You were not reading my post carefully. I was saying we’ve come close to offline renderer quality by combining ray traced reflections with GPU lightmass. The lighting was mostly prebaked by GPU lightmass, so the diffuse indirect illumination was quite accurate. Previously, that would still leave you with inaccurate specular indirect illumination, since neither reflection captures nor SSR would do the trick, but GPU lightmass combined with RT reflections really looked quite close to offline render quality.
We did not fully raytrace the scene. It was not like Vray or Corona or something, but just using the reflection component of the Ray Tracing itself already proved to be useful for a practical project, even at the current, experimental stage. That was my point
I was also only talking about Ray Tracing specifically, which is the topic of this thread. Yes, UE4 has a large amount of issues which generally make it questionable for use non-gaming industries, many of which I’ve broken my teeth on, but introduction of Ray Tracing and continuous development of it is actually a direction of removing at least some of those issues. All in all, it’s a good thing.
And I am the OP by the way. By the label of the thread itself you can clearly tell I am also a bit critical of the current state of Ray Tracing in UE4, but I’m not abandoning the hope. Epic is not Autodesk after all
