When Blender Cycles appeared as part of Blender 2.61 release back in 2011 people went nuts. Until that date, we had to use external renders in Blender to get features like global illumination.
In the upcoming months, we will experience another leap forward in Blender capabilities related to rendering. At least, in real-time rendering. The responsibility for that is Eevee.
Some artists that still didn't try Eevee and the experimental builds of Blender 2.8 might not get the full impact of Eevee in our workflow. A real-time render engine will enable you to create outstanding images at incredible speeds. As the name says, it will be in real-time.
You will find a lot of demo scenes for Eevee with characters and other elements that show the potential for the renderer. But, not much related to architectural interiors. At least, nothing that we are aware.
Until a few days ago, when the Spanish artist sanask posted at the BlenderArtists forums one of the best interiors renders with Eevee for architecture.
According to the artist, he took a scene that was initially in Cycles and made all the necessary conversion to Eevee. Rebuilding materials and lights to test them in Eevee.
What is the most impressive aspect of that interior render? The time required to create the images. Only 20 seconds to create an image with 4500 x 3500 pixels.
In Cycles, an image like that would require something like 2000 seconds, about one hour depending on your hardware.
As you will see, in the description (visit the forum post), the images at are not straight out of Blender 2.8. The author uses Photoshop to post-process the images.
We tried to reach the author to ask him a few questions about the tests, but until now we didn't hear back. If we do, I will update the post with more information.
What does that mean for our workflow? Can we abandon Cycles and focus only on Eevee? No. They have different purposes.
Eevee will give you astonishing results in real-time. In Cycles, you might get photo real results, which might take longer to process, but will get close to photos.
That doesn't take the fact that Eevee is a game changer for Blender, with ramifications in real-time architectural visualization and design.
On the other hand, it is hard to make a full analysis with Eevee still in development. We should wait until Blender 2.8 reaches beta to have the whole extent of their impact on our workflow.
Should you be excited about Eevee? Absolutely!
In case you want to download a scene in Eevee that has all the setup for interior scenes, visit this article we published a few days ago.
