Path Tracing for Archviz

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

I haven’t seen much discussion about Path Tracing on the forums so I am very interested to get to know your experiences with it. I know Epic says that it is just for reference but the results are already quite impressive. So far, I’ve used it only for indoor scenes. Below I wrote down some of my first impressions

pros:

  • gives much better results than Ray Tracing without too much setup

  • much better light details especially for small objects

  • mirrors are working properly

  • in normal Ray Tracing mirrors are not showing GI - do you have any solutions for this?

cons:

  • High-Resolution Screenshot with multiplier not working - the workaround for this is to launch in standalone, increase resolution and make a normal screenshot.

  • However, this is quite unstable on RTX 2070 Super with 2K resolution. On a small indoor scene, it crashes the engine and I think this is due to video memory getting full. Did anyone have similar problems? Normal Ray Tracing seems to work fine with higher resolutions

  • translucent materials don’t work

  • no denoiser - I have tried the external program, Topaz Denoiser and it gives good results. Would be great to have something built-in

  • IES light profiles not working

2

Hey. While Epic might improve the pathtracer further - (its already had some nice updates), its main purpose is establishing ground truth reference for realtime lighting.

If you want to do path traced archviz animations i can recommend you to have a look at Octane Render instead. Ive used it for many years and its a great render engine.
Its faster, much better quality and support more features than the standard PT in ue4. And works similar to the built in PT with their plugin. For UE4 use there’s a free tier available so its a very good option!

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3

Hey, thanks for your answer. I am doing automated visualizations in Unreal and I need to be able to batch render lots of them during runtime. As far as I know, it is still not possible with Octane. That’s why I started testing the built-in Path Tracer. The results look better than Ray Tracing but it started crashing the engine too often