I tried using EEVEE but any parts with decorations rendered very weirdly. Regular bricks will work, but they don't look as good as using cycles does. Curious as well if anyone has had any success using it with the Mecabricks add on.

I played around a little with a simple model that I rendered a few weeks ago with cycles taking 1 hr 45 minutes a frame and took a week or more to render most of the sequence after a few crashes.

Here I reconstructed it in EEVEE and rendered the entire sequence at 15 seconds a frame.

That is a massive saving of time, and if I had spent a little more time could probably have been able to make it look identical.

Eevee is great but it is a biased real time engine. In terms of photorealistic results, Cycles will always be better. That said in some cases it is more than sufficient and that is really great that the option is available. Lots of nodes are still missing in eevee. The most important one is the bevel node. Hope one day it will be available.

I look forward to the improvements in Eevee, and yes, I understand that it can never have the level of detail that Cycles gives, but for a system that is still in its infancy and that can give results as good as this in the time it does it in means that for us animators, we can now produce our movies in a lot less time, and the compromise in quality is unlikely to be noticed from the majority of audiences except that the renders are missing the lovely ageing that the Mecabricks plug-in gives. For scenes like the bridge though it is unlikely to be noticed.

Next, I need to work out how to make Eevee work with the minifigures and models using images but the result so far is encouraging for the instances where I can bluff it.

For anyone who may want to experiment further, and especially for Owenator13, this may be a way for you to do your renders using your older slower computer without the render farm and getting faster results. As long as you have a computer that will run Blender 2.8 which requires OpenGl Core 3.3 or better. One of my two Quad cores will not run it for some reason but my older Pentium 3260 3.3ghz machine will. Blender have dropped the 550TI nvidea card in that machine in the last two versions of Blender 2.79 so this will give it a new lease on life, and its also the machine I have been experimenting on.

I have played around a little more with Eevee and found that a few settings SEEMS to me to give a workable solution. I even get to keep the Mecabricks damage & finger prints etc.

Opening the scene already set up in cycles, using the mecabricks add-on, I needed to change each model with a few settings to work with Eevee though.

Firstly, I changed the render engine from Cycles to Eevee, obviously. Eevee with its default settings is not usable so some changes are required. I found out that I needed to change 'Space Screen Reflections' to on, and to un-select 'half res', and to select 'refraction' (Thanks all the pioneers who posted their experiences on Youtube!)

Also, under the Scene settings, shadows, select soft shadows.

The light intensity needs changing, sometimes to a factor of 10 as the Cycles lighting is far too aggressive for Eevee. It also seems that emission materials i.e. planes used as light sources do not work as in Cycles either so you need to play a bit with that.

Under the materials tab for each part of each model that uses a png or jpg image, change 'Blend' from 'Opaque' to 'Alpha Blend', turn off 'show back face' and turn on 'screen Space Refraction'. This will get rid of the milky look when rendering.

So far, it looks like I may be able to bluff something. I will carry on playing with it.

Found out that at the moment, (12/01/2019) Blender 2.8 Beta does not support Image sequences or Movies as a texture.

Thats a real shame as i use that for my lip syncing of the minifigures and animated screens etc.

Hey, Markal this is great info, but for me whenever I render parts with decorations the part will render as if it's not even there. Like its invisible... any ideas?

Hi, not sure I understand the problem. I know that in some of the cases I played with, I had to change a few settings of the nodes. Specifically if the parts had image textures so assume that is your issue.

Try this. Select the past with the decorations and then under the 'materials' tab change 'Blend' from 'Opaque' to 'Alpha Blend', turn off 'show back face' and turn on 'screen Space Refraction'. That might help.

Let me know.

Yeah that's what I did and now when I render the image the parts with decorations are literally invisible.

Have you checked the node set up?

Is there a better way to express transparent plastic in the blender 2.8 eevee renderer?

I set it like this.

render option :

material option :

I am still battling to come to grips with this myself, but i would start by turning off the half res Trace as I think this shows the hidden faces and play with the Trace precision

Blend mode, play with that as well.

Select soft shadows

And I am not sure if Opaque is the best selection for transparent.

I need to spend some real time to work this stuff out and watch a few more tutorials on Youtube.

Hello,

@goodasi
There is not much more you can do to improve the render of transparent plastic in EEVEE. For best results, you must use a ray-traced rendering engine, such as Cycles.
Otherwise, if you want to increase the overall quality of your rendering, you can enable 'Ambient Occlusion' and set the 'Distance' parameter to something like '100m' and also enable 'Subsurface Scattering' for better render of the plastic.

Welcome on Mecabricks. 😉