Is it possible to render Ocean with Path Tracing?

I’ve been exploring Path Tracing in UE5 and it’s pretty amazing. I have a scene with an Experimental Ocean and it doesn’t render, possibly because it’s dynamic and moving. Is there any way to freeze the Ocean so it will Path Trace?

Moving water should be no problem for the pathtracer, IF you use the supported materials and features for your water :slightly_smiling_face: But it sounds like, that you use a material, feature, that is not yet supported.

Scroll down to the supported features, to see, what is suported and what not (and this list will change with UE 5.1).

Yea, thanks for this and I’ve been using it as I explore. It doesn’t specifically mention “Ocean” or the new water system. It does say no support for “single layer water.” Maybe the new water system falls under that designation, I’m not sure.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had found a workaround or hack to get the water to render. Not much of my work has water in it anyway so it’s not much of an issue. I was just curious.

I spent an entire day on it and figured I’d see if any of the “real” UE experts out here had anything to say about it. Often I’ll learn that there is some switch with a seemingly unrelated or confusing title that if you enable or disable it, something completely unexpected will happen. I was hoping the new water system was like that.

It seems like, currently it´s not supported. I first thought, maybe it´s just made from procedural meshes (and they use a lot of splines in this video to form all the shapes, so that seems to be the case), which are not supported, and you could drop the water material on a regular mesh. but after loading the plugin, that Wave asset seems to be it´s very own thing, not just a regular material.

So i guess, you would have to build your Ocean water material for the Pathtracer from scratch :frowning:

Seems so Suthriel, thanks for the comments.

It is not currently supported, but good news: the newest unreal version does support full path-tracing of Single Layer Water and the ocean system, and it even supports the underwater PPvolume. 5.1 will bring a lot of good stuff I think.

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Ah, nice. I look forward to seeing the next update. UE5 is exciting to me as a visualization artist and I’m enjoying seeing it mature. It’s hard to sit and wait until it gets to its full potential.

The spline meshes, like roads on landscape, are not rendered with path tracing. Probably that’s the problem. Hopefully this limitation will be fixed in the upcoming versions.

According to the 5.2 roadmap, spline meshes are on the list, which will be very useful.

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now 5.2 realesed, not support this…

Do you know if it is already possible to path racer with the ocean of epic games? I can not find it