I’ve searched for a few variations of “Packaged vs Editor Rendering Quality” and found a few posts with spot questions about emissive lighting or shadow quality, but I’m wondering if there’s a documented definitive guide to “why does my editor viewport look different than my in-game packaged build?”
The editor rendering at lower-quality by default makes total sense given the editor’s purpose (quick iteration with uncooked assets), but we’re trying to do some offline renders (where we don’t care about hitting real-time FPS targets), and if we can avoid having to cook a packaged build, but instead just hit a button in the editor to launch a PIE game-mode to record a video, that would save us a lot of time on packaging.
However, we need the highest quality settings for these renders, so I’m hoping there might be a post/tutorial/forum-post that says: “oh yeah, make sure you set these editor settings, these .ini files, and these CVARs to boost your editor quality.”
FWIW, we run the editor headless (no window) when we render these offline videos, in case it makes a difference.
Alternatively, if it’s not possible to get 100% parity, because even after we set all the editor scalability settings to max and highest quality, there’s still some finnicky temporal-AA tweak or ambient occlusion detail that’s #ifndef EDITOR that no matter how hard we try, an editor build simply doesn’t have access to it…
Then we’d like to know that, because if the difference is big enough we may forego on our attempt to just use editor only, and continue packaging for offline renders.
Thanks,
Jaap Suter