Unreal Engine General Thread

[Anonymous No.770931]

Anybody tried to play with raytracing? I wonder how capable will 3080 be for it. I'm hoping it could render decently smooth exterior scenes like a street with a bunch of buildings and props. Am I expecting too much from it? After all, most raytracing demos I've seen showcase small dioramas with 1 hero prop in focus.

I wonder what will happen when UE5 releases the new lighting system and which of the available ones will be used for the highest quality rendering - raytracing, Lumen, or baked lighting. Or some combination of those. I have no clue. I hope it won't become even a bigger mess with so many options and settings to tweak.

[Anonymous No.770932]

with DLSS even an rtx 2070 is good enough

[Anonymous No.770948]

Im creating a small 3d game and I want to compile a rtx version of it. But I fear most of my future clients wont be able to run it properly.

Im using a 3980 threadripper+2080ti

[Anonymous No.770950]

>>770931
You might, the 20 series RTX stuff is mostly based on just blurring all the noise away. This should get a bit better with the new ones, but it’s not like you’ll be path tracing in realtime anytime soon.
As for UE5, I’d imagine people care more about the ”300 billion polys realtime?!?!” stuff, which is most likely just too much for any ray tracing (just building the acceleration structures will be a pain since there’s a lot of content, everything is now dynamic and most of it probably never even lives in main VRAM)

[Anonymous No.770953]

>>770950
you have no idea how nanite work my dude

[Anonymous No.770955]

>>770953
We are still in 2020 with UE4. Im planning to launch the game in a couple of months

[Anonymous No.770957]

>>770932
I can't understand things can you explain what dlss is and how I can use it

[Anonymous No.770974]

What happens when you bake lighting and then activate raytracing on top of it? It looks like it doesn't remove baked information but the image still changes. Now I wonder if the lighting is more physically correct or less. E.g. activating raytraced AO drastically changes shadowing. Now what is the better version of this, baked or raytraced?

Also it looks like somehow raytracing looks cleaner and nicer to me when I add it after a light bake. I don't quite understand what's happening so if anyone can explain that to me, thx.

[Anonymous No.770977]

>>770953
go on, tell me what I got wrong then

[Anonymous No.770989]

UEV is going to be just like 4. Showcase fancy features that won't make it to the final version, will look graphically impressive for a year then all other engines (besides unity) will look and perform miles better.

[Anonymous No.771001]

>>770989
It doesn't really matter if other engines will look and perform better if you won't be able to use them. Only good free engines we could use are Unreal, Unity, Unigine and Cryengine. And from those Unreal is definitely the most artist friendly, especially when you include all the available addons they have been giving away + free megascans integration. You can't beat that. We can only hope Nanite and Lumen won't be complete memes and we will finally get a good dynamic lighting solution.

[Anonymous No.771022]

>>770974
I also want to know this.
Imagine I have an interior scene. I bake everything in production quality. Then, I activate raytracing.
What does it happen? Considering I dont have reflections or special features for rtx, how much would this affect the fps for example if the scene already has all lightmaps baked?

[Anonymous No.771115]

hey there, I've done some work with unreal raytracing if you have questions

[Anonymous No.771119]

>>771001

Well UE4's SVOGI was a complete meme, that's the reason I have doubts when it comes to UEV.

[Anonymous No.771411]

So THIS is the power of Unreal Engine 5 and PS5

[Anonymous No.771416]

>>771411
No fat chicks

[Anonymous No.771555]

>>771411
SAUCE

[Anonymous No.771565]

>>771416
>fat
look at that waist faggot

[Anonymous No.771577]

Now that raytracing is going to become a thing everywhere, what would still be the limitations of realtime engines that can only be done with offline renderers? I honestly can't think of any except for maybe rendering actual volumes and fluids. Basically only complex physics simulations. And fog.

Ok, and caustics, but then there's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGFheEHcoaM

And since it's better to ignore it even in offline renderers because of how slow it is to render it, this is probably even better.

Now I also realize the more complex scenes I have, even more reason for me to use realtime rendering, because e.g. when you start adding a bunch of foliage, shit gets real fucking painful with offline rendering. Blurry as fuck if the samples are not set high, so can't even save time with denoising anymore.

