Only just came across this thread of the UE forum. Wish I’d have known about it when I created my competition entry for Kitbash 3D’s short film contest back in April. I entered the challenge using a game engine (UE obviously) against offline rendered projects. So when sharing WIP, I wasn’t really getting technical help, just general compositional and cinematic feedback… which was still useful, but ended up having to solve a lot of technical issues of my own.
I really enjoyed making my film using UE’s cinematic toolset and am now working on a new one. I can see a bright future for the use of game engines in film making.
Just wanted to share this item with you guys to show UE is starting to make waves in the VFX industry!
Thanks! Yes I learnt a ton of stuff. Mostly I learned that you can render out an image sequence at whatever resolution you like playing at whatever frame-rate you specify. I had to compromise the visual quality and output resolution because I was recording in real-time. I only had a GTX1080 for this project!
Stupid I know.
nice job! I am also considering using UE for short animated films. The offline renderers I would normally use are Arnold, Renderman or Redshift. I understand that visual quality would be less with UE. However, if the animated short films are destined for YouTube, does it really matter? What is your experience with render times vs. offline renderers (assuming a similar quality)?
Glad someone found them useful! They were mostly for my students.
To answer your question, the beauty of using a game engine is that you can approach projects with a focus on quality or performance, or maybe a hybrid of both! I know you can have scenes that are more efficient in offline rendering too, but with a game engine you could build a project where you can jump in and explore. That’s what really appeals to me!
For example, when I created the project above, I didn’t know you could render to an image sequence. Therefore, what you are seeing is my computer running the project in real-time AND screen recording at the same time! Hence the poor visual quality and low resolution. I only had a GTX1080 at my disposal then.
My new project, which I’m uploading to YouTube Friday, is a hybrid project in that for the video, I will render out a still image sequence. However, if I reduce the settings I’ll still get about 80% quality but at 60FPS at 1920* 1080 on a RTX2080.
By comparison, whilst Industrious was rendered in real-time, my new project is being rendered at 5K and edited down to 4K (to inject some additional sharpness). It is about 2 mins long and takes 45 mins to render. That said, an offline renderer would take probably longer. Oh, and both projects are totally dynamically lit with each having only a skylight and directional light.
I think that even with a hybrid approach, you’ll be surprised what you can get the engine to do. See below some stills from the forthcoming project:
Limit? Really? 5k should be enough for any project. I’m sure you can specify whatever resolution you like? I tried 8k once and it appeared to work fine, although I ran out of room on my SSD!
Ray tracing in UE is definitely not production ready yet.