New Release: Realistic Rendering Showcase

If you watched today’s Twitch broadcast then you’ve already heard that all active UE4 subscribers can now download our Realistic Rendering showcase through Marketplace for free. We hope it’s a nice surprise for everyone!

Epic’s environment artist Paul Mader worked with senior designer Nick Donaldson to create this lifelike high-rise apartment scene. I asked Paul to say a few words about it.

“We wanted to show UE4 developers what they can do with the new tools and technology using a realistic rendering demo as a quick proof of concept. Real-time graphics have always had to fight with heavy limitations, and one of the easiest ways to downplay shading and lighting restraints is to make scenes that are very stylized, or to add dirt and grime to objects, for example. This exercise removed any type of mask to show how artists can now easily build true-to-life environments.”

According to Paul, producing a setting such as an apartment room works well, being familiar territory where imperfections tend to be obvious. “We wanted to test the tech with a clean, realistic room. UE4 has a physically-based material system that works with our global illumination renderer. Our goal was to come as close as possible to an architectural visualization rendering that one might expect to see created with offline rendering software such as Mental Ray or V-Ray.”

Paul and Nick spent three weeks creating the apartment scene from start to finish. “From the beginning the agenda was to avoid going crazy over-budget with our assets, and theoretically, every asset in that scene could be used for a high-end game,” he continues, revealing that the carpet, which exhibits fine detail down to the footprint traffic on individual fibers, was the best place to start.

“I thought that if I could make the carpet look good the rest should be no problem. Using UE4 you can see every little change immediately. Tweaking materials and lighting can be very time-consuming with an offline renderer, so being able to fine-tune changes within a scene and see them instantly is great.”

On the topic of UE4’s support for photometric lights, he says, “We can now set up realistic lighting using exact values in lumen and IES profiles taken from real light sources. It throws out the guesswork, and physically-based shading makes it easy to implement attractive materials that work in every light situation.”

We’re excited to see how developers use the realistic rendering showcase along with the other content that’s been released so far.

What do you think? Are you checking it out? Please share any feedback here in this thread!

This small Demo is so AWESOME! no words to describe it haha! well done Epic! and it’s running quite well I can manage 40fps on 1080p on Epic Settings :smiley:

Awesome, this has been my most eagerly anticipated demo! Keep 'em coming! :smiley:

Rift Developer here. Loved the optimization for the Rift. For those who don’t know, they’ve added a level Blueprint which checks if a head mounted displayed (in this case the Rift) is detected and changes the post settings (aliasing and such) if it is.

Go from an average of : 30FPS and 30ms -> 40FPS and 20ms

I just put in my old GTX 275 again, is that the reason the room is way darker than in the preview screenshot for me? Or am I missing something here?

I am really loving how much content they are coming out with in such a short time. Really worth the money! This is great.

btw “If you watched today’s Twitch broadcast” any link to that twitch broadcast.

100 FPS on Epic, huh. Freaking magic

Yeah Since the GTX 275 does not have DirectX 11 it cannot render the new lighting global illumination system.

Great demo, very high quality stuff! Great for learning. Hope I can check it out soon with oculus rift :slight_smile:

Looking into the lighting of the scene right now, very interresting.

Really great demo, runs flawlessly on my PC and love the details and trying to understand how its built now.

Whats the best part of the demo though?.. The music :slight_smile: No lie been stuck in play mode for a while as I don’t want it stop, will do all development with this music.

@Jinh, we’ll post the Twitch broadcast to Unreal Engine - YouTube on Monday. I’ll edit the link up top at that time and also let folks know via the social channels.

Does it relies exclusively on Directx 11? What about OSX users?

Paul, great attention to detail–appreciated that you could see the insulated glazing unit spacer in the sliding door. Carpet material is amazing, same for the bookshelf!

Well OSX users do use the same graphic cards as windows pc’s so I am sure it should :slight_smile:

Its very amazing honestly. The only thing i must say is i wish it was bigger i.e. a whole house instead of just a room, but i understand that they want to showcase specific features of the engine so thats why the scene is more compact :-).

One thing of note. there is a fly through of the day and night scenes but they forgot to make the mantinee play at the level start…

wanting to play around with camera movement more i created my own camera paths here!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gtHamLNPXyk

Looking really great from what I can see in the screen shots and videos, but not on my machine.
It is way too dark in the corners away from the window up to the point I can’t see a thing.

I’m on OS X Mavericks 10.9.2
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB

Is this a DirectX 11 issue? Does Open GL require other settings to render well?

Thnx

Is this similar to what you’re getting?

Dark results

I’m getting the same thing on my macbook pro
OSX 10.9.2
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB

same problem here: MacBook Pro OS X 10.9.2, GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB

Very nice~~