EV Express addon for Blender 2.

9+
Addon for EEVEE to speed up the workflow creating a scene to showcase your model.

Index

Installation

Prepare the scene

Add to Scene

Spot Rig Controls

Additional Lights

Strip Light Control

3 Point light Control

Render Settings

Color Management

Camera Settings

Documentation

SpotRig light Ctrl

Global Shader

Tips on how to use EV Express

Contact
Installation

• Download the latest .ZIP file. No need to unzip it

• In Blender, go to Edit > User preferences > Click on Install
• In Blender's browser locate the Zip-file you just downloaded and press "Install add-on from
File"
• Mark the checkbox right before 3D view: EV Express and Save Preferences
• You will see the EV Express in the N-panel. Probably it is the tab at the most bottom.
Prepare the scene

• No need to say; save you work.

• Get the models you want to render in your scene.
• Remove all Sun lights and turn off Environment lighting. (See Properties Panel > World tab)
• Click on Display render preview. (See 3D view right-top).

The scene could be black now, which is a good sign, unless there is still Indirect Lighting Baked that is
not deleted. That's ok as well, we are going to bake again anyway later.

For easier navigation later, it is handy when you open another 3D view and put that in the Wired
View like so:
Add to Scene

In the later versions of EV Express there are complete light setups. So, you don’t need to add lights
separately. Here are the latest light setups:

There are still the older options to add light and other components to the scene. They can be useful
if you don’t want to load a complete setup for example. But I am not using these that much
anymore.

You can add the following items to the scene:

• Backdrops: It’s still there from previous versions of EV Express. Sometimes it could be handy
if you only want a backdrop.
• Add Spot Rig: In case you didn’t load a complete lighting setup by clicking on the
thumbnails. So you can load a backdrop, then a Spot Rig for example. Mind the spot rig is
now use for the more ambient light in the complete setups; the lights are bouncing in the
cube for indirect lighting into the scene.
 • Add 3 Point Light: In case you din’t load a complete lighting setup by clicking on the
thumbnails. So you load a backdrop, and other components of your choice. But the most
convenient way is to use the thumbnails for a complete setup. The 3 Point Light is the most
important light-rig to light your asset. The spot rig is more for ambient light, to light up the
scene a bit (so the shadows are not that dark).
• Add Smoke 1. Add smoke into the scene if there isn’t already one in a complete setup.
• Add Global Shader. Adds a Global Shader into the scene. If your objects / assets are using
materials from the Global Shader, you can change the color palette of the scene in a click.
• Add Compositor Nodes. Best is to install the NMS_CompNodesV3 instead of using this
option. It’s still here just in case you don’t have the CompNodesV3 for some reason, but it
doesn’t have the latest updates.

One important thing to realize is that whenever you make a change (like add light, change light,
change material) you should bake if you want to see final result. This is how EEVEE works: indirect
light needs to be baked and you need to be in rendered preview (Not material preview). You see the
bake button under the Render Settings in EV Express.
Spot Rig Controls

The Spot Rig is called that way because you can change all the lights to
spots. In a next update these lights will be called ambient light rig. The
idea is this: to create ambient light, these lights are point lights by
default. And this light is bouncing in the cube for indirect lighting. With
this you got rid of dark shadows that you often see in EEVEE renders.
That happens when the artists don’t use any enclosure, like indoor, or in
this case the cube for indirect lighting (and the backdrop).

If you set all the lights to spot, the light won’t bounce in the cube for
indirect lighting, and the shadows look much darker. While the cube for
indirect lighting is very useful, it can also be in the way of the view. That’s
why we render it in the 3D viewport as wire. But if you want to see it, and
change the color of the cube, then you can change the display view. This
is handy for when you want to simulate a blue environment or green etc.

And sometimes I cheat a little bit by giving the environment a very light color. The result is that the
shadows will be lighter. It depends on what environment you want to simulate.

You see that the menu starts with Light Position, Select Both and Light Focus. These are for
controlling the position of the light rig. Light focus has only effect when the lights are set to
spotlights. The Light Position controls the position of the 8 lights (it’s a parent, and you select the
parent with this button). I suggest you to get familiar with the following keystrokes:

Here the explanation of the buttons:

Light Position: Selects the parent of the eight lights, so you can move rotate and scale the 8 lights.

Select Both: Selects both the parent and the focus. Meaning that you move the whole rig.

Light Focus: Selects the focus of the light. You see the result when the lights are set to spotlights.

Color Presets: There are a few color presets, inspired by HDRI’s by Greg Zaal. Select a preset and all
the light will get a color.

All to Point: Will set the eight lights to point lights. This is good to create good ambient light.

All to Spot: Set the 8 lights to spot. Use this when you don’t want ambient light and you want to
simulate something like a disco, or indoor light.

Show: Shows the cube for indirect baking.