My current example - I was able to render my scene with decent quality with like 25 samples, and it denoised just fine because of the materials being used. Once I added some grass, it was game over. 200 samples is the minimum and my render time for every frame just increased 5x. Good shit. Meanwhile, Unreal doesn't even blink and continues rendering just fine - in realtime.

[Anonymous No.771580]

>>771577
Quality, basically. Current AAA games that use raytracing are limited to displaying a few shadows and reflections on a $1000 graphics card, at 30-40FPS.

https://twitter.com/otoy/status/1286145833147088896

This is OTOY's real time engine, doing full path tracing with lights and volumetric fog and shit, at a reasonable framerate. Notice how everything looks fuzzy and takes 2-3 seconds to fully render once the camera stops. Even in a low resolution with more powerful hardware and AI denoising/upscaling memes, we're not /quite/ there yet. 10 years from now, though...

[Anonymous No.771581]

>>771580
I think I wasn't clear enough - I didn't mean it for games, but for video production. It doesn't matter if it won't render at playable frames. Rendering it with high quality media export at 1 fps is still fine. The question is how can it compare when you set everything to max quality where you can use the tech to its full potential.

[Anonymous No.771583]

>>771581
still quality, since real-time engines use all sorts of approximations and tricks for higher performance (for example no general support for spectral rendering, layered materials, ...). this might change with time as the hardware and algorithms mature; the two will probably converge to some extent, so you might have a single renderer that scales from real-time to offline by just changing some parameters.
another hard limit is memory, you still don't have enough VRAM for movie-quality scenes.

[Anonymous No.771585]

>>771581
>>771583
Octane (and most GPU accelerated modern renderers) is basically this. You have a realtime preview in a viewport, which is identical to the final result except slightly noisier. If you increase the number of samples and wait longer, you get a better result. When you render the final image, you take the exact same scene and save it as a 99% complete image that takes an hour to render, instead of a 70% image that takes 2 seconds to render.

Realtime raytracing is exactly that, it's just using dedicated hardware and trickery to get an ~80-85% as good result in a fraction of a second. Given more trickery and more processing power, we'll be able to get a better result in even less time.

[Anonymous No.771589]

>>771585
yeah, what I mean is that at least currently you'd need to alter some algorithmic choices (automated dynamic light probes, heavier denoising, etc) to get actual game-viable graphics from it. so there is still necessarily some special casing for the two modes, but that should go away in time.

[Anonymous No.771592]

>>771589
They're working on that too (>>771580). Then there's the inevitability of GPUs getting more powerful over time, so if nothing else, we'll be able to bruteforce our way through the problem eventually.

[Anonymous No.771602]

>>771583
>>771585
Is there an example somewhere where I can see those comparisons where realtime raytracing is of noticeably lower quality than an offline render? I know it's all approximations and cheating, but if the visual difference is almost unnoticeable and you also get much faster render times, I don't see the need to use path tracers for smaller studios or individuals who render on their on PCs and need to finish projects fast. Again, I'm aware it can't beat physically accurate results, but I also didn't see good comparisons where the difference is actually visible.

Also, if you used GPU path tracers , you would still have problems with VRAM. Are you saying GPU rendering is not used anywhere in professional video production?

I'm talking about mid sized studios or individuals, not Pixar or Weta-tier blockbuster quality.

[Anonymous No.771605]

>>771602
None that I know of sadly. I'd make some myself, but I'm a poorfag stuck with an AMD card. Your best bet would be to set up a scene in UE4 with the default realtime tricks (SSAO, SSGI, etc), substitute as many things as possible with the RTX equivalent, then enable full path tracing either via Unreal's built in solution or the free Octane plugin. You'd probably get a result like >>771585 even with RTX, since iirc it only projects low resolution shadows and reflections on top of a "regular" scene instead of calculating ALL of the light like an offline renderer would.

