of work to get to a certain level of samples that you might be happy with.

Now the other thing is at the moment...

you can see on the cycles we also have a device and this is basically telling Blender what device to use.

So it can be your CPU or your GPU. I do recommend that you use your GPU rather than CPU if available

because your GPU is much better at handling rendering. So now before we go into any of the

options in the cycles render engine what we first need to do is come over to edit, go down to

preferences and what we first need to do is go up to where it says system and from there we can

actually change the options for cycles. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to where

it says Optics X. You might not be able to actually click this on, it might be down to CUDA.

This Optics X is the cycles X render engine so we do have a new version of cycles in Blender 4

onwards and it's called cycles X. As well as come in with a host of different features which will

increase the quality of your renders it's also much much faster than the old cycles.

Now if these options are actually greyed out for you, that means that you just haven't got a graphics card that actually supports it.

I do know that CUDA I think is anything from NVIDIA's 2nd series and the Optix X is anything from the high end of the 2nd series and certainly on the 3rd series of NVIDIA.

I'm not sure about the other graphics cards.

So you just have to pick whichever one you can, the highest one you can, and unfortunately if you can't pick any then you'll just have to have the basic cycles.

Now all you need to do to enable that is again just put it on Optix X and tick both of these on.

So I like to tick both of these on just in case Blender can use both of them together to speed up performance.

So once you've got those ticked on or you've got your CUBA ticked on then what you can do is close that down and then you can come over to where it says CPU and put it onto GPU Compute and you'll see just how much faster that actually is.

If I now move around you can see just how fast this actually speeds up.

And that is because we're now using our GPU.

All right so now let's go through a few of the options.

So you will see under light paths we've got a lot of options here.

Now all of these options will change the way that your scene actually looks like.

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We won't go through these but these are where all of the light options

will actually be from the transparency to the glossiness of the actual scene.

So you're free to mess around with these just be aware the higher you put these

the more performance is actually going to take.

Now the other thing you need to know is that sometimes

when we're dealing with certain shaders within Blender

they won't be able to be rendered out in Eevee.

And it's normally down to the ray tracing power of Cycles

that will actually be able to render them out.

A lot of the times when we're dealing with something that has a transparency in it

for instance or something that has displacement

and it's built through the actual shader so it's a material built through the shader

you will have to actually use Blender Cycles.

So now what we're going to do is I'm going to come down and just go through the performance options because performance on actual cycles is very important.

Now depending on if you're using your CPU or your GPU is how important it is to get the right tile size.

The higher the tile size it is the better it is for your graphics card.

The lower the tile size the better it is for your CPU or your computer processor.

So whichever one you're using to render out whether it be your CPU or GPU just take these into account.

So again CPU lower tile size so something like 64 and GPU higher tile size something like 2048.

The next thing we want to look at is this Use Spatial Splits and you can see what it says longer build times faster render.

So just make sure that you tick this on because what we're also going to tick on is persistent data.

Once we've ticked these two on, what it basically means is it's going to take longer to actually build out the scene

than it is to render it. If you don't tick this on, it's going to take a certain length for each one to do.

So finally, the next thing we want to discuss now we've gone through that is the actual color management.

And you will have this within Eevee as well. I've just saved it to Cycles.

Now, if you're using Blender 4, you will have a view transform that says AGX and this is the new actual view transform.

This one is supposed to be the most realistic. If you're using older versions of Blender,

we'll have something called Filmic, but I recommend with the new one using AGX.

Now, you've also got a look which you can actually change, which is really handy, especially if you're doing stylized scenes.

And you can change this look to something like very high contrast, or you can change it anything in between.

So you can have base contrast, or let's put it back on AGX. Let's put it on something like medium.

Where's medium? So medium high contrast and you can see now this scene is

looking really really nice. Now you can also see a few other problems with

Blender Cycles. One of them being we don't actually have any ambient occlusion.

We don't actually have any bloom. So although everything looks better in

Blender Cycles, not only are you going to lose all that straight off the bat, but

also you have to then come in and set it up in the compositor. So this is why

you really need to think when you're rendering out a scene whether you want

to render it out in Eevee or Cycles. Eevee is much much faster and everything

is there straight off the get-go. Cycles is much much slower, needs a lot more

performance from your machine, and on the back end we also have to go into the

compositor to get a really really nice image. Now before we finish and actually

render this out, it's also very important with Blender Cycles how many

samples you're actually going to work with. So you can see here where it says

not the viewport one where the render one is. You want to set this pretty low to start with.

It is set as default at 4096. I recommend setting this at 200. What will happen is then it's got a

noise threshold on here. It'll hit near that 200 and then the noise threshold will kick in and

basically denoise your actual image. In other words get rid of all those fireflies and things

like that. Now if we come up and what we're going to do before hitting the render button,

I also recommend if you're working in cycles that you put this on to wireframe because then it's

going to save on performance and it's not going to be rendering it out in the viewport as well as

trying to render it out in the actual render. So let's put this on wireframe. What we're going to

do then is come over to render, render image and here we go. Now you can see it's very very different

from our actual Eeveeworks. You can see it builds up, builds up, builds up. You can see on here the

sample is going up and then you'll see it actually finishes and we can see it took 12 seconds.

Which is around six times longer than what Eevee took.

But you can see it's a really really beautiful image.

There's just no ambient occlusion or contact shadows and things like that on here.

So that's the difference everyone.

Now the final thing before I finish is I want to show you just one more thing that's important

that you can do with both Eevee or Blender Cycles.

And if I come to my camera and all I want to do is just hit camera to view

and I just want to put my actual camera in this position just so I can see the background here.

And then all I'm going to do is I'm just going to come down to where it says film.

Open that up and you will see one that you've got here that says transparent.

And this is how you create an image with a transparent background.

If I now go to render, render out my image you can see now it comes with a transparent background.

You can also see because we've got that persistent data on now

it's a little bit faster than what it was before.

And it's just under 8 seconds instead of 12.5 seconds.

Alright everyone, so I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you learned a lot from it.

We will go into a lot more detail about this as we're working through the course,

whether we're working in Eevee or Blender Cycles. Thanks a lot everyone, cheers.