Ray Tracing is beyond broken in 4.23

[Rawalanche]

@Juan_Canada

Hi Rawalanche,

We are sorry to hear about the issues you are experiencing. Ray tracing is still tagged as an “Early Access” technology, while we are happy with what we have done so far, this is just the beginning and we are working hard to make it better every day.

I have already filed some of the things you report here:

• When ray tracing effects are disabled (r.RayTracing.ForceAllRayTracingEffects is set to 0), there is still some ray tracing work done. In fact it has been like that from the beginning but now that in 4.23 we support heavier geometry types such landscapes or HISM this is more evident. This will be improved in the near future, hopefully in the first 4.23 hotfix

• “It is not obvious for many that in order for Ray Traced skylight to works, the environment sphere captured by SkyLight capture needs to have Ray Tracing disabled”
  We are aware of this issue and are thinking on strategies for improve it. We have set the “visible in ray tracing” flag to false for the default sky primitives included with the engine but nothing prevents users from use other sky spheres. We are discussing the best way to go here and will hopefully come up with a better solution than the current one soon.

• We will also deeply look into the issues you report with reflections. I have double checked there are no changes in Preview 8 that should affect this but anyway we will review what we are doing and eventually will improve and fix whatever issues we find, trying to get the best performance vs quality balance.

Best,

Juan

Since you have the path tracer implementation, it should not be hard to test and verify if ray tracing components are providing correct results. I am very surprised so many weird quirks have gotten through under supervision of someone who has already done one commercial offline renderer, especially one where accuracy was the main priority

BTW, I am confused when you said “Default sky primitives”. I had no idea the engine had any. I did not find a single sphere in the engine content that had normals properly flipped inside.