This was a type of (literal) test-bench scene I was doing back in the Early Access phase of Unreal Engine 5 a few years ago – mostly with the aim of testing out the different new features that UE5 had to offer and then later on, figuring out what had changed or which bugs had been fixed which each new version of the engine.
In particular, 5.6 introduced a new form of ray traced translucency through the Lumen hardware ray tracing pipeline – which wow – really makes a big difference and makes very challenging scenes like this even possible without path tracing at all.
Although it has to be said that it also seemed to cause some weirdness with Niagara systems, with collision and rendering, both with translucent and non-translucent mesh renderers…? Granted I was using cpu-based ray tracing collisions? Hopefully just a bug with how the pipeline works…
Rendered out in Unreal Engine 5.6.1 on an Nvidia RTX 3090 using Nanite for most meshes, Lumen for GI and reflections and a combination of Megascans, Blender modelled & textured assets, and third-party assets.
(also now with even wayyy more fish!)
