I came across some information about their next release expected in 2019 called Renderman XPU, which will utilize simultaneous GPU and CPU rendering, and I started exploring all of their advanced rendering capabilities. That lead me to explore all of the other current rendering systems on the market as well and this got me thinking:
Does UE4 have any planned integration for utilizing or adding external rendering software’s like Renderman, or Arnold, etc? I use the sequencer a lot for making cinematic shorts and cut-scenes and I don’t know if I’m missing something, but is it already possible to use another render system in Unreal and if not could we ever see this type of support added in the near future? I think it would really make the rendering and cinematic capabilities of this engine go off the charts, the amount of realism using a final render system like Arnold or Renderman seems like it would be insane. Anyone got any insight in this?
Those renderers, and other offline renders used for CG/film, look so good largely in part because they use path/ray-tracing whether biased or unbiased. Otherwise, there are a lot of similarities with shading models between the tools. Ray-tracing will come soon enough for real-time, but in limited forms and limited complexity.
As far as I know, Chaos has provided an illusory version of Vray. Although he hasn’t used RTX yet, NVIDIA’s AI noise reduction has been integrated into the interior. As far as I know, Chaos’s plan will soon incorporate the DXR part to achieve ray tracing rendering in the phantom viewport, while EPIC is adding RTX support for the phantom engine, which is expected to be implemented in 4.22. As for Arnold or Renderman, I’m not very clear about their plans, but Chaos’s Vray ForUnreal may be one of the things you want?
Thank you for that information! I wasn’t familiar with it before so that is very helpful and thank you to everyone else on this forum that commented as well, I really appreciate it. I hope that we can see some off-line render systems added both for RTX and normal graphics cards because I think that would add an incredible dynamic for photorealism and rendering as a whole.