Thank you. That all makes sense.
Taking these words, and using it for production & the purpose I outlined in my previous post.
That means, when using 100% Raytracing –> I don’t need to Bake anything?
Yes/No ?
No baking.
thanks @ for your complete answer
nowadays we have game engines like unigine that they can bake everything without lightmaps (unwrap opjects)
if we have 2 method for light baking in games
1= 2d lightmap (need unwrap opjects)
2= Voxel Probe Lights (doesn’t need unwrap)
so** why we cant have both of them in ue4 ? (lightmass+voxel probe)**
archviz objects have too much polygons and they are high quality , its hard to unwrap them. with voxel probe we can import objects directly from autocad or revit and bake them in ue4
the quality of Voxel Probe Lights is really good as you see in this screenshot
i hope some day we can bake scene in ue4 without lightmaps or unwrapping objects
https://forums.unrealengine.com/filedata/fetch?id=1507878
If your goal is not to have realtime performant rendering and you dont care if you spent a few minutes per frame then I don’t see the reason why you will need to use a game engine for the task when offline renderers already have gotten fast enough to render a decent HD Frame for archviz from a few miinutes to 10+. Both GPU and CPU are going real fast these days. with incredible in built denoisers helping things out if needed.
You also have to keep in mind the setup time, the setup time to import arrange and make scenes “compatible” to work with a game engine even if you are not creating a game or looking for performant scenes and then spend further time on managing proper materials and lights (which are still limited compared to offline renderes) all this is time consumed per project.
I would rather work limitlessly in a 3d application and send a frame to an offline renderer and wait a few minutes longer than spend extra time and worry about crashes and setup times in UE.
A recent project of ours almost suffered the same fate when we attempted to render in UE, in the end we found it too risky and time consuming, the project took a day longer for rendering but worked as expected and in a well predicable fashion + we got extra passes for compositing for free, something still extremely limited in game engines.
In short if you don’t want want the scene to run in realtime or near realtime as in (5 -10 seconds per frame rendering) then no reason to go in engine.
@Farshid Unigine licensing costs was always too big for the most of the people and their improvement rate at bringing new tech into the engine is quite low. One would want lower costs and a more user based spread engine, which constantly improves the engine since their release 1, and in this case is Unreal Engine 4.
As I mentioned at some thread post and will repeat here, if I was working into arch-viz, I would have all my assets also tweaked for game workflow, because I would be able to sell them in the marketplace making them another source of income. Just a thought.
There’s a huge benefit though if you can make something in the game engine and use something like raytracing where it can get very close to the quality of something like Vray but takes less than a second to render vs. 10 minute renders. Epic made the Datasmith tool that can help to convert complete scenes over to UE4 and after that with the real-time lighting you can adjust things very quickly rather than waiting minutes for a render test.
**@: **
Thank you so much. No baking at all. This is FREAKING AWESOME!
Now… that being said. Last two questions to this topic, just to clarify.
#rebuild
If I don’t need to bake. How can I let the Unreal Engine know, to NOT show me all the time the message, that I need to rebuild things?
Rebuilding Geometry, rebuilding lighting? Why is the engine giving you all the time this message, if I fully raytrace everything?
And is it possible, to turn this message off?
Generally speaking. If you are using 100% Raytracing, you don’t need the Button “BUILD” anymore, is that correct?
#unwrapping:
if I fully raytrace, does the engine still require to unwrap the geometry?
I am still not clear about it: Yes/No ?
@WilliamK:
I hear you . However, I just have a different perspective of view when it comes to this topic. If I am going to work in 3dsmax and Vray, I am going to try to setup the file as good as I can. Also meaning, I will take the time to unwrap certain parts, or at least I have to add some UVW Mapping on top of it. I will also take the efforts to create nice shaders, and yes… I also do the proper lighting. Otherwise your final work will just not look good.
Regardless if you are going to use Unreal or not. You are going to do this anyways, right?
Now… in terms of animation and using a render farm with the offline render. This is where it gets really interesting with Unreal. First of all. Offline Renders just take longer to produce nice shots. Much longer. Using Brute Force, rendering Motion Blur, DOF, and all the nice shaders. It just takes time… right? We all know that.
Besides the time factor. You might also run into issues. Flickering issues, noise issues, etc. Yes, you can denoise … but you still have to run all the frames through the denoiser. It’s also time. And on top of it, after rendering thousands of frames on a very expensive renderfarm (small shops can’t even afford) you’ll start comping thousand of frames. Most likely in 32bit, that requires additional software, additional network power and time.
Where I see the huge benefit in the Unreal Engine is the Animation process. Not to mention, the client want’s to add a shot. Or imagine, Animation Changes, Cameras, or what ever.
