How can I enable RayTracing?
are you talking about the new nvidia tech? if so its not out yet
When will it be released?
Very curious with that.
it’s only for volta cards, and they don’t come out till next month i think.
It’ll be released around the end of the year. In version 4.22.
This is actually the reason I came on the forum today. What kind of preparation do you think artists should take for RTX technology when it’s released in Unreal?
For example, should objects be higher poly counts so they have more of a precise surface to generate shadows and reflections or will we be able to reliably use current objects upon release?
We will have to wait and see. With “perfect” reflections, yeah there’s an assumption that with very glossy materials, any distortion or low poly look will be extra noticable. Reflections might use lower LOD versions of models, or that might be unnecessary optimization. There’s still a lot of embargoes and such little access to the hardware, it’s very hard to speculate.
I’m curious what’s going to make a bigger impact, RTXAO or RTXReflections. And how expensive they are going to be separately and together. Also really excited about possible RTX lightmass, and that AI AA.
That’s a very good point, I’m just excited for the real time reflections within a scene. Opens up such massive possibilities for the future.
i just really want something to replace lightmass… i can careless about raytracing for my game right now. I want realtime lightmap generating 
Maybe a little on the pessimistic side for now, but personally if any new tech in an engine doesn’t have current wide range uses for gaming platforms i tend to ignore the PR almost entirely until it becomes standard and runs on all hardware and consoles.
It is not like we haven’t seen raytracing run on GPUs before, we’ve had it for years now in offline renderers, shove enough power in it and eventually you’ll get something close to real time (even in VRAY) similar to what it is now, it is inevitable. So I don’t get the excitement when a footage was shown with Darth vader in a raytraced scene that could only run on a GPU renderfarm.
Just the other day I saw supposedly in game trailer of Battlefield 5 using raytrace, that sends all the wrong kinds of misinformation to the unsuspecting buyer when the game itself doesn’t even look half as good or polished compared to the original non raytraced one. Maybe they are trying to cover up their flop of a campaign recently.
Also the difference between non ray traced trailer and raytraced one are almost indistinguishable, another reminder why tech should be used where it really makes a difference visually. I still have UE4 suffering whenever i use the good old planar reflections with more than 3 characters and a few trees in the scene.
I suspect tomorrow the headlines are going to read VR in raytracing when not even your average VR headset or technology is ready yet.
I’m taking everything with a grain of salt these days from all this tech talk, they seem to be jumping too far too fast.
Will use it when it is good, proven and ready.
You know, if you look at some of @EoinOBroin work here: Striving for Photorealism in UE4 - Work in Progress - Unreal Engine Forums, it almost appears that games can already achieve photorealism. I don’t know how his scene’s perform however, or what kind of hardware you would need to support them. From what I can tell he only uses skylights and directional lights to light the scenes, nothing out of the ordinary. How much of an improvement is ray tracing actually going to make compared to what Unreal can already achieve? It makes me think that real time Ray Tracing isn’t as exciting as it’s made out to be.
Now granted, he uses assets from Megascans, which, your lighting can only be as good as your materials, so I’m sure that’s part of it.
Well from an artist perspective:
SSAO looks terrible and DFAO is only useful for large scale occlusion. So good ambient occulusion would be a really big deal.
Same with reflections. SSR looks terrible, planar reflections are expensive.
While by no means undermining the work of the artist.
Such images are always deceptive, not only from the performance standpoint and the scans used but by how the light would interact with other elements OTHER than just vegetation in an open outdoor areas in a real game or even a cut scene, such as characters in the scene, fur, hair, self shadowing on those vs the environment, reflections in water, indoor scenes, animations and interactivity with surrounding elements.
We went through this in some of our projects and i can tell you how “simple and easy” it is to achieve a “photoreal” result with bunch of scans thrown in and a few typical lights, just watch a 30 mins youtube tutorial these days and you get a similar result. But as soon as you start putting it all together to be functional and make it work as a complete image from an artistic perspective (not even mentioning performance) you start seeing how its not going to work so easily.
Especially when characters are thrown in, complex characters with hair skin cloth sims and moving parts.
As for Raytracing it would be a dream come true from an artistic perspective for me, as my team and I got tired of playing around with all these endless problems in UE when it comes to self reflections, shadows and lighting. It’s so much needless work to get every shot right in a cut scene let alone a game to look on par with personal quality expectations and a certain standard compared to what we are used to in offline renderers.
But as much as I would love to have raytracing running today in realtime and everywhere, I know as i mentioned above that this is just an early PR stunt and not a realistic expectation anytime soon. Best thing not to get excited over this and to make do with what we have as tools for now.