My findings with Raytracing for Cinematics and Animation

Development Rendering
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Posted a Short Cinematic with raytraced lighting: "DUTY" - Short Cinematic - UE4 Raytracing - Released Projects - Unreal Engine Forums

Here are my findings and some hacky solutions:

  • Raytracing on a GTX1080 is slow but usable for Cinematics. :slight_smile: Only encountered some crashes on exiting the editor.
  • Render with screen percentage 200. This helps with AA and denoising artefacts.
  • World Position Offset is currently not supported with raytracing (coming in the future). This was a major problem with all the moving trees. Solution: Turned off WPO on trees where it’s very distracting or render with shadow maps for single Assets in a secondary pass. For background stuff in the distance it’s mostly fine though.
  • Foliage is currently not supported with raytracing (coming 4.23). Solution: Turned on Contact Shadows. They work with raytraced lights too and are giving some screen space shadows on smaller foliage like grass.
  • Tesselation with Displacement is not supported with raytracing. Never expected it, this would be a major slowdown. Solution: Contact Shadows with small length are helping here too. This was working better than expected.
  • But even with all the small kinks, Raytracing is a godsend for something like this! No more baking and Shadow Map problems. :cool: I love it.

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nice tips! thanks!

3

Beautiful work and excellent post.
Thank you and appreciated!

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Didn’t know foliage is currently not supported. Thanks for the info.

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Glad I could help.

Thanks, man!

Yeah, and the Landscape Actor is also not supported in 4.22 with raytracing. But both will be in 4.23 wich should be out in a couple of weeks.