That said, if 100% cinema quality photorealism isn't your goal, you can absolutely get usable results out of a realtime renderer without any RTX acceleration. See Enscape/Lumion/Twinmotion, and all the things people have made using Blender's Eevee. You could also in theory have a solution that synchronizes a real time renderer with a full path tracer, so you could animate and light a scene in Eevee or UE4 and have a nearly identical, but better quality path traced result when it comes to rendering the final product. In practice though that's a clusterfuck since a lot of things don't carry over (you can't have area lights, materials behave differently in the realtime renderer and the offline one, etc).

[Anonymous No.771608]

>>771605
Just remembered, there's this video which does a pretty good job explaining the difference between Unreal's existing realtime effects and the RTX ones (fairly old now, but I don't think they changed much since then).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY

It looks underwhelming because of how much shit we've managed to fake over the years with baked lighting and precomputed effects instead of direct ray tracing hardware.

[Anonymous No.771609]

>>771602
yeah, the VRAM problem is mostly for really high end stuff (or just scenes with shitloads of objects, you might still want those for an ad or something), lots of people probably use GPUs for production as we speak.
for examples, see any of the recent denoising method papers/videos. the results are okay-ish, but for changing illumination and disocclusions there tends to be a horrible blur since they change from temporal to spatial denoising

[Anonymous No.771612]

>>771609
Plus there's out-of-core rendering which is supported by Octane and some others. Pixar was also working on something similar IIRC with Renderman XPU. It shouldn't be a huge issue anymore, but I don't work for a studio that makes 200 GB scenes so take that with a grain of salt.

[Anonymous No.771622]

>>771612
yeah, occasionally ping-ponging between RAM and VRAM shouldn't be too bad for scenes that size. not like this is a new issue, ooc used to be a thing way back when scenes didn't fit in RAM either

[Anonymous No.772948]

Raytracing still requires reflection captures for a better precision, right? Why, though? Also, it seems to me raytraced GI isn't that great, maybe it gets better with more bounces and samples, but from what I see on the internet, people say the same thing and still bake GI.

It stil feels somewhat messy to work with, but then again, I can't test it properly since I have a non-RTX card so I have min samples on everything.

Third thing - what do you think of combing SSGI with other methods like baking and raytracing? Is it necessary and how do they play with each other?

[Anonymous No.772954]

>>772948
the issues are because the ray tracing performance isn't really still there (maybe we'll be closer with the 30 series cards?) so baking and reflection captures and shit still do it better for static stuff.
dunno how unreal does it, but in general SSGI should combine OK with more general solutions, since it gives really cheap short-range interreflections. the quality isn't perfect since it misses occluded stuff, but I'd say it's good enough for many things.

[Anonymous No.772961]

>>772954
>>772948

Dont forget about compatibility. Most people dont have RT-capable hardware, so devs still need to set up the traditional techniques along the new raytraced ones so that it runs on "old" (still current) hardware.

During the PS5/SeX gen at least, RT will be just a complement, not a whole paradigm switch.

[Anonymous No.772963]

>>772961
good point. for a little while it'll be extra work since you essentially need two renderpaths. in the long run, if we get to a pure fully dynamic realtime GI system, it'll same a bunch of development effort and precalc time though

[Anonymous No.773360]

When I do

r.RayTracing.ForceAllRayTracingEffects -1

Which is supposed to stop forcing all raytracing effects ON, for some reason lighting still changes even if I turn all the settings OFF in postprocessing. Now I have no clue what is activated. It looks like some sort of raytraced GI is still there, but I disabled it in PP. Is there a way to reset everything without creating a new project? It is so confusing...

[Anonymous No.773363]

Does anyone know of a good download site?

I have found some files I wanted but I cant find things such as Vive mocap and this modeL
https://flippednormals.com/downloads/daemon-girl-game-ready/

Anyone have a good pointer to a page with a lot?
Already ripped a lot from game-asset.org

[Anonymous No.773613]

So apparently skylight can't produce sharper and contact shadows, so I can't get get a nice lighting just with an hdri? In Blender lighting looks completely different, because I can get a direct sunlight as well just with a single hdri.

So apparently I just spent 4 hours trying to figure wtf am I doing wrong while I should have just added a directional light, huh. That's pretty neat.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[Anonymous No.773670]

I'd be happy at this point with a better GI system, even without ray tracing. Light does not fall off suddenly, Epic.

