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I'm finally working with Eevee in Blender 2.8 beta and initially I was so blown away at how high powered it was, thinking to myself "is this the end of waiting a whole week to render 1 minute of footage in Cycles?", but of course there is a catch that comes with not using light ray tracing for rendering. When testing a glass refraction material with some chromatic aberration between the two engines I ended up with completely different results:

Cycles cycles render

Eevee eevee render

As you can see Cycles does the proper glass refraction, but is littered with pixelated fireflies while Eevee looks smooth and pretty but has a completely inaccurate refraction that doesn't even show any of the backside edges.

So that leaves me with two questions:

  1. How to have Eevee render with proper glass refraction / light ray tracing for glass and liquid materials
  2. How to render glass in Cycles so that it ends up smoother and not so pixelated and fuzzy

Ultimately I want the smoothness of the Eevee render with the realistic refraction of Cycles. I appreciate answers for either engine since I will likely be using both depending on the situation.

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    $\begingroup$ Eevee cannot do proper glass refraction by design, it's out of the game completely. Cycles is capable, but very slow and inefficient, it should not be your weapon of choice for glass rendering. You need a bi-directional path-tracer, optionally with spectral rendering capability. Lux-render comes to mind, but also Mitsuba and Indigo. From top of my head also Corona or Maxwell. I am sure many more if you google. $\endgroup$
    – Jaroslav Jerryno Novotny
    Jan 5, 2019 at 10:15
  • $\begingroup$ In fact Maxwell is almost "dead" cause of its "speed" imo. Corona is great but only with 3rd party export and Mitsuba has its limitation due to being kinda testing tracer for some innovation techs. LuxRender in his 2.1 b4 is very good and free in fact with good results but slower GPU. Cycles could "imitate" most of the cases but its not exactly the PBR result - despite this its mostly usable. EEVEE is kinda game-engine so no good at all for this ... it has capabilities but not for PBR of any kind (as far as I know). $\endgroup$
    – Jan Matys
    Jan 5, 2019 at 16:05
  • $\begingroup$ But for sure try all the engines mentioned by JerryNo above if U could to see what makes the BEST results for U. Maxwell is slow in most cases but on the other hand has superb results sometimes but its expensive ... Corona and V-Ray are much faster and also cheaper with great results. $\endgroup$
    – Jan Matys
    Jan 6, 2019 at 0:00

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This is because of Eevee being a Real-Time Render Engine and it has to take shortcuts with materials such as glass. Cycles on the other hand is a Ray-Tracing Render Engine which will give more accurate results compared to Eevee.

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