Blender 5.2 LTS: EEVEE & Viewport¶
Screen Space Raytracing Overhaul¶
The 5.2 release brings a major cleanup to the Screen Space Raytracing pipeline. While these changes include some breaking compatibility, the goal is to address long standing usability issues.
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Most older scenes will load and look similar. If that's not the case, usually the thickness parameters needs to be tweaked. Due to fixes in energy conservation, some scenes might render darker than in 5.1.
A new Backface option has been added to the Screen Tracing sub panel. It allows to reduce light leaking and allows to tweak the the GI look. This option affects both Screen Space GI and Fast GI Approximation.
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The Reflection denoiser has received a few tweaks that helps better preserve reflections contact sharpness.
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The Raycast Node also inherit better intersection precision and no longer triggers false positives for rays moving toward the camera.
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Refer to the Pull Requests for the technical details and side-by-side comparison screenshots: (PR#157059) (PR#156597) (PR#157763) (PR#157479) (PR#158051) (PR#157803) (PR#158150)
Fast GI and Ambient Occlusion Fixes¶
A few critical bugs have been solved with the Fast GI implementation making it more robust. (#156597)
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This changes the look of existing files using this option. The AO pass and the AO shading node are also impacted by the change.
The Far Thickness parameter found under the Fast GI Approximation has been removed. It previously caused dark halos around objects.
The implementation has also been optimized for speed and noise reduction. This is effective with the precision slider set to less than 1. (PR#157479)
Filtering¶
Scene based anisotropic filtering setting (69aa93bb55)
Mipmap generation is now consistent between backends (2f657feb36)
Light Camera Ray Visibility¶
EEVEE Lights now support camera ray visibility. (#158416)
EEVEE Instancing Performance¶
EEVEE now supports the same instancing optimizations as Workbench and Overlay. (#154963)
Instancing-heavy scenes (CPU bottlenecked) can be up to twice as fast.
This also means that EEVEE will be able to benefit from further upcoming instancing optimization.
EEVEE Large Shadow Pool Option¶
EEVEE now have a 1.5 GByte and 2 GByte options for the shadow pool size. (#158344)
Improved Light Probe Planes compatibility¶
Light Probe Planes are now compatible with Blended Material mode and Shader to RGB. (#158483)
[!NOTE] This change reduces by 2 the maximum amount of texture a Blended material can contain. This also applies to materials using Shader to RGB.
Raycast Visibility Toggle¶
Allows selecting which objects are visible to the Raycast node. (#157799)
Other¶
- EEVEE BSDF properties now have lower banding artifacts (#158656)
- EEVEE refraction BSDF now evaluates light properly in lighprobe plane (619b029b08)
- EEVEE principled BSDF sheen now respect clear coat layer normal (15fbf39fae)
- EEVEE principled BSDF now falls back to interpolated normal when the normal input is degenerate (PR#161129)
- EEVEE now always re-renders the scene on playback, even if it's static (575b23e442)
- EEVEE mix node is now consistent with Cycles when used with float and vectors (7abf059be9)
- EEVEE force use of GLSL precise derivatives for more deterministic bump mapping accross platform (PR#159156)
- EEVEE SubSurface Scattering now evaluates indirect light separately if ligth-path clamping or intensity are non-default (PR#159156)
- EEVEE Light render-passes are now consistent with Cycles and don't accumulate for each evaluated BSDF (PR#159921)
- EEVEE now uses slightly less video memory during rendering (PR#155780)
- EEVEE now supports normal map node Base option (PR#160565)
- EEVEE removed the limit of 8 object attributes per material (PR#160401)
- Overlay now exposes a grid axis brightness slider in theme settings (PR#158588)
Fixes¶
- Fixed EEVEE undefined behavior in shadow visibility (PR#159160)
- Fixed EEVEE undefined behavior in polygonal bokeh depth of field (PR#159305)
- Fixed EEVEE over-blurred background caused by motion blur (PR#159299)
- Fixed EEVEE shadow artifacts when light threshold was set to 0 (PR#157305)
- Fixed EEVEE normal transform in Vector Transform node for non-uniform scaled objects (PR#160254)
- Fixed EEVEE light culling at shallow field of view angles (PR#160159)
- Fixed EEVEE missing volume refresh after shader compilation (PR#160395)