This is my first post on the Unreal forum and my first project with Unreal Engine.
It’s getting to the point that I would want to call this done but I thought I’d start a thread here on the wip area in case the fresh eyes of the community can think of something to improve upon. I personally would want to do something to the anti-alias because of the nasty jaggies on the thin highlights but I didn’t find any extensive settings for AA when I was looking for it. Also, I’m getting some weird artifacts on some surfaces and it seems there’s some kind of a burn-in effect of a previously rendered image on some of the renders. Any ideas what’s causing that? The only way to avoid that is to (high-quality) render the frame twice?
The design is based on a sketch drawing by Matteo Pandolfi. Also, I would like to thank Vincent Stimpson (stimpanzee on this forum I believe) for his work and effort on creating a fantastic car paint shader for Unreal Engine. I used it as the base and only added the support for a skin texture into it.
Anyway, enough text. Images commence! More at: Borchia V8 VC - studio - Album on Imgur
I will do another full set of images with a different lighting later!
I was just about to change the lighting and render out some new ones but the scene won’t load at all now. I haven’t
opened, moved, changed or deleted anything since I last opened the editor and captured the shots in the post above.
I’m out of ideas on what’s happened here.
It’s all built into the Advanced Lighting starter content level. I double click it in the Content browser but it won’t do
anything. Right clicking pops up an error message “Failed to load assets” but the Message log doesn’t list any errors.
“Map check complete: 0 error(s), 0 warning(s), took 57,767ms to complete”. That is all it says.
Does anyone have any ideas what might have caused this and what could I try to make it open correctly again?
UE4 version is 4.8.3 which is the same one I had earlier.
Try migrating the level from content browser to a new project.
If you have downloaded 4.9 Preview try to open a clone of that project in 4.9.
If nothing works i’m afraid you’ll have to migrate the assets into a new project and recreate the level.
It looks beautiful, btw. How many poly’s is it in total? And is it driveable at the moment?
Oh, and you may be able to fix SSR smearing issues with highresshot by setting the new editor window size to a larger value than your targeted resolution, take a screenshot and then downscale that shot in Photoshop.
Thanks! It’s around 500k, the whole thing. I didn’t concentrate on making the exterior exactly game ready (as I wasn’t planning to build it in UE4 in the first place) so there’s a lot of “excess” topology in there. It’s a static object for now. This was my first time with Unreal Engine as well so I wanted to keep things somewhat simple.
Oh, I forgot to clearly state in the first post that these stills are rendered with the High Quality Screenshot tool and resized down from around 5500 pixels wide images but it’s still giving me a lot of hideous jaggies. As if it rendered the shaders and textures in that resolution but slapped the post-process effects on in the native resolution and just scaled them up. Dunno exactly, I’m just guessing. There was a bunch of things I wanted to test out (such as how big of a difference does it make if I get the high-quality screenshot from the editor view, immersive view or game view) but then this frustrating non-error appeared. I guess I should just try migrating it and see if that takes care of it.
After a couple of weeks having my mind off this I returned to working on it.
I’m currently trying to improve my glass shader since the simple texture I’ve been using doesn’t seem to be enough for the look I’m after. The color in the texture file doesn’t seem to give me the tint effect at all. Here’s a couple of things I ran into and just can’t get my head around:
Plug the red channel of the mask texture to Alpha and then blue to B, grey to A and see how it goes.
About highresshot…Instead of upscaling with highresshot try this; set the new window size to double the size of your desired resolution > play in new editor window > take a screenshot with highresshot 1. Then downscale the shot in photoshop to the resolution you want.
And consider making it a drivable car regardless of the poly count.
Oh, right. I have no idea what I meant with the comment about poly count. I guess what I wanted to say was that I wanted to keep this first UE4 project of mine relatively simple and didn’t want to think about having it as a drivable car. A friend of mine suggested I try rendering it with the lightmaps as well so that’s also why it’s a static object. The next one I do in UE4 will most likely be a dynamic object though.
Anyway, I went back into the window shader and got it a bit simpler while still getting the look I was after.
Beautiful… should definitely be a Marketplace asset if you’re keen.
OK as for the render output:
Try using TXAA with Screen Percentage 200% if possible… Then in Matinee record frames from Matinee to 4K. This way you get crispness and softness with all the effects accordingly.
As someone mentioned TXAA helps a lot with jaggies but SuperSampling AA through Screen Percentage/ Matinee output to screenshots/ screen capture really gives it the “wow” factor.
I found that “High Res Screenshot” from the Editor does NOT give the absolute best results.
Thanks for the reply . I’ll definitely take a look on the SSR settings as well.
Yeah, I noticed the High Resolution Screenshot tool doesn’t work consistently, especially when capturing from in-game view.
So I’ve been using the console command “HighResShot 2” with TXAA 200%. And regarding on what Jacky suggested about.
I tried setting the game window to 3840x2160 and then using the console command “Shot” but the image was still saved as
my monitor resolution (1920x1080) and it didn’t render all the effects the same way it does with “HighResShot” command.
Maybe there’s something I’m missing here. I’ll dig up the comparison shots later tonight and post them here on this same
message.
Here’s a few different paints I set up during the weekend:
If “HighResShot 2” with TXAA and Screen Percentage 200% gives you a 3840x2160 file with the correct rendering, that’s great. Then just downsample that to 1920x1080 etc. in your photo editing program and I’m sure it’ll look real smooth (that’s what Jacky was saying in essence).
Did you do this for the latest screenshots? They do look beautiful and “sweet” in terms of softness and sharpness.
If you don’t want to edit the SSR shader (which I think is totally worth it) try “r.ssr.quality 4” to boost SSR from console.
If you do edit the SSR shader as per the link previously given, I find I can’t live without my custom SSR now (NumSteps 16, NumRays 8).
Yeah the ones above are all 3840 wide and resized to 1920 width.
I can’t find the comparison images anymore but basically the downsized HighResShot2 looked exactly the same as
the normal size Shot in the same size it was saved by UE4 except that the bloom wasn’t rendered the same way.
So the ssr quality isn’t on the “4” setting if my engine scalability setting is on “Epic”?
Wow, that’s one sweet ride! DB10 meets Stingray is what comes to mind
Very nice work on the design, modeling, materials and the overall rendering/presentation. Really cool stuff!
How many poly’s is it in total? And is it driveable at the moment?
I guess what I wanted to say was that I wanted to keep this first UE4 project of mine relatively simple and didn’t want to think about having it as a drivable car. A friend of mine suggested I try rendering it with the lightmaps as well so that’s also why it’s a static object. The next one I do in UE4 will most likely be a dynamic object though.
