I work in the automotive industry and I need to be able to create separate render elements in Car Paint like in Vray, when you make your own blend material that has a base color material and a reflection material. The Blend material in Vray can be connected to the render elements like reflection, base color, specular, shadows, etc. so when it renders, you get separate images of everything. These images are then imported into nuke, each image can be adjusted separately, allowing a lot of control over the final look of the render.
I understand UE is a game engine first, then photoreal raytracing came second. Can this even be done in UE5? I’d really like to find a way to do this, even with Blueprints if it’s possible.
Just two works, deferred rendering. UE works using that technique and it is the actual industry standard in videogames, in short terms it works like an incredibly tiny photoshop with only a few textures called GBuffers, they store info like diffuse color, normals, metallic, roughness etc, with those later you can compute your light, reflections, etc at once. Saving as separated entities those things would not be permissive, so there is no such thing as reflection pass or other passes in general, all those computations are as compacted as possible, otherwise you won’t be running at 120 fps if you save all that info into separated textures right?. Sequencer offers you the possibility to export the info from those so called Gbuffers, but it is way far to be usable for post production.
As general comment from all the people coming from normal VFX pipeline, abandon those ideas, real time isn’t VFX, I have seen people really struggling with this idea. Your post production happens in real time, you have a bunch of controls inside the post process volume to fine tune your final pixels, although obviously no where near to things like nuke.