Eevee Production Suite For Blender

Making production with Blender

Note: This offer works if you want the full suite or if you already have the EV Express add-on or the Material Nodes add-on.  

• Create scenes very fast in EEVEE with proper light and materials. New: And modular assets. 
• Make a production in no time. Block your scene, pimp it up, give it light, add material and render in 5 frames a second. 
• The ONLY product that cares about probes, render settings, and light settings for EEVEE. 
• Intuitive workflow, active development, active community: It’s alive!  

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pmUaM0t9gh0

Reliability

EEVEE renders fast, but who takes care of the proper render settings, contact shadow, biases, light- and probe settings? The EEVEE Production Suite does. This suite is the only of its kind that is specialized in EEVEE. There are other tools out there for lighting (and materials), but this suite is the only one that really cares about EEVEE;  Without precautions, there are many problems rending animations in EEVEE, like light leaks, self-shadowing, and screen space artifacts. 

While the tendency is to use more AO (because environment light doesn’t cast shadows), the EEVEE Production Suite has a more reliable solution. From the start, it never worked with environment light. So instead, it is using a more reliable solution with geometry, lights, settings, and probes. 

Speed – Render an animation 2 sec/frame.

Next to reliability, the production suite cares about speed; In two clicks, you set up a complete lighting setup with light rigs, probes, and backdrop (There are 56+ presets). And another click will set all your render and light setting to the best settings known for EEVEE. And with four clicks more, you have procedural material for your asset and the backdrop. Now your scene is complete.  Ready to render. And it will look good! But if you want to adjust the scene to your taste, there are many tools in the production suite. 

What is in the package? 

For 35 dollars, you don’t get only the solution to render in EEVEE, but also 56+ lighting setups, a library of 165 procedural materials, 4 addons, compositing nodes, and 41+ stackable node groups make your own procedural shader. 

The following products are included in the full suite: 

1) EV Express – the lighting studio

EV Express is an add-on that speeds up the workflow tremendously, setting up a scene in EEVEE to showcase your model.  No more hassle adjust all the render settings, shadows, contact shadows, probes, etc.  (Below an older video, for newer video, see documentation). 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=arFtxHQ_Ots%3Fwmode%3Dopaque

2) Material Nodes Addon and Material Library

The Material Nodes addon provides more than 40 building blocks to make your own material. You can combine these building blocks and are multifunctional: they can be used as shaders and masks. Therefore you can combine these building blocks to build complex materials. You can even mix them with the Fluent Materializer! (It’s the same stacking system). Also included is a library of 165 materials. You can use them also for your backdrop. 

NEW: A Procedural Landscape Shader

There is a .blend file in the downloads called “Landscape_Example.blend”. You will find instructions on how to use this shader. You can study the material, or you can use this as a template for your own landscape shader. The first step is to bake masks like height, AO, slope, etc. Then you save the bakes to disk and use them in the procedural shader. In the end, you can bake your procedural shader for better performance and for gaming engines.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2wn76Zwb5CE%3Fwmode%3Dopaque

3) Compositing Nodes

There is one convenient compositing node that I learned from Troy Sobotka, the developer of Filmic. It is the pivoted contrast node. With that node, you have preset-less contrast. So instead of the presets in color management, there is now a slider in the compositor. This is not the contrast node we find in Blender because that one is broken. The pivoted contrast node expands the values around mid-grey, and you can set the mid-grey value if need. By default, it is set at 0.18. 

There are other nodes provided that are safe to use with linear data (scene-referred data). A lot of Blender’s own build-in nodes are broken, and that is because their formula is not suitable for scene-referred data.  With the introduction of Filmic a few years ago, we became aware of that. Before Filmic, the developers thought it was ok to have photo-shoppish formula in the compositor. This is because the default transform-view “clips” the high dynamic scene data. And then you won’t notice it anyway. 

4) Material Presets Addon

The Material Presets Addon has a few presets of the Procedural Material Library, has all the materials of the material library which you can use straight in the 3D view!. You find this in the NMS TAB in the N-Panel. Click an object (the backdrop, for example) and click a preset (Rubber, for example), and there you have procedural rubber on your backdrop. It’s easy to change the material in the properties panel or the shader editor.  (See the update log below for a screenshot). 

Other add-ons that work well with the EEVEE Production Suite

• Fluent Materializer: the nodes have the same structure and are interchangeable. Meaning you can mix them. 
• Blocker and KITOPS is a perfect combination.  With Blocker, you can quickly block a shape and refine it quickly with KITOPS. I love it! 
• For Animation, check the free addons: Dynamic Parent Addon, Text FX Addon, Commotion, AnimAll. But there are many, many more.
• To add more grunge to the Materials, check Grungit and Smudgr Pro.
• Also, DecalMachine speeds up the workflow. 
• Level Builder is handy to build your scene with assets quickly. It’s one of my favorite addons.

Those are examples of addons that really speed up the workflow, which I keep on using.  

Contact

• You see on the right of this page (if you are logged in): “Ask a Question.” After a click, you will see a short form, and I will get a notification. Usually, I will reply within 9 hours unless I am on holiday. 
• You can also join our Discord Server.  There you can ask questions, see all updates, and you can submit your art. 
• Or you can contact us at Twitter: @newmediasupply or @cgonfire (for technical questions).

Updates

– August 04, 2020:  There was a problem with the PlasticFoil and Color_From_Movies nodes that threw an error.  The fix is in the download called  MaterialNodes_V_5_1.zip.  Best is first to uninstall the Material Nodes addon, then restart Blender and install the new version. 

