https://code.blender.org/2018/03/eevee-f-a-q/
Does EEVEE support animation?

No, since Blender 2.8 has no animation support yet. However, this is coming very soon. Animation support is currently under development, available for testing via the command-line option --enable-copy-on-write

I wonder why its name is EEVEE because it's asking for legal troubles, Nintendo might sue them for copyright violation.

Yeah but that's old news. It supports animation just fine now except for this issue. The support was added some time ago. Although I may have figured out the reason to this. It might be caused by the way I started the animation on negative frames. If I start it from 0 so far it seems to render mostly just fine. Thanks for commenting anyway. Yeah I've been wondering the same about the naming. Maybe it's because it's just a name of the rendering engine instead of some character. Eh, dunno.

Actually it's still broken. The stuff happening is so random that I don't have any idea on what could be the reason. I guess I have to finish this project in Blender 2.79. Eevee seems to break it up completely.

Ok, lemme clarify a bit.

When you start at frame zero, it renders without issues. But when you start elsewhere on the timeline, you're seeing issues ?


Assuming I am reading that right, it's not limited to the 2.8 flavor of Blender because I ran into the same problem with one of mine when I stopped a render somewhere mid-timeline and restarted it the next day.

I'm trying to remember what the hell caused this ( it's been a while ) but I think it was a parenting issue where Actor X's hand was parented to a bone on Actor Y's hip as an anchor point. When starting from zero, everything was fine because the calculation for where the hand ( and the rest of the IK chain for the arm ) was supposed to be had been calculated via the previous frame, but when starting later in the timeline those calculations haven't been done yet so the whole hand and arm aren't quite sure where they're supposed to be and it causes some sort of crazy " jump " for that frame until the calculations are worked out.

I -think- ( emphasis on this, it was a year or two ago ) I simply set the render range back a frame or two so the calculation would be correct by the time the frame I wanted to fix came up again.

Eg:

Day One: Frame 0 - 100
Day Two: Frame 100 - 200 ( Frame 100 exhibits the jump issues )


How I think I fixed it:

Day Two: Frame 98 - 200
( Will toss frame 98 and 99 as I already have them, but frame 100+ works as the math has been done during the previous frames )

Actually it just renders maybe few frames semi-right no matter where I start and then hands and feet and other body parts start to snap around randomly, dick goes through her belly or completely misses her, facial expressions don't seem to work like they should, one leg pops up and down on next frame and then the other leg randomly etc. It doesn't matter whether or not I start from negative frames. I was mistaken. If I would render it frame by frame manually everything would be fine (except insane workload for ~2500 frames)

But yeah I guess the hand and other constraints are somehow broken since the stuff breaks so weirdly I don't really understand what's going on. And I'd rather not rework the constraints as that would break my animations quite likely.

If there is parenting loop it can cause some issues where constrained things don't always work properly but I shouldn't have any. And either way it's just weird that 3d view rendering is fine and single renders are fine but animation isn't although nothing should be different.

In related news, I downloaded v2.8 and the very first thing I thought was:

" WILL THEY QUIT MOVING SH*T AROUND ? "

Can you load your scene up in v2.79 ( assuming it loads in a previous version at all ) to see if you're getting the same problems ?

Heh yep there's some relearning to be done when 2.8 is released. Yeah sure it works in 2.79. Thats where I'm animating it in. Rendering just is painfully slow. I have separate save for 2.8 tests as it can break stuff randomly.

Heh, ok.

I've noted EV ( not going to try and spell it out lol ) does not handle fur well, so real time rendering with that eye candy turned on isn't gonna happen.
Some of my old scenes refuse to play nice and just crater everything.
WTF did the layer selection area run off to and hide ? ( I usually put bones in a layer, controls in a layer, mesh in a layer, so I can visually turn them on and off at will )
They broke my 3D mouse in v2.8 :|
Pretty sure 99% of my add-ons will fail in a most spectacular fashion were I to try and load them. ( Source Tools certainly doesn't lol )


I swear the way things are going, you almost need a dedicated system that does nothing but render when you want it to.

Hmmh it should handle fur just fine. Or hair at least. I've seen some videos of that. Might require some rework though to get old fur to work. Eh, dunno haven't messed with fur in a while.

Yeah they removed the layer system and instead made "collections" which are now in the hierarchy panel. They still work somewhat in similar manner but have much more options and things you can do. I'm not convinced though. They feel very cumbersome and the same goes for the stupid pie menus and ctrl+tab change. It kinda feels they are improving things in one direction and messing up the good, simple and fast "base" they had. But it's still quite early and it might be possible they add the "layer tabs" back. One dev already made a plugin for it but it had some issues.

I think all plugins are pretty much broken and have to be updated to work with the new systems.

If Eevee someday renders my animation without stuff exploding it would be really helpful as I'm having insane render times for such a simple scene I have now. Currently It does look very nice in viewport but sadly the rendering is completely fucked up.

If I recall correctly, this is the anim that was running ~10 minutes / frame ?
If so, yeah, we gotta figure out what is going on with the jumping / shifting issues.

I'll go find one of my old scenes and load it up ( one that doesn't crash v2.8 anyway, I don't think BlenRig plays nicely with v2.8 ) and see if I can recreate the issues you speak of.


Will let you know :D

It's closer to 30+ min / frame now that I added the environment and lights and stuff. And also rendered at full vr goggle resolution. It renders each frame twice too. So its probably 15-20 minutes x2 per frame.

Damn.

I can't recall how long the per frame times were on the VR test I played around with, but I don't remember them being quite that long.
Then again, I can't tell you what I had for lunch two days ago so I may be talking out my ass here lol

Apparently I was correct about not remembering sh*t, which is why I write it down :D


Went back and looked at the test scene notes and my render times are on par with yours.
( ~33 minutes per frame on a 1080 card. 2160 x 1080 @ 750 samples, stereo images )

This part, however, did stand out based on what started this entire discussion:

Make sure all parented controls are synced up in Blender before hitting the render button ( so you don't have do render it twice )

This was the scene where one of the actors arms decided to go all silly on me.

I -think- ( emphasis on this ) all I did to sync everything up was to simply play the timeline out in the viewport before resetting to zero
and starting the render.