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While I understand that Eeeve (not even mentioning cycle) can produce more physically accurate renders than game previews, I don't want to generate anything close to photorealistic… Unfortunately, to produce a single frame like this one, I need, with Eevee around 10 seconds (I do not have any Nvidia GPU, but my laptop is definitely not a low-end computer). Therefore I spend around 5mn to render a single second… which is really a waste of time and energy (in practice, for instance I try to avoid adding stuff in between an animation as it would re-render the whole animation, unless I spend time to manually rename the output pictures which sounds really hacky…).

enter image description here

On the other hand, in games (including open source engines like godot), or even in webgl (see this demo for instance), my laptop can easily render in real time much more physically realistic scenes. I know that one can install different render engine in Blender, is there one that can give a true real-time output? (or really close to real-time)

If not, is there an easy way to export a whole scene and render it with some open source game engine/browser render engine/… (then, it would be great to have somehow a way to easily check the final looking of my object without doing a full render)

EDIT

Why this question is not a duplicate of this one? Because in the answer they just say, roughly:

Eevee is not made for real time rendering

That's fine, but this question is about finding another rendering engine that can deal with real-time rendering. Tweaking Eevee settings can't bring me close enough to real time rendering.

EDIT

So to give some more details:

  • Here is the file I use (it's a zip as it needs to contain some exr map that can't be packed for some reasons I ignore… and the service that hosts the file won't keep it for more than a week)
  • Regarding the hardware, I have a Dell Lattitude 5500, SSD, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8365U CPU, with Intel Corporation WhiskeyLake-U GT2 [UHD Graphics 620]. I don't really play graphic intensive games so not sure how it handles them, but it plays in-browser scenes like this one at 60 fps (that seem much more complicated than my own setup).
  • I don't think the issue is the time to write on disk: I have an SSD, and I export to JPG to save space, that is, according to your link, fairly quick to export. And I get similar render time even if I just render in the viewport without saving
  • I tried to tweak the settings of Eevee… I after pushing down all cursors, I can get down to 0.75s per per frame (so x10…) using a single sample, 0 precision for screen space reflexion (needed for metallic shapes), and 1 sample for subsurface scattering but first this time is still far from real time, like I need 3 hours to render a 10mn shot and the quality is quite bad, in particular the shapes are "pixelated", in particular the shadows that are really pixelated and even worse on the metallic parts the are just noise now:

Default:

enter image description here

Cursors down (the shadow is pixelated, but also the wing):

enter image description here

Original:

enter image description here

Cursors down:

enter image description here

Original:

enter image description here

Cursors down:

enter image description here

During the same time, these animations run in realtime in my browser at 60fps, so 45 quicker:

tobiasBora
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  • Pretty sure any game engine would not be so "real time" if it had to render and write said results results to disk, which adds significant overhead. Final renders also have a higher quality, and possibly higher resolution than viewport previews. You might be able to reduce rendering time by tweaking some settings and reducing quality, but I'm not sure it will ever match viewport FPS. – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Feb 01 '23 at 09:34
  • @DuarteFarrajotaRamos The time to write a frame to disk is negligible compared to 10 seconds! As a proof, you can easily record your desktop (including games) and save it it real time to a file. The "duplicate" does not help, it just says that "Eevee is not that much evolved yet, also blender has made it for previewing final and much more realistic results than game engine": If eeve is not made for real time rendering, it's fine, but as I don't care about realistic, I would still be happy to choose another render engine. Could you please re-open the question? – tobiasBora Feb 01 '23 at 11:32
  • Encoding and saving an image to disk can take significant time https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/148231/what-image-format-encodes-the-fastest-or-at-least-faster-png-is-too-slow Looking for a render engine is not a question we can help you with here, maybe you can rephrase your question to focus on tweaking EEVEE settings to render faster – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Feb 01 '23 at 12:25
  • To reduce render time, reduce quality. Number of samples, resolutions of shadows, precision of ambient occlusion (or disable AO altogether), etc. Can your computer run 3D games? Does it run current gen games well? If it does, it's weird that it takes 10 seconds to render a frame of the scene you posted. If you upload the blend file I can test to see how long it takes to render a frame on my computer. – Alexandre Marcati Feb 01 '23 at 12:25
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    Also I was very confused by the part you mentioned if you needed to re-render a part of the animation you would have to manually rename frames. That's not true. Just re-render the part of the animation with the same file name and with "overwrite" on. (I'm assuming you render animations as image sequences, which is the recommended way). – Alexandre Marcati Feb 01 '23 at 12:27
  • @DuarteFarrajotaRamos Nice link thanks. But I encode with jpg (fastest in your list), and I have a SSD that can write way more than one picture every 10 seconds… and the issue is still present if I don't write the file on disk, so I don't think it's the limiting factor. What is wrong about asking if an alternative render engine could help? These engines could still work with blender as a plugin for instance. – tobiasBora Feb 01 '23 at 23:10
  • @AlexandreMarcati thanks for your answer. I edited my post to answer your first questions, with a demo file. Regarding your last question, I meant that if I add frames (making the length go from 1000 frames to 1500 frames) say, at the beginning of the file, if I use override it will replace the first frames, and it will not update the 500+ frames. So I need to manually rename them from 0-1000 to 500-1500 and then re-render the missing frames. – tobiasBora Feb 01 '23 at 23:13
  • Asking for links to resources for Blender is considered off topic here, that is basically a google search you can do yourself, asking directly about issues is encouraged though. See https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/15355/resources-for-blender If you can rephrase your question to focus on the specific difficulties you are encountering, rather than point you to some site that will be ok, otherwise it is better suited for forums like Blender Artists Forum – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Feb 01 '23 at 23:15
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    I don't think you'll find an actual real-time renderer for blender. Your best option might be to hire a render farm. Another option is to use an actual game engine like Unreal, but it would take some time to learn how to do that, and I don't think you'd be able to just import the whole animated scene with characters and all directly into unreal and just render it. – Alexandre Marcati Feb 01 '23 at 23:19
  • Keep in mind that rendering a 10 minute 3D animation is not something trivial, unless you have the resources of a studio (like an in-loco render farm or budget to hire one). – Alexandre Marcati Feb 01 '23 at 23:22
  • Ok, too bad, thanks everyone! – tobiasBora Feb 02 '23 at 06:00
  • This has also been asked quite a few times before https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/112597/ https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/155096/ https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/157906/ – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Feb 02 '23 at 12:21
  • Viewport rendering sacrifices quality for speed, you can see shading and shadows slowly improving to final quality after you stop making changes, while Blender briefly iterates through samples and aliasing. Offline render always has to wait for this process to complete before saving. As stated in the links I don't think the UI exposes enough settings to the user to allow turning all relevant settings down. – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Feb 02 '23 at 12:23
  • I guess given the number of times this question has been asked, I guess it's a clear indicator that people are interested by such a feature. And that's part of the reason why I was directly asking for another render engine. Anyway, I think I might try to directly use Godot to render the scenes (possibly with baked textures for nicer results), it can even export a video in real time without droping frames, or export to 120fps to get motion blur in post processing. – tobiasBora Feb 02 '23 at 17:22

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