– August 13, 2020

• Updated EV Express to 10.3.1 and is compatible now with Blender 2.9
• Added more than 50 transitions for the VSE Editor.  Documentation will follow as soon as the VSE Transitions arrive on Blender Market as a separate offer.

– October 32, 2020

Added nodes for the compositor: pivoted contrast, hold-out mixer, and improved saturation/desaturation. Some other adjustments. You can find this in the file NMS_CompNodes_v2.zip.  There is a video about the pivoted contrast and hold-out here: https://youtu.be/qIY1OPB2I7A 

– July 16, 2021

• Render settings to 32 samples. Default is 256, but I don’t see any difference. So that is a huge speedup.
• Adapted to the new DOF features, which are now enabled by default.
• Volumetric lighting and shadows are enabled by default.
• Use High-Quality Normals by default.
• There were backdrops not at Z=0. That is fixed now.
• Preset 10 has a new backdrop. And some other adjustments.
• The EV express works well with Blender 2.93 and 3.0 as well. 

Update July 17, 2021

For the EV Express, I included the following presets:

• The EV Express is switching over to a system with adjustable backdrops. The above presets are prepared for that.
• The above scenes have a new light; the Stripe Light. This gives you powerful control, lighting the scene even more.
• If you load one of the new scenes, you will see in the UI the following:

To adjust the strength of the Stripe light, the best is to change the color. That is much faster. When you click ‘Select Controler’, you select the parent of the 3 stripes so you can easily loc-rot-scale the light.

Also, there are now presets of the Material Nodes right in EV Express:

That means you can select your backdrop and assign one of the procedural shaders.

Update 19 July 2021

We’re now at EV Express 10.3.4. 

• I did the following fixes:
• Cleaned up orphan data. The file size is now 164Mb instead of 456Mb.
• Placed the latest light presets on top
• The High-Key preset was missing and is included now.
• Fixed an issue with the StripeLight collection when loading another preset.

Update 22 July 2021

• Quite an update: 6 masks.
• A new UI in the N-panel of the shader editor
• Thumbnails are back. 
• Tools to bake and to mix masks. 

Update 31 July 2021

• You will find a Landscape_example.blend in the downloads. This is an example of how to texture a landscape procedurally. There is an explanation in the .blend file, and there is a baked version of the procedural texture. You can also use this as a template for your own landscapes. 
• News: I teamed up with Iyad Ahmed (@cgonfire), who will help me with coding. This way, the speed of development goes a bit faster. Also, if you have suggestions, there is a bigger chance we can implement them. 

Update August 1, 2021

• A small but needed update: At the bottom of the UI in EV Express, you see the SpotRig Light Ctrl (The list with the 8 lights, arrows, color, size, etc.). If you select a light in the 3D scene, the arrow will light up the selected light in the 3D viewport. That way, we don’t have to guess what control to use in the UI.  A screenshot tells a thousand words:
  
  

Update August 3, 2021

• EV Express 10.3.6
• Improvement of shadows and contact shadows of the additional lights
• More links in the documentation panel of the EV Express (Tutorials, Twitter, Discord).
• Changed info in the preferences (Authors, links, version).

Update August 6, 2021

Super awesome updates this time, here we go: 

• The latest light setups had still light caches baked. The bake is removed which improves the performance and stability of loading a preset. 
• Documentation loaded slowly.  The local HTML files are replaced with a PDF, and now the documentation loads very fast.
• And now the BIG news: All 165 materials are accessible right in the UI! Thanks to Iyad who tackled this coding task. So no more appending, or loading the library in your asset manager. Here the screenshots: 

Update (bugfix) august 7, 2021

• The textures of the Landscape_Example.blend were not packed. There is now a download called: Landscape_Example_V2.blend that has the textures packed. Thanks to Simone for reporting it. 
• The documentation of the Material Nodes was missing in the downloads. This is now included. Thanks to mr.fallenart for reporting it. 

Update August 1, 2021

An awesome new feature: we can now bake the EEVEE lights to HDRI. Normally when we try to do that, we see only the reflections of the light, not the emissions. But we found a trick and now we can design our own HDRIs. That also means that we can have a speedy workflow in EEVEE, and at the end we can switch over to Cycles if need. Check this video about the update:

Update September 7, 2021

We did it! We have now modular assets in EEVEE Production Suite. Block out your scene in no time and it barely uses RAM. So you can build for a long time. 

Update February 2022

– Fixed the render buttons for Blender 3.0+.  EEVEE Production Suite is now fully compatible with Blender 3.0+. 

Update 31 March 2022

– EEVEE Production Suite is now compatible with Blender 3.1.  It’s version 10.4.6

Update 24 April 2022

I included a new addon (that can replace the composnodes or you can keep both), called NMS Compos Presets. 
It will give you 16 presets in the compositor (N-Panel)

And if you press Shift+A you will see it as such:

All these setups are adjustable so you can refine your look. You can also mix them. 

Update 13 May 2022

• For performance sake, I replaced complex materials for backdrops with simple materials. We have the material presets addon in the suite anyway. Especially Mac users, and those who have a slow CPU will notice better performance. (shader compiling works on CPU). 
• I added a passepartout control for the camera. Sometimes you want to see only what will be in the render and not get distracted by what is outside the camera view. 
  
• Added a backdrop shaper (bevels and taper). This menu will be active when you select one of the latest 16 backdrops:
  

Update 22 May 2022

• Bug fix:  there was an error spawning in the system console about a NoneType has no attribute name. Fixed.
• Added gamma in the color management tab. 
• Added resolution in the render settings tab.