A beginner’s Guide to using the Eevee Renderer

Intro

This guide will show you the steps I went through while setting up my renders in blender using Eevee. This guide will cover how to set up lights, orient your camera, set up your materials, add an HDRI, and create an infinity wall.

Adding Lights

When opening up blender for the first time you will be greeted by the default cube, a point light, and a camera already in scene. The first thing I did here was add lights to the scene. To do this go to Add>Light and select the type of light you are adding to the scene. Blender has a built-in plug in that must be enabled that helps you quickly add a 3 point light setup.

After clicking on them 3 lights will be added to your scene that will track whatever object you have selected at the time. When you click on one of the lights you can go to the menu on the left and click on the lightbulb. This will allow you to edit the settings of this light including color and intensity.

Above the light settings you will find the constraint options. Here you can change what object these lights are tracking. I set it up so that the lights will follow an empty cube object that will not show up in renders.

Camera

While you can also orient your camera manually using translation and rotation you can also bind your camera to the viewport and pilot it. To look through the perspective of your camera hit 0 (zero) on your number pad. And to lock it in to the viewport go to the side panel (it may be hidden on launch and can be opened by dragging the arrow on the top right corner of the 3D view) and then going to View while the camera is selected and clicking Lock Camera to Viewport. To exit the camera view simply hit 0 once again. To quickly make your current view the same as the camera hit CTRL + ALT + 0. The camera will then be moved to the view you were in.

Adding Objects to Scene

This is pretty simple. Go to File>Import>FBX and find your file

Creating an infinity Wall

To make an infinity wall I made a plane and then extruded three edges. I then beveled the edges on the bottom. Then you have to click on the wrench in the bottom right to add a subdivision modifier.

To crease to edges, select the edges you want to crease in edit mode and then open up the Item tab on the side and use the Mean Crease slider.

Render Settings

To make sure that you are using the Eevee renderer find the render properties tab in the properties panel. There you will find the renderer the blender is currently using. The three options are Eevee which is the default, cycles, and workbench. Below the render properties tab, you will find the output properties tab, which will allow you to change your resolution and frames for animation.

Setting up Materials

At this point you should be using the Eevee preview mode to set up your lighting and see what your scene will look like when you do you render. You can find this view mode in the top right of the 3D viewport and clicking on the circle on the furthest right. You will see your model has no texture on it and to set it up you have to open the shading tab on top.

Here is where you can hook up your textures. Before this you must properly export your textures in substance painter. Below is the settings that I use for blender. It is important that the normal map be in OpenGL.

Next you need to hook up the textures to the principled BDSF shader and make sure that the Roughness, Metallic, and Normal maps are set to Non-Color color space. After doing this your textures should be displaying properly.

Setting up an HDRI

To set up an HDRI in your scene you need to go to the shader tab again and change it from object space to world space in the top right of the material nodes. To find an HDRI you can check https://hdrihaven.com/

To hook it up, go to Add>Texture>Environment Texture and hit open on the node. This will open up the file browser then you pick the hdri you downloaded. Hook up the HDRI to the background and the HDRI will show up in the scene. When you highlight the HDRI and hit CTRL+T you will get extra nodes which will give you more control over it.

Render your image

To render your scene that you’ve set up you can click on render>render image on the top tab or by hitting F12. When the image is done rendering you can go to Image>Save As and then place your final render wherever you want.

Final Viking Renders

Update:

Viking boy 5

Done with low poly now and I threw it into marmoset for first bake testing. I still have to do UVs and texturing but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Viking Boy 4

I finally finished all the things I wanted in the high poly and I have started working on the low poly. Unfortunately I had setbacks and ran out of time but I'm looking forward to finishing this up.