Hide: Hides the cube for indirect baking

Change Color: changes the color of the cube for indirect baking. This is handy to simulate
environment. For example: greenish for woods, Blue-ish for sky, etc.

Add Keyingset: This creates a keyingset for the 8 lights and the 3-point light. When you press i to
insert a keyframe, you can now insert a keyframe for all these lights. Normally you need to do these
8+3 = 12 times. Note that this is an experimental feature because you should bake the indirect light
whenever there is a change. But still, you can make animations with light. The only thing is that it
doesn’t animate indirect light.
Additional Lights

When you load a complete lighting setup (thumbnails) it happens sometimes that you still need
some extra lights in the scene. For example, to highlight a specific detail. Use the additional lights for
that, which have the best settings like contact shadow, bias, etc.

Note that when you load an additional light, and you select it, you can adjust the light in the 3Point
light Ctrl Menu (That will be temporally the keylight). This works then only if there was a 3 Point Light
loaded.
Strip Light Control

Strip (or stripe) light is the latest addition to the EV Express addon. So we have the Spot Rig for
ambient light, the 3 Point light for local light, and now this Strip Light for effects. For example you
can use it to simulate TL light (like in a super market or big office). You can also set it to the left and
rotate it to the object (for example the monitor preset does that).

The controls:

Color: (showed black here) is to change the color. What I do often is

putting a high value for Watt like 20000 and then I just adjust the color
(in particular the value of the color). This works much faster than
adjusting the value of W(att).

Watt: As I showed above, it’s handy to give this a high value (for an
artistic workflow).

Meters: The 3 strip lights are rectangles, and here you can set the
dimensions.

Select Controller: Select the parent of the Strip light. Try G X to move in Global X direction, G X X to
move in local X direction, R R to rotate freely.
3 Point Light Control

The 3-point light control is the light rig to light your asset. Usually, you set the key light 45 degrees
from the camera and the fill light on the other side 45 degrees from the camera. This way you don’t
shine light straight onto the object in the same direction as the camera looks at the object. This later
one would look more like flash-light and can be very ugly (depends on what you want to achieve).
The trick to get good light is to position the light as such that you see quite some details. (Video
Tutorials will follow).

Light Position: As in the rig with the 8 lights, this will select the
parent of the 3-point light. Use G X for example to move in Global X.
Use G X X to move in local X. Or R R to rotate freely.

Select both: Selects both parents of the rig, meaning that you can
move, rotate, or scale the whole rig.

Light focus. Selects the focus (another parent) of the 3-point light.

Key: selects the key light.

Back: selects the back light.

Fill: selects the fill light.

Energy: to set the energy of light (Watt). Usually, I give this a high value like 20000 and then I just
change the color (value of the color). That works much faster than adjusting the Energy.

Color: Change the color of the light.

Size: Change the size of the light.

Render Settings

There are loads of render settings and it is time consuming to find the meaning of all these settings
online. Luckily, I collected the best settings (mostly recommended by Eric Klein), and implemented
this in EV Express. These settings will reduce light leaks, self-shadowing, and other screen space
artefacts.

Bake indirect: Whenever you change light, or even change material

you should bake if you want to see the final result (or reliable
result). You also need to use Rendered Preview (not Material
Preview) to see the result of the bake.

Render settings 1: These are the best render settings. I tested

many times, and for animations, this is the best setting of the three
options. But if something is off in special cases, try the other 2
options.

Render Settings 2: slightly different settings, mainly the AO is different, and this setting looks quite
dark.

Render Settings 3: slightly different settings, looks very much like Render Settings 1.
Color Management

The settings for Color Management are a bit hidden in the properties panel > Render Settings > At
the bottom. Therefore, I implemented these settings here so we don’t need to jump that often to
other places.

Look: Here you find some presets for contrast. Often, I use Medium High Contrast, High Contrast or
even Very High Contrast. This because Filmic is compressing the data, especially in the highlights.
What I often do is set the Exposure so that there is not that much compression in the highlights. And
then I pixel push a little bit in an editor like Gimp, Photoshop, or Affinity photo for example the
levels. But be careful with that because you easily break it.

View Transform: Use Filmic if you want photo realistic renders. But if you want to pixel push (for
example you need to create exact colors for a cover design) then I would use the default transform
view. But don’t use the default transform view to render light (like sun, lamps, something that emits
light). By default, use Filmic.

Exposure: Sets the exposure of the render and render preview.

False color: In the view transform you will find False Color. If you want to experiment with this, load
the first lighting preset. That is the mid-grey scene. If you load false color, then you see some areas
(narrow ridges) that are grey. That indicates that the material that has a mid-grey albedo value, will
show up in the render as mid grey. I use this to get a point of reference: Often we load a scene and
we don’t get a grasp how strong the light is. Then we adjust the material (make it lighter), but if we
don’t understand the lighting conditions, we are not really able to adjust the material as we expect.
What happens often is that you give the material to some-one else, and he see that your material is
quite brighter. Brighter (or darker) than you intended.
Camera settings

Like the Color management, the settings for the camera are a bit
hidden, and on several places. Here I bring the most used together in
one place.

