html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"After over 2 years of development, the EEVEE Next project has produced a major evolution of the Blender viewport system, set to be a key feature of the upcoming 4.2 LTS release.Project goalsThe EEVEE Next project was aimed at modernizing viewport rendering, address technical debt and overcome existing design limitation. The main target of the project was to improve performance and visual quality of viewport rendering, leading to a better user experience while building, animating and rendering 3D scenes.What changedThe viewport system is now more predictable and supports a wider range of lighting and shading corner cases. A new shadow system was introduced, providing more stable and higher quality shadows, while remaining memory efficient. Other noteworthy features are a new global illumination system, unlimited lights in a scene, improved volumes rendering, motion blur and depth of field.More detailed technical documentation is available in the Release Notes, while the functionality is described in the User Manual.Here are some overviews from the community. Compatibility issuesSignificant efforts have be made to avoid breaking compatibility with previous versions, but given the magnitude of the change, and the number of workarounds used by artists in production, some issue are expected.A migration guide is available to mitigate these issues. If you are encountering undocumented behavior, please do share your findings and help to improve the guide!Next stepsThis is the foundation of a new interactive lighting pipeline. In the next releases we can expect improved performance, both for rendering and shader compilation, and hardware-accelerated raytracing.Congratulations to Clment, Miguel and Jeroen on this milestone. Special thanks to the community of contributors for working on stabilizing and integrating on several platforms.Thumbnail image by Hamza N. Meo.Support the Future of BlenderDonate to Blender by joining the Development Fund to support the Blender Foundations work on core development, maintenance, and new releases. Donate to Blender