What render engine you pick while working in Blender can have a huge impact on the quality, and speed of your project. In Blender, Eevee and Cycles are the two main rendering engines, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Blender Eevee Render Engine
Blender uses Eevee as a real-time render engine bringing ease-of-use, speed, and overall performance improvements. It also helps to render images at a reasonable quality and fraction of the time it takes complex engines for rendering like cycles.
Eevee is a real time rendering engine. This is great for things like animation previews, interactive applications and game design.
Eevee is quick, but it’s not a raytracer so you’re unable to obtain the same photorealistic fidelity we could with Cycles; It specializes at outputting stylised art-work.
Blender Cycles Render Engine
To render any 3D scene created in the Blender, one has to be familiar with Cycles and its working; it is the esoteric most parts of Blender. This works well for projects that need detailed lighting, reflections, and shadows.
Ray Tracing (evolved in Cycles form) — With ray tracing, now described in the new functionality of Cycles, light provides increased realism when interacting with surface lighting and shadow spaces.
GPU: If you have a powerful GPU, you can also use high performance for rendering.
Fundamental Differences: Eevee vs. Cycles
Render Time
Eevee: Real time render engine, way faster with animations previews and real time applications.
Cycles: Render longer but with better photorealistic results.
Lighting and Shadows
Eevee: Employs easy light tools, similar screen-space reflections and ambient occlusion. Not very accurate shadows and reflections.
Cycles: Ray-traced rendering, with high-quality global illumination, precise reflections and refractions, uniform area lights and soft shadows.
Use Cases
Eevee: Stylized animations/renderings, game assets or general visualizations with a short deadline.
Cycles: for photorealistic renders, product viz, and animation (though limited in performance compared to commercial tools).
Eevee vs Cycles: Eevee if you care about speed, Cycles if you care about realism. Finally, those needing quick results should stick with Eevee, though for true realism and light properties, anyone in need of the best possible visuals will be best advised to stick with Cycles.
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