We created this video mailnly to test the new engine. We used the latest Blender Foundation technology — Eevee realtime renderer. It is still in beta, but already usable.

For those who hear about Eevee for the first time here is a quick reference. This renderer works with PBR shading the way game engines do. Compared to rateracers, a single frame processing speed is hundreds time less. It's achieved by some simplifications in the chart.

As we can see the results are quite comparable. In the case of Cycles, we can note a more delicate work with specular and DOF. Also, one of the disadvantages of Eevee is the poor work with refractions. Beautiful transparent glass is difficult to achieve. Naturally, there is no caustic. But this is the side effect of the rendering method embedded in Eevee. However, as in this work, I almost don't use transparent materials. Sometimes bugs with jittery shadows appear in Eevee. These are again the side effect of technology, but it can be difficult to fix.

All in all, Eevee is a very productive renderer. It has full unification with Cycles shaders. Inside Blender, you can switch between these two rendering engines almost immediately. In Eevee there is even a kind of module of global lighting based on irradiance volume map.

There were some software gaps too. When I finished the project, the render-to-texture was broken in the engine. We tried our best, but we couldn't use animated textures for the background directly in the renderer. This is why the forest was added already at the composition stage. Blender updates are released almost every day. The problem seems to be fixed at the moment. But anyway in serious production all new technologies should be used with caution.

Of course, it's not a full and completed work — there is neither script nor solutions of global problems here. But there is a good-looking picture and an understanding of how it all works. We had no special purpose recarding the character. I just saw a picture on the Internet, don't know whether it was a collage or something. There was a gecko sitting on the grass with a leaf in his hands like in the animation. I just wanted him to play something.