In Unreal Engine 5 there is a ray tracing option when creating new projects. For fun, I enabled the checkbox, created my project, and then I had to wait for 10 minutes while it compiled 6,500 or so shaders. Unfortunately, there was no visible difference (on my low-end GPU) when I went to run the level.
Can a Niagara fluid simulation cast light and shade on the environment?
Is ray tracing necessary? If so, what hardware supports this ray tracing?
To have the fluid sim hooked up to the global illumination would be a dream, like that scene in the clone war in Star Wars, where there is so much smoke, and the lasers light up that smoke.
I have a laptop with GeForce GTX 1650, driver version 527.56 (the latest version as of now). It has 128MB dedicated RAM, and 4GB shared RAM. It’s got sentimental value, but that’s about it.
I updated the driver and tried again from scratch, but no matter what I try, I cannot get the fluid simulation to cast light and shadow (assuming that ray tracing will fix this).
You need a RTX 2000 series and up for ray tracing to be supported in hardware.
(There was some software-based support in the NVIDIA drivers for the 1000 series, but I don’t know that it ever worked that well.)
The best way to see whether it’s on, is to add some flat mirrored object, and see whether it mirrors like you’d expect. (Making sure “ray traced reflections” are on.)
For you with your existing GPU you can use Lumen without ray tracing if you can adjust the settings for performance, or you can turn all that off and use the older lighting system with baked lighting.
Yep, Lumen is working for the most part. I can set the value of the colour to something like 50.0 and it glows onto neighbouring surfaces. It’s awesome!
