So I wanted to ask you guys about UE4’s ray tracing model.
As far as I know and the ray-tracing documents that I read about UE is that UE doesn’t actually do real time ray-traced rendering, but it’s a hybrid renderer. UE’s ray tracing rendering renders the scene with the tradition rasterized rendering ( vertex + pixel shader ) then uses ray-tracing to enhance the scene’s lighting and shadowing effects. Is this accurate?
Yes, in fact you can set actors to be omitted from ray tracing.
Most engines today use ray tracing just to specific feature effects as they are engine based around vertices, you would need to build engine form ground up to make it full ray tracing, not to mention it would be too demanding for today GPUs.