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I played a bit with nodes that I have a basic idea how they work but not much more than that, so I have to learn much more about it.

I know Blender Render uses different nodes than Cycles. As of now I've only made assets in Blender to export to other animation apps. Now I want to learn to animate with Blender using the coming soon real time engine. Do I need to find specific tutorials for EEVEE? Or does it use the same node branching for Cycles?

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  • $\begingroup$ Yes it should use roughly the same set of nodes and a similar workflow, give or take a few extra featured and limitations $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 24, 2017 at 1:07
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    $\begingroup$ I'm not sure that this is a valid StackX question as the answers will change a lot over time. Even though this happens somewhat in regular Blender development, its especially true of 2.8 which includes Eevee. So what is right today may not be right tomorrow. $\endgroup$
    – 3pointedit
    Commented Aug 24, 2017 at 2:29
  • $\begingroup$ @3pointedit You can't use the it's only true today but not tomorrow so you can't post here excuse as many answers here that work just a few versions ago no longer work today. Blender is always evolving. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 24, 2017 at 9:19
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    $\begingroup$ My point really is that this isn't even a Blender question, as 2.8 is in no way released. The developers probably don't even know what the design will be from moment to moment. $\endgroup$
    – 3pointedit
    Commented Aug 24, 2017 at 11:45
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    $\begingroup$ @Erichuelin yes he can, 3pointedit has a point, future applicability of a question is a valid concern. While stuff does change over time it is valid for at least one full release, probably more as devs try to keep backwards compatibility as best as possible. For development versions that may not be true, an answer now may not even be valid for the full final release, and there indeed have been some breaking changes in this area recently. That being said they were made towards unifying everything under the same node workflow $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 24, 2017 at 12:20

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Eeevee uses the same node structure as Cycles, and its aim is to make its materials as consistent as possible with Cycles materials. Ideally, you should be able to preview the result of your Cycles node structure by switching to Eevee or by using the Eevee-powered "Material Preview" viewport directly.

This already works almost perfectly with the nowadays very common PBR texturing workflow that uses the Principled Shader and color/roughness/normal/displacement textures.

Here's an example material with Mix shaders, Fresnel inputs, Noise textures, Bump vector nodes, etc.: they all work in both engines and you can hardly see the difference in the final result.

enter image description here

Note: the wowen material in the rest of the monkey head is "Weavr" from Simon Thommes, which is also surprisingly consistent among render engines, despite it being quite complex.


However, not every node is present or is fully featured in both renderers equally. This goes both ways: the Shader to RGB node for non photo-realistic (NPR) renders is EEVEE only, as well as the Specular BSDF.

Anisotropic, Holdout, Toon, Velvet, Hair and Principled Hair shaders only work with Cycles, as well as several input nodes: e.g. Particle Info, Bevel.

This list may change: see "Node Support" in the Manual for detailed and updated information.


Note that you can have different "Material Output" nodes, one for each render engine, in the same material, in case you would like to tweak the materials independently (e.g. to make use of Cycles-only features in Cycles while faking them somehow in Eevee)

ci

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    $\begingroup$ Very good answer, one additional information would be lack of light comming out of Emission shader inside EEVEE :) $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 12, 2018 at 11:26
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, I didn't mention that because technically Emission is recognised by EEVEE, but only through light probes and indirect lighting. So it "works", but with limitations. $\endgroup$
    – Nicola Sap
    Commented Dec 12, 2018 at 11:28

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