Blender Eevee is Magic

Mentioning my ever lasting adoration of the realtime engine in Blender on twitter kind of exploded (for my standards), so I figured I’d write a blog post.

Georges wrote a great little app to configure Elgato Stream Deck buttons on non-proprietary platforms. I’ve been following Georges’ ventures into streaming. He’s done amazing job promoting GNOME development and has been helping with OBS a lot too.

To make Boatswain work great by default, rather than just presenting people with a monstrous shit work mountain to even get going, Georges needed some graphical assets to have the configurator ship with ready made presets.

Sadly I’ve already invested in an appliance that covers my video streaming and recording needs, so I wasn’t going to buy the gear to test how things look. Instead I made the device virtual, and rendered an approximation of it in Blender.

For GNOME wallpapers there are cases where I have to resort to waiting on Cycles, but if you compare this 2 minute render (left) to the 0.5s render (right) it’s really not worth it in many cases.

Personally switching to AMD GPUs a couple of years back has removed much pain updating the OS and the reason I was allowed to do that is Eevee.

There was some interest in how the shader is set up, so I’m happily making the file available for dissection.

To do it properly, I’d probably want to improve the actual display shader to rasterize the bitmaps in a more sophisticated manner than just displaying a bitmap with no filtering. But I’d say even this basic setup has served the purpose of checking the viability of a symbol rendered on a lousy display.