EV Express $

June 2, 2019October 31, 2020 New Media Supply 0 Comments Backdrops, Compositing, Lighting, Render setup, Shaders, Studiolight

EV Express is an add-on that speeds up tremendously the workflow setting up a scene in EEVEE to showcase your model. No more hassle adjust all the render settings, shadows, contact shadows, probes, etc. Per april 15 you can use the EV Express add-on also for Cycles.

You ever were in the situation that you quickly wanted to setup a scene but at the end it took a bit longer because you were looking for settings somewhere hidden? Not with EV Express. Now you can be really productive in case you need a scene to showcase your model.

The EV Express addon had quite some updates and turned out to be a complete addon with lighting setup, backgrounds, smoke, render settings, compositing nodes and camera settings. It comes also with extensive documentation.

Note: Because the File-size of this addon, the Blender Market of Gumroad is a more convenient way to purchase the EV Express addon. The file-size exceeds 128 Mb.

What is included in the EV Express addon?

Add two light rigs with best settings known so far for shadow, contact shadow, etc.
Colour presets for lights inspired by HDRI’s from Greg Zaal. Of course it’s not possible to simulate HDRI’s with lights in EEVEE but it is pretty handy to have some presets that are recognizable.
Fourty complete setups (big preview browser) where each scene contains: lights, backdrop and probes. Eight of the presets contain a building (house, farm, etc) and probes are already set up.
Render Settings. With one click you can apply the best rendersettings known (screen space, indirect light, AO, samples, etc) And there are two other render presets which have light variation on settings.
Add volumetrics. Ready to render, so no hassle to set up material (or find the material) but just press two buttons. Adjust color of volume.
Add keyingset for all the settings for one of the light-rigs. This means that you can keyframe the rig and with that, you keyframe it’s colors, position, scale, and focus. Normally you have to keyframe each color for each light for example. now you can do it with one click.
Settings related to camera which are normally spread out across several places like Lock to View, DOF, Focal Length, and with one button you place an empty for the Depth of Field. The depth of field with be automagically enbabled. How convenient! I love it.
The global shader is now included (per 12 april update). This was a seperate addon but I merged it in the EV Express addon. See the global shader as a shader for the whole scene but has a colour scheme. With one button-click you can change the colourscheme. I stole these colour combinations from movies.
Add nine useful Nodegroups in the compositor. There are common ones like vignette but also some unique nodegroups like Logo-overlay and Normal-FX.

Release Notes and Updates

Update December 12, 2019,

– Suprise Suprise! I created some looks under colormanagement with help from Troy. To get it to work you need to download the config.ocio and replace it in your Blender installation. For example: C:\Users\YourName\Downloads\blender-2.81a-windows64\blender-2.81a-windows64\2.81\datafiles\colormanagement First rename the original config.ocio to config_old.txt and move it somewhere as backup.
– Also tweaked some backdrop, making them more generic.
– And used a woman’s bust from CGCookie for the thumbnails. The thumbnails looks much better.

Update January 15, 2020:

– EV Express goes Archviz. This means I added 8 presets with buildings. And for each building lights, probes and materials are set up.

– A render preset that has Lower light threshold. This means that weaker lights can contribute to lighting the scene. I added a bit more ambient occlusion in this preset.

– Made it to work with Blender 2.82.