I second that 
Thanks man 
Yeah Sequencer is amazing, really loving it- I made a fly through of an updated version of that corridor scene below with it!
Thanks! Working on making a nice example scene with a bunch of stuff including grass shaders, a photogrammetry base shader and a typical lighting setup!
I made some final tweaks to my last scene, including a video! I’ve missed doing hard surface stuff- so much fun to play with the lighting and shaders
Quick video of the scene testing Sequencer and some sound design I’ve been working on: https://youtu.be/VIa74Lt2Yi0
thumbs up to that
Subbed! Please post a breakdown of one of the scenes or a screenshot of your postprocess settings, that looks amazing!
Sure thing Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the lighting views and also my lightmass /post process / point light settings (there was one point light outside for every two windows).
As you can see, especially since this is based on an older scene of mine- there are many errors in lighing, and poorly made models, but a lot of the time, a good result can still be had!
Regarding the “Environment Intensity” and “Diffuse Boost” tweaks to the lightmass settings, I believe that was just originally from putting large/small values into each of the parameters to see what changed- this happened to look ok, so I kept it (probably many things I do in all my scenes isn’t “correct” or “accurate”- I purely look for a good end result, and don’t really think of what I should and shouldn’t be doing! If a boosted indirect lighting amount of 50 looks better than any other version- do it!)
Hopefully this helps! All I can really say is a scene is defined mostly by composition. Lighting and shading also play a big role, but without the right composition to begin with, it is difficult to achieve anything decent! I’m very much still learning and will continue to try and improve, but that is one thing that sticks out to me.
Thanks so much! I am more interested in the realism because composition doesn’t really matter when the player moves around, but I’ll keep that in mind. It’s also helpful to know the pp settings, in my projects I just increase the contrast and desaturate everything to get a realistic image without much work:P The material work in your scene is great too, I don’t have Substance yet so I just stick to default materials and decals:)
Awesome work, again! Thanks for the breakdown, it’ll be really helpful in the future when I start doing some realistic scenes. I had a question though, at the beginning of the thread you mentioned, at least one of your scenes, was running 1440p @ 60fps. What kind of specs are you running on your computer and has this been consistent in all your scenes?
Wow! This is incredible. Look forward to seeing more of your work!
So amazing, really would like to see a more thorough example scene or tutorial on how you’re achieving these results. Incredible!
Awesome work. Thanks for posting.
Hi! Can I Ask you a question. Why are you use so many Num Indirect Light bounces? I think that 5 is more than enough. In any case difference between 4 & 20 or more, is not significant. But difference in light building time is big…
I would actually try and design so that most of the possible positions that the player can have will look good composition wise! In this case it is easy enough- just a corridor, so they can only walk up or down it! However for larger games, especially open world settings, this can be a much bigger challenge!
I’m currently running a GTX 980, an i7-5930K and 32 GB RAM! Yep these specs have been consistent, but for example, the indoor scene that I last posted runs easily at 80-90 FPS, whereas the grass scenes can go all the way down to 30 (depending on how dense I make the grass). The thing about realistic grass is, that if you want to emulate nature- you need a huge amount of blades- in reality grass is extremely dense, so most games tend to make the trade off of less blades for more performance, which usually doesn’t end up looking very real! I don’t think hardware really is at the point yet for games to run grass at the density required for realism, but certainly if you are creating your own archviz or realistic scenes, you can crank up the detail, as you can push performance much more!
No reason here other than my being greedy and thinking “more bounces = better” I’m sure the quality difference is very slight, but for me the build times are reasonable for most of my scenes, so I keep it at 100!
I decided to invest in a 4K monitor as I’m starting to ramp up production for my game (targeting 4K and VR). It also allows me to get much closer to a cinematic image, as many of the problems in game caused by lower resolution (like noisy aliasing on thin foliage) are made a lot better. Doing some quick tests on an older scene, it really makes a big difference in terms of clarity- no need for Temporal AA, so everything comes out looking super sharp!
I haven’t forgotten about the tutorial that I promised, I’m currently finalizing my photogrammetry/foliage pipeline and will be posting results along with a tutorial/free example scene here soon!
Thanks for all the info! The revisited scene looks awesome. The grass looks great! And I agree with the whole grass density thing. I work as a 3D animator for archviz, medical, industrial, etc and if we need to use grass we have to optimize everything else just so it looks appropriate. 3ds isn’t the best application for grass I don’t think but V-Ray certainly helps. I like how yours works and it would be a huge argument for using UE4 in some of our client renderings.
Also, I’m so stoked for the tutorial!! 
Thanks for keeping us in mind.
Is that with Early-Z pass on in the optimization panel?
I am also probably completely paranoid, but the first thing that comes to my mind when looking at that noise pattern and the slight warping in your video is that this was rendered in VUE, not in UE4. Can you post a UE4 Editor screenshot of this scene, sir, please?
I haven’t touched “Early-Z pass”- must check that out, haven’t looked into it before
And haha I’ll take that as a compliment! The gif is downsampled from 4K (3840 width to 800 width) and loses a lot of quality which causes the noise pattern, but here is a screenshot of the scene in editor nevertheless: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Haha, yes, the color grading and fine structure of the grass and the scene makes VUE kind of look old. It would be interesting to see how much fps can be reached with optimisations (early z, shadows ‘just good enough’, LOD-ing and grass density until the appearance breaks down). If it is 30fps right now, that’s a good sign that 60fps can be reached.
Is your game going to focus on Landscapes?
Honestly since I’ve just been trying to create nice stills for the most part, I haven’t at all been concerned about performance, but now that I’m starting work on my game, I might create a few optimised scenes to see if I can get a nice balance of quality and performance!
My game will actually mainly take place indoors, but I wanted to make sure that the setting felt real, especially for VR- so there will be a lot of outdoor detail (landscapes/foliage) surrounding the buildings, to add believability to the setting!
Is your game a type of horror game? I think using these techniques would be perfect for that! Your hallway scene is pretty creepy so VR creepy-photorealism would be amazing!
Yep it will be a horror game! Not a typical jumpscare/mindless game, but something a lot more cinematic with a huge emphasis on the visual quality! I make music for a living, so I’ll also be putting a big focus on music/audio coupled with the visuals to really sell the experience
Quick SpeedTree test Having fun trying to make dense forests! Unfortunately my project crashed beyond repair (a bug that sometimes happens to me when I place too much of a certain foliage actor and reopening the map causes a consistent crash) and I won’t be able to recover the file, but I thought I would post a WIP shot anyway
Looks amazing very realistic. Can’t wait for that tutorial. Thank you!