Lock to view: if you look through the camera (Numeric keypad 0) and
you press lock to view, you basically position the camera as you look
through the rectangle (camera) in the 3D viewport. Move with the
middle mouse button the camera. You can also use shift and Ctrl
while using the middle mouse button.

Unlock to view: unlocks is again. So you are not positioning the camera anymore.

Focal Length: Sets the focal Length of the camera. If you set it like 70 it nearly looks isometric. And if
you set it to 20 is looks more like a fisheye view.

Add DOF: Use first Shift + right click on a spot on your asset. Then press Add DOF. This will place an
empty and use that as the point for DOF.

F-Stop: Then you can use the F-Stop to set the blur.
Documentation

Loads of interesting things to find in the Documentation.

Local (EV Express): Will load this document in your webbrowser. It will
be most likely a PDF. (Before it was HTML, but that caused quite some
delay).

Installation: Brings you to the page on Blender Market on how to install

EV Express. (Of course if you see this menu in Blender you have already
EV Express installed. But this document will be available on other places
as well).

Twitter: Here you can reach out to me (Robert) or if it is very technical

then you can reach out to Iyad Ahmed who is very proficient in coding.

Join Discord: Jay. It’s quite some fun hanging around on Discord. There
you can see the latest news (YouTube, Twitter, Twitch), join a contest,
request support, look at funny pictures, or chat with other users of the
EEVEE Production Suite and the EV Express. They are all there to help
you. Or you can also help others. It’s definitely worth it hanging around
on discord because I plan to give away vouchers frequently.

Tutorials: With one click you will load Video Tutorials in your browser.
No need to look it up.
SpotRig Light Ctrl

The SpotRig Light Ctrl (In the feature Ambient Light Ctrl), is a list of the
eight lights in the rig. You can see what light is selected, or you can
select a light by pressing the arrow. You can set the color, size and
energy.

I don’t use that much this menu, and that’s why I placed it at the
bottom. Handier is to use the color presets, and if you really need to
change the lights (special circumstances) you can use this menu.

There is one trick here and that is as follows: Press select all, and then
press the Alt key while you slide the Energy value. This will all the
lights at the same time. So that is quite a time saver.

What I do often is set the energy very high like 20000 or even 50000
Watt, and then just adjust the color (especially darker or lighter). That
works much faster than sliding the values in Watt.

Global Shader

More documentation will follow later since the Global Shader was
actually a separate addon and merged now in EV Express. But for
now:

Sel. Global Shader: Selects the Global Shader. Grab in in view, or if

you want to see all controls that comes with the Global Shader, go to
Properties panel > Object tab > Custom Properties

Copy Material: Select you object first, then select one of the cubes that comes with the Global
Shader then press the button Copy Material. The material will then be applied on your object. You
can also use Alt+M if you have HardOps or go to the properties panel > Materials to assign materials.
You can also assign materials to vertex groups etc which is nice for backdrops.

Color Presets: When you are using all of your objects, (including the backdrop or not) then this is
nice to experiment with Colour presets. These colours are handpicked from selected movies. You can
animate these as well after having pressed the button to set up a keying set.

Shader Presets: These presets (Blender bug?) only work when you set up a keying set and then press
i to insert a keyframe. So:
 • Press the button to setup a keyingset
• Select a shader
• Press i to insert keyframe.

To adjust the shader:

• Press Sel. Global shader button

• Go to the Properties panel in Blender
• Select the Object tab (symbol with square)
• scroll down to Custom Properties
Tips on how to use EV Express

• Read the Prepare the Scene section in the Documentation

• Get familiar with shortcuts as described in the Spot Rig Controls section of the
documentation
• Don't use HDRI's, environment light or Sun Lights. These are hard (or not) to handle in
EEVEE.
• Experiment with the cube For Indirect Baking. Give the cube a texture and bake. You can
then hide the cube.

Post process

Filmic is great until the point that we are finished rending and some minor compositing. We are not
there yet and need to "Push some Pixels" before we publish our render. What you might want to do
is using the tool Levels in GIMP and set the input levels as shown in screenshot below. (Unless you
have a reason not to do so).
Contact

• You see on the right of the page on Blender Market EV Express or EEVEE Production Suite (if
you are logged in): "Ask a Question." After a click, you will see a short form, and I will get a
notification. Usually, I will reply within 9 hours unless I am on holiday.
• You can also join our Discord Server. There you can ask questions, see all updates, and you
can submit your art.
• Or you can contact us at Twitter: @newmediasupply or @cgonfire (for technical questions).
Additional lights