Reference/Release Notes/2.93/EEVEE

= Blender 2.93: EEVEE =

Depth of field
EEVEE's implementation of depth of field has been rewritten from scratch to improve performance and quality. It also features a new high quality mode that matches the raytraced ground truth if using a high enough sample count. 

Volumetrics
A few improvements have been made to the volumetric lighting. It is now easier to work with and has less limitations.


 * Added a new Volume and Diffuse slider light contribution. This addition was motivated by the current lack of support of light node-tree and visibility flag.
 * Area lights are now correctly supported inside volumetric lighting. The solution is not physically based and does not match cycles perfectly.
 * Volumetric Lights Shadowing had bugs fixed that may change the look of certain scenes.
 * Volume lighting now uses a softer attenuation function, reducing flickering of lights center.
 * Volume light clamp was changed to fit the new volumetric lighting.
 * Volume shadowing will now be soft if using the soft shadow option in the render property panel. Light needs to have shadows enabled for this to work.

Ambient Occlusion
A complete rewrite was done to fix over-darkening artifacts and precision issues. A better specular occlusion has been implemented to reduce light leaking from light-probes. 

Thanks to this, the ambient occlusion node now supports variable distance and an approximation of the inverted option. 



Improvements

 * Glass BSDF have been updated and have less visible interpolation artifacts when IOR is less than 1.
 * Fresnel effect of glossy surfaces now follows Cycles more closely.
 * Reflection Cubemaps probes have been improved for low roughness. Old scene now require a rebake.
 * Normal Maps and smoothed normals do not produce strange reflections when reflection is below the surface.
 * Sub-Surface Scattering do not leak light onto nearby surfaces.
 * Screen-Space Raytracing (Reflections, Refraction, Shadows) have been improved to reduce the amount of noise and convergence time.
 * Contact shadow distance fading was removed for performance and reliability reasons.
 * Faster animation rendering by reusing scene data between frames.