Instead of re-rendering, re-comping, and going through this entire process… I just knock out a new shot inside of Unreal. My rendertime is a fraction (doesn’t even exist anymore). Plus I do all the comping and camera adjustments in real-time.
As you can see. That is huge. But yes, you need to put the extra efforts into setting up the Unreal project. But heck. For me, this is crystal clear the way you want to move forward. I am for sure not going back what started 10-15 years ago.
Plus… as technology gets better, Hardware and Software. Im pretty sure in 3-5 years the classic way of rendering (offline) and the compositing will become obsolete. And Chaosgroup, and all other Raytracing Companies need to be able to compete with the Unreal Engine. Otherwise all clients will jump over to Unreal and they can shut down their business.
Why would I wait minutes of a Frame to be rendered (doesn’t matter if CPU or GPU) in an offline render engine, if I can do it in realtime with Unreal?
Yes… lot’s of things might not be there yet. Quality, Refraction, Fur, Liquids, VFX, etc. But I bet in a couple of years, it will beat all offline render engines.
On top of that. You could go interactive. You could use it for VR if you optimize, of for a game engine. You can send it to clients, they can have a walk through, and you can integrate ENTERTAINING presentations. Or deliver clients and entertaining realtime experience, that helps selling the product you have been visualizing.
All those factors speak for it to do realtime raytracing with Unreal & Nvidia.
1 - Don’t use Static or Stationary lights, or disable Static Lighting in the Project Settings - this is the better choice since you save the overhead of static lighting, otherwise every material still compiles with the permutations and samplers required for 2D/Volumetric Lightmaps and your GBuffer will have unused/wasted channels.
2 - This was answered above, but you will still need to unwrap your models for texturing. A separate UV for Lightmaps is not needed, however.
@BernhardRieder as @rosegoldslugs kindly pointed out, you will need to get rid of every place where static or stationary lights are enabled in the first place. The course in Unreal Academy for Arch Viz does a good job explaining where these settings are, thou it is still using UE4.19, those settings still prevail for UE4.20 and up, since not everyone will be able to use Ray Tracing hardware. Once you get rid of those settings you will end only with dynamic (movable lights) lighting and this is already enough.
Unwrap geometry for texturing is needed, otherwise no 3D tool will understand how to layout a texture on a complex geometry. Not every geometry uses a plain material, but mostly in fact uses multiple materials. That was the reason I mentioned that tool (within the video) which does automatic UV Unwrapping. Now, the second type of Unwrap which is for lightmaps, is not necessary for Raytracing in UE4,
Thank you so much, both of you for all your help so far. This is great, appreciate it!
1. I turned off Static Lighting
2. Movable Lights
Sooo… that is done. Is there anything else I would need to consider?
:rolleyes::)
The raytracing is very interesting. I was running also a test, but for some reason I can’t resolve noise and flickering when raytracing glossy reflections.
You need to go FULL HD on YouTube to see the flickering & noise issues.
Here is my latest test:
[
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@settings:
I am already using the max settings for the raytracer. 64 samples per pixel. And for the lights, I was using 128.
Post Process Volume
Pixel Samples: 64
Pixel Samples Light: 128
Can anyone tell me how I can render animations without noise & flicker issues?
Especially when dealing with glossy reflections?
Thanks a lot!
I tried turning off static lightning. However I noticed that even with raytracing the reflections stay black. When I turned it on again, the reflections were working.
Especially noticable with metal materials.
A TLDR for those who just want it short and simple, Raytracing and bakes do similar jobs but do it separately, Raytracing is done dynamically by well, raytracing (duh), Baked lights are quite literally just a texture, Thats it. Its just a texture that you can specify the size of that stores lighting information baked in the editor which if i remember right is raytraced information. You dont bake raytracing, thats not how it works, you bake baked lighting only, its in the name.
yeah cool… so just to clarify: when ever you are going to ray trace, you always want to have all your lights set to moveable?
Well, here’s the thing though, raytracing can be used to bake lighting as well, it’s just a matter of whether it is stored to lightmaps or if it’s updated every frame. In the future, there will be an update to UE4 that takes advantage of raytracing cards to speed up light baking.
I was running some other tests with the latest 4.23 Preview, and I am running into the following issues.
- Glass seems to “suck up” or block all GI Bounces
- Interior Rendering: black spots & material issues
Here is my documentation & explanation plus Audio:
and here is another problem I am having all the time, and I can’t resolve flickering on tiny/fine lines.
example on the lamp below:
I simple don’t know how to resolve that flicker problem…
any ideas?
and more light flickering…
please… does someone know how to fix this?
it’s killing me… 
Have you adjusted the reflection samples?