Hey there,
i have been trying and trying to get great still images of large scale water bodies right. I want to b e able to create large ocean scenes that look photo realistic.
I could do it all again in blender [add your fav. here] but for rendering time and ease i would love to do it in unreal.
I tried multiple water and ocean plugins, water landscapes etc. (WaterlinePro, Cinematic Ocean, … etc. etc.)
lighting of course should be straight forward with HDRI lighting, Lumen etc.
blending the horizon line in a foggy misty smth. with exponential height-fog?
the water…
It should just contain some large waves blended with some smaller local waves.
reflect the sky realistically and does not even has to have sss and shades. (though some patches of different wave patterns would help the realism)
But I am unable to recreate this.
Here is the two day waterlinepro/cinematic Ocean result.
Probably directly in maya, Vray, or Arnold you’d get much better end results.
In engine you have to:
A. Fight transparencies. Rendering and transparency just doesn’t work right in engine to begin with one being deferred rendering the other ofen being pushed into forward rendering.
B. Fight lighting. They made a complete mess of almost everything in the latest engine versions, so maybe you can get it to work, but its more than likely you will not. And you won’t find tutorials or how to info since it’s all new stuff that doesn’t even really work right…
C. Fight the path tracer… water bounces the light back. A realistic render will require that effect/behaviour to loom real. Afik the engine limits those bounces and causes artifacts/blobs with high numbers potentially making for a bad/blurred final render.
Keeping all that in mind your best bet is downloading an Nvidia ray trace branch and reading up on their docs and ifnromarion (rather scarse) for the infromation you need.
Consider this too:
blender has a much better water simulation than anytbing you can code yorself in engine - and this is true even if you happen to be the dude that coded the blender simulatipn algorhytm. This is really because of usage. The engine is supposed to be runtime. Blender is not so it is able to precompute different things/behaviours that the engine cannot/should not.
faking things like we do for games makes your renders much less credible.
Panning a normal as the waves works for games because the motion itself masks the tiling. It doesnt work for stills because you can immidiately pick up on the tiling.
reflections and reflection captures needed to make an open ocean scene work will easily exceed engine limits / overall avaliable resolution. So likely, you have to go with direct ray trace to make things happen (hence partially the nvidia branch suggestion).
Fog/mist
To make it realistic you’d have to raymarch it or something. You can make decent approximations with different planes and specifically crafted unlit transparencies, but you’d have to spcifically author the life out of the texture to get anywhere, on top of making a material with enough parameters and features to prevent tiling and offer variation so the human eye can’t pick up on patterning…
And again, even witb all the work, youd still get much more realistic results outside the engine, using the programs that are more commong and meant to recreate live renders… not that stuff made with unreal can’t look somewhat realistic too btw, but you do have to know the engine far too well to make that happen usually…
And the reason i dont think it will ever look realistic is that unreal’s PBR is plastic like compared to everything else… basically I can generally pick out what was rendered in unreal and what was not if you put the same scene rendered in 2 different engines side by side… doubt I’m the only one who can since its often just obvious.
Hehe thanks for the feedback.
Totally agree of course on the capability of in-engine content vs houdini, arnold, vray, etc.
I used to work in 3dsmax and vray, later on blender and substance painter / designer for materials.
But for many quick projects that did not require a lot of extra fidelity i would often switch to realtime engines. (used normally unity, but passed on that for some years now).
But water never really came up actually. It was more landscapes, interiours and product shots. I think too that I will probably just not go in for the effort. Just not practical time-vs effort.
