Clément Foucault is the main developer of the Eevee render engine in Blender.
BD: What’s your background and how did you get into Blender development?
Clément Foucault: I have a degree in 3D animation filmmaking, a pretty generic degree that covers many areas of the animation process. I was already more leaning towards the technical side of production and Blender was already my tool of choice. I then became a freelance 3D artist and did a few gigs while developing the PBR branch in my free time. This project caught the attention of the Blender Institute and they offered me to be part of the 2.8 team and integrate my work in this huge release.
BD: What was the initial spark for your decision to start developing Eevee?
Did you use other render engines as reference?
Clément Foucault: The PBR branch is the prequel to Eevee. I had this idea of integrating new realtime rendering techniques during a project where I used Marmoset Toolbag 2 to preview the final look of the assets I was making. Jumping back and forth from Marmoset to Blender was really a pain. I already had done a really low quality PBR for Unreal Engine 3, so one day I decided to give it a go and implement it directly into blender. My main reference during development was Cycles as it was the ground truth.
BD: Did the open movie “Spring” help shape the way we work with Eevee
nowadays?
Clément Foucault: “Spring” had to deal with the whole 2.8 instability. It was not meant to directly benefit from Eevee. But the team did use it for texture painting and gave precious feedback about performance and bugs.
This interview was first released for the magazin Digital Production. BlenderDiplom is now presenting the interview in its original, non-translated form.