Hey guys.
Have you tested Blender 2.8's Eevee rendering ? I've been using it recently (both for work and in my free time). It rocks ! Have a look, I did a quick import of Relto in it... (I didn't bother with some materials but I think it's still a good showcase). These images are pre-rendered for higher quality, but you can also render them in realtime. Well, almost - you have to let the view stabilize a few frames, because some effects are quite noisy when in movement. But still, really cool.
The material editor is pretty good too. You can easily blend textures together using UV maps, make realistic metallic materials, etc. The materials (and most of the rendering) will look the same in both Eevee and Cycles, which is an impressive feat considering the two render engines work differently.
(Okay, to be honest, coming from regular shader programming, there are a lot of things I don't like about the material editor. I've been pulling my hair out figuring out some of Eevee's limitations But well, Blender is geared towards artists, not programmers, so it makes sense for it to be somewhat dumbed down, and it's still much more flexible than the old "internal" renderer.)
Oh, and do some of you remember how alpha blending causes all sorts of issues with face sorting and rendering ? Well, Blender has a very cool alternative: alpha hashing. It's a bit like alpha clipping, but dithered. It solves most issues alpha blending has (can even handle partially transparent shadows to some extent), at the cost of pixel noise - which is then filtered by temporal anti-aliasing. It won't work on all types of objects (for instance it's too noisy for high-density grass), but works really well for Relto's pine and maple trees. I copied the idea to use in Unity, works really well
Anyway. Unfortunately, the material editor is now completely incompatible with Plasma's own material system, I have no idea how Korman will deal with that. Unless in the future MOUL can ditch the old material system and handle custom shaders in PRPs ? Not going to happen soon I guess. But it's still fun to experiment with.