Blender 4.2 new EEVEE (Patreon)

As you may know, blender 4.2 comes with a brand new EEVEE engine that supports "ray tracing", or rather screen space ray tracing which means it will calculate global illumination and reflections for everything that is visible on the screen.

It's a step forward and overall my models seem to hold up fine as far as I can tell.

The first picture shows the result with default settings and as you might notice, there's some issues with specular, especially on the middle of the lips, nostrils and around the eyes.

The way to fix this is to increase the "Max roughness" setting under ray tracing in render properties. You can also increase "Precision" under screen-tracing sub menu.

If I understand correctly, increasing the roughness to 1 makes it so that instead of using what they call "Fast GI", EEVEE will instead use "correct" ray tracing. Result can be seen in 2nd picture.

I don't know why that setting is at 0 by default, but if I'm not wrong it means "correct" ray tracing is not used at all and only "Fast GI" is, whatever that means.

Maybe a performance thing but I didn't notice any difference on my setup so I recommend setting max roughness to 1.

It might also have something to do with the new thickness setting in materials but I'm unsure what it does exactly right now.

If some of you have a better understanding of those setting, please share in the comments.