[Anonymous No.773736]

What's the best way to match the colors (and lighting) in UE4 to colors rendered in Cycles or any other renderer?

I've spent 3-4 days tryharding, but I feel like I'm running in circles. First I tried to match the lighting, brightness, contrast etc. by comparing clay renders from Cycles with a "lighting only" mode in UE4. When I got really close, then I tried adding materials and color match again. But I'm not sure if that's a good process.

So just to make sure, I started color matching again, but with textures, and trying to get a trimsheet to look the same in both engines. Finally, when I managed to color match one shot, I realized that for SOME reason, all the other shots still look completely off in Unreal. LIke, not even does the lighting not look the same, but from other angles, even color temperature, as well as contrast and everything else looks wrong. And I just repositioned the same camera without touching anything else.

So again, that leads me to this question as I still think I'm doing something wrong. Currently the only way I'll be able to color match Cycles render is by manually tweaking postprocessing for every single shot, even though the lighting is static, but that makes 0 sense to me. There has to be another, better way.

[Anonymous No.773738]

>>773736
The color is different even with neutral lighting?
Could be that the softwares uses different color profiles, srgb, adobergb etc.

[Anonymous No.773743]

>>773738
I don't even know anymore, I'm googling for solution, but can't find anything. There are some video tutorials for color matching but they get worse results than me.

UE4's postprocessing has so much setttings that can fuck me up as well. By default it's completely different from Blender. Also, add to that problems with IBL because it calculates lighting completely differently, and maybe some problems with textures themselves (although from what I see, they look the same when imported so at least that part should be fine), and you get plenty of problems. Oh, and also lighting values are different, so I pretty much have to eyeball everything, only adding imprecision to it.

I'm actually quite surprised how hard this would be, I was thinking it would be fairly straight forward.

I might have to start again with a fresh scene one more time, but I really don't know what to do.

[Anonymous No.774191]

>>770989
>(besides unity)
isn't unity at par with unreal engine nowadays? especially with HDRP

[Anonymous No.774193]

Anyone tried 4.26 preview yet? Chaos destruction keeps crashing my editor.

[Anonymous No.774224]

>>774191

Nope. HDRP is still in beta, performs even worse than unreal and doesn't look as good (even though unreal looks outdated as fuck).

[Anonymous No.774238]

>>774224
Oh on, it's that retard again... Then go on and use your Decima when you hate the best free engine of the market so much.

[Anonymous No.774243]

>>774238

The best free engine, graphics-wise, on the market is Unigine. Unreal has the best tools but it looks like hot greasy plastic crap.

[Anonymous No.774274]

>>774243
True, Unigine looks amazing, especially its screenspace effects which make stuff in corners look great. Does it even have raytracing?

[Anonymous No.774488]

>>770931
>Zero official videos on how to do very basic stuff like setting up rendering scene or rigging character
Unreal my ass.

[Anonymous No.774543]

>use alright rig to animate
>sequencer eventually makes ue4 freeze when selecting anim tracks
>trajectory pathing at 0

Is there something in ue4 I can do to get it to work normally?

[Anonymous No.774642]

Anyone know how to make particles work with raytraced translucency? If I'm using Nigara, I'm only getting large rectangular streaks on my rain emitter, and when I use old particle system, it doesn't get rendered at all.

I also have problems with DoF when translucency is turned on. It doesn't recognize the depth of the translucent object in focus so it gets blurred together with the background. Apparently that effect fucks everything up and has been reported as a bug.

Does UE4 have decent render passes so I can do DoF in post? Might have to do that with rain as well if I don't find a solution for particles.

[Anonymous No.775475]

Does the new Blender to Unreal mod work well? I'm reading there's still problems with unreals retard scene scale but I don't understand it well enough to know if I can just work around it.

[Anonymous No.775478]

>>774488
Stick to Unity, brainlet

[Anonymous No.775532]

>>775475
You mean the addon? I tried using it to import the whole scene and found it completely shitty, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

However, Datasmith works great.

