New viewport and PBR engine coming to Blender 2.8

Top image: Agent 327 Barbershop project by Blender Institute – rendered in Cycles, reference of Glossy texture in wood floor

Eevee's features (The core of the features should be ready by Siggraph 2017, with a more polished usable version by the Blender Conference):

• Support realistic Blender light types (i.e., all but Hemi)
• Adding/removing lights from scene will not slow down the scene
• Shaders specularity will be supported
• Reworked light panels for the Eevee settings
• Soft shadows: for the realtime Eevee will have the current shadow buffer implementation, for offline Eevee rendering shadows can be cranked up
• Uber Shaders. developers plan to implement Uber shaders following the Unreal Engine 4 PBR materials. Not all UE4 shaders will be implemented (like car coating, human skin), because Eevee will not have the same features as UE4. Uber shader will be mainly an output node.

Blender 2.8 Viewport design mockup by Paweł Łyczkowski, suggesting fresnel wires over a Cycles preview

• UI/UX solution for multi-engine material outputs. A material that was setup for Cycles and doesn’t have yet an Eevee PBR Node should still work for Eevee, even if it looks slightly different. The Cycles fallback option should be enough to get users to jump into Eevee from early on.
• Convert / Replace Blender Internal. After achieving working Eevee engine developers will deal with the compatibility of old Blender Render files.
• Advanced Materials. More advanced techniques will be supported later, like: SSS, Clear Coat, Volumetric, Image Based Lighting
• Blender will support pre-rendered HDRI followed by in-scene on-demand generated probes. This makes the scene objects to influence each other (reflections, diffuse light bounce, …).

Reference image from Unreal Engine 4, room design by NasteX 

• Glossy rough shaders. Blender can’t support glossy with roughness reflections without prefiltering (i.e., blurring) probes due to performance issues.
• Post Process Effects - Motion Blur, Bloom, Tone Map, Depth of Field, Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion should be ready for the Siggraph 2017. Other effects that developers would like to implement eventually: Temporal Anti-Alias (to fix the noisy fireflies we get from glossiness), Screen Space Reflection (more accurate reflection, helps to ground the objects)

More information on Blender Developers Roadmap site.