This is the most common method of scene calculation, where light rays are shot from lights then bounced off surfaces a specific number of times, providing illumination, material properties, and camera initialization. Most 3D artists are very familiar with ray-tracing. As it utilizes the same rendering system as a game engine, it's very easy to see how EEVEE can be much faster than a render engine of a different style. As you may know, both of these are game engines, and as such are primarily used to create video games. Other real-time rendering engines that work similarly to EEVEE are Unreal Engine and Unity. But EEVEE isn't the only real-time engine being implemented in state-of-the-art graphics programs. As you can imagine, this ability to see things in real time is a game-changer.

We can move lights and cameras freely to understand what we're framing and how we're framing it. We can make changes to materials and instantly get an idea of what exactly is happening with those materials.

By real-time, we mean that we can preview our animations and designs in real time (or as close to it as physically possible). Before we dive headfirst into the absolutely astounding feature set that EEVEE provides, let's cover a little bit of what makes it so great, but also touch on some of the limitations.ĮEVEE is an acronym that stands for Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine, though originally it was named after the evolution Pokémon, Eevee.

Blender eevee materials