[Anonymous No.775544]

>>775532
I'll check datasmith out, thanks

[Anonymous No.775648]

>>775475
I tried using the ue to rigify and found it completely useless. Downloaded autorigpro instead and it's been a dream

[Anonymous No.775653]

>>771411
Is this really UE5? Can this be achieved in 4 realtime? Source on the creator?

[Anonymous No.775666]

>>775653
Why wouldn't it be achievable in realtime? I can't see what is even special here.

[Anonymous No.775671]

>>775666
Well I don't know if that's realtime clothing deformation or animated. That's one thing I'm wondering.

[Anonymous No.775748]

>>775648
>Downloaded autorigpro instead and it's been a dream
It was absolutely worth it, I must say.

[Anonymous No.775754]

>>775653
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/18L8NX

[Anonymous No.775784]

Is there a way to reverse engineer build games?
Not just the meshes and maps but custom plugins.

[Anonymous No.775787]

>>771411
>clipping
Cooming really makes you go blind.

[Anonymous No.775912]

>>775784
in unity yes, not in unreal

[Anonymous No.775921]

>>775912
Damn, I can't find a torrent for glycon or vive mocap kit.
I just play around with unreal for myself, paying $150 for playing around is a bit much.

Thanks anon.

[Anonymous No.775952]

How hard is it to make a game moddable?

[Anonymous No.775953]

>>775952
They're moddable by default, depends on how far you wanna go. Custom maps or items or quests are easy, integrating a scripting engine into your game is harder.

[Anonymous No.776268]

How do you guys handle dripping liquids? Not as in cascades, but like pouring a water bottle?

[Anonymous No.776303]

>>776268
In what tool friend?

[Anonymous No.776309]

>>776268
Should it be interactive or not? For a cinematic shot I made a water fountain outside ue4 and then brought it in with alembic.

[Anonymous No.776314]

>>776268
just write a fluidsim, it's not that difficult

[Anonymous No.776378]

>>776303
That's the thing, I don't know which to use for this task. I just want to avoid THIS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkXKaIGYxX4&ab_channel=smudboy

>>776309
Fairly interactive, like how Valve handled the sludge in Portal 2.

[Anonymous No.777424]

Can anyone help me with this?

I need a paper-like material on this plane, and the shadow from the sphere has to be visible on its back. So you should see a dark circle from behind, just like you can see it on a front side atm.

I also need the light to be able to pass through it so I can use it for paper lanterns where a small point light is inside. Can't make that to work either.

[Anonymous No.777601]

Has anyone ever been able to get a SFM model properly into UE4?
I convert it with crowbar but im missing the texture/ info.

[Anonymous No.777872]

>>777424
Use a translucent material and set it to a quite high, but not 100%, opacity

[Anonymous No.777920]

>>777872
Hmm, that's what I already did and the result is >>777424
Not sure if I understood correctly about the opacity, I just added 0.9 to it now (it was empty before), but the result is still the same.

[Anonymous No.777937]

>>777920
Your blend mode (bottom left) is still on opaque. Literally has 0 translucency.

[Anonymous No.777938]

>>777937
>>777920
Let me explain, I'm not sure if what you want is possible with the many UE4 limitations. Achieving semi-translucent paper should be, but having it capture shadows is a whole different thing.

Try also changing shading model from subsurface to folliage; and maybe switching that "two-sided" checkbox.

[Anonymous No.777948]

>>777938
The thing is that this effect can be achieved without problems with RTX off, but I need it with raytraced translucency effect turned on, because it will be close to glass materials (and those work great with raytraced transluceny).

Here's an example without raytracing, this is what I want and it can be achieved with any combination you mentioned, even if the blend mode if opaque.

If I really won't be able to figure this out I'll just have to rework my shots to not include both materials close to each other, but it sucks this is happening. From what I see in the docs, this should be supported already, so I thought I just don't know how to set it up.

[Anonymous No.777956]

>>777948
Can't you just disable RT translucency for that particular material?

[Anonymous No.777960]

>>777956
I'll try, haven't thought about that actually, thx. If it works, then great, I'm satisfied with non-RT result anyway.

[Anonymous No.777980]

>>777956
>>777960
It works! I think I just had to create and add a new subsurface profile, I guess it can't work without it.