As you can see below the knife does not belong inside the Unreal Realtime Rendering Preview scene. However I used scene because it has amazing realistic that when importing meshes with their own texture groups, look decent and how they mostly should look if you used a program like Marmoset or 3DO to preview your PBR textures beforehand. What I am wondering is the technical differences from scene, to say a scene that I create from the first person build template project that UE lets you choose? I truly want to have my scene resemble something like in the picture below, not with the assets, but with the quality of the scene in terms of lighting and shadows, with depth and display. So the main question is, what makes scene different from my newly created scene of the first person template? Is it possible to get type of quality from the Global Illumination in 4.3? Or will I have to go with light maps all the way for most of my scene?
Please note that the knife above (minus the blade which is still in a WIP) is how it’s supposed to look. When imported into the first person template, it is very glossy and wet looking.
That scene is using lightmaps, so don’t worry about that. The stuff that you like about it is the assets, the sun settings are probably a bit different from the templates, but besides that the assets will be reflected onto the object, so having all the different objects and light/shadow will make for interesting reflections. The standard templates are a bunch of gray which isn’t very interesting. It’s like in a 3D program when you try to render metal but the reflections look bad because you don’t actually have anything to reflect.
So if I create all my assets for an environment and then piece them together, and tweak my sun light, I will have a good looking ambiance like in the pic?
You could use an ambient cubemap in your post-process volume. is similar to using an HDRI for image based lighting in a 3D renderer. You just pipe in an HDR image, and anything in the volume is lit and reflects from the HDR.
Using an ambient cube map would just make reflections more emphasized right? Do you think it would replicate the effect that the realistic real time scene has?
I took all of the physical assets out of the scene, so the only asset left is the knife. However the shading looks exactly the same as before, even with everything else deleted. So what exactly is causing to look so nice?
The Reflection Captures are what makes it look nice and shiny, while the post process will modify the rendered knife (and scene’s) tone, bloom, lens flares and much more. To find out which is making the most difference, try pressing the small eye icon beside the various items in the “Scene Outliner” to turn on and off each effect to see which is doing the most to improve the look. Also, the lights themselves will most likely be enhancing the post process , so removing all of the other meshes from the scene will not have as much an effect as removing lights would. After changing values, rebuild the lighting to see the full effect of your changes to get a better idea what does what.
Yeah I deleted everything else except the directional light and it seems that makes a good bit of change. Thank you so much for information, it seems that everything does something that adds just a little more flavor to the scene, so I guess I’ll have to use all of them in order for my scene to look just as good.
Hmm idk, it still looks more wet than the other, and all I have in the previous picture is the directional light. In new picture, all I have is a directional light in my own project scene, and it looks way more wet and glossy than in the Realistic Render scene.
Update: Got the same color palette to be achieved to a similar version of the realistic rendering scene. However the large gloss wet look is still there, and I am wondering what is different?
Update2: Figured out with the help of some others, SRGB NEEDS TO BE TICKED OFF. Still a little more wet than I’d like, but I got everything to look rightish!
