It was interesting reading about your mention of 4.24 and Ray Tracing being a Beta feature, because it made me reflect on how I myself started a discussion off asking if the 4.23 preview was really just going to be aimed at Chaos…Because in doing so, I was just accepting that RayTracing is just a Beta thing.
But, when I then look at how RayTracing has thus far been promoted, I am seeing is that it is not at all being promoted as some Beta feature that is just in testing. In fact, Epic is showcasing Raytracing in promotions and webinars as part of its strategic partnerships with other companies like NVidia, film and game developers, architectual visualization companies, and it is even used in part in showcasing of its online learning courses. You can imagine a lot of outside companies are probably devoting capital in buying hardware (ie RTX cards), as well as Unreal Marketplace assets, expecting that Unreal’s Raytracing is going to develop forward.
Which brings us to this Preview. Now, it’s one thing for us to not see any development moving forward, or very minimal, but what we are seeing is a degradation of functionality since 4.22. Leo Rakes posted a list of his ‘thus-far’ finds 7/24 post:
“Until the latest 4.23 Preview 3, RTGI was damaged, RT translucency was completely disabled, SSGI could not be combined with RT effect, LPV could not be combined with RT effect, which led to the only available GI effect under RT Shadow was RTGI, but its performance was so bad. Many parts of ray tracing look terrible, even worse than 4.22.3.”
Just know I understand the dynamic, I know from my own experience there always tends to be an organizational disconnect between marketing/front-line/customer-service and back-office/operations/IT. It is one of the joys of a big actively developing company. There are points when customers have unrealistic expectations, and there are points when you can pat operations on the back for doing an awesome job. But then there are times when developers need to know that they can’t be timid in setting goals to meet a demand or deadline. Because like it or not, Epic has set its foot into the Raytracing world and is promoting it as an active part of its engine. Raytracing development has to be a priority. I’ve seen it said that it is not a priority right now, but this indeed conflicts with what is being promoted in the public sphere.
And issues getting fixed is 4.24 is wonderful, but 4.23 comes out first - it can’t be released having a degraded Raytracing product. You will have people setting up projects in 4.23, then finding out it doesn’t work as good as 4.22, and then they can’t migrate their assets and have to rebuild scenes back in 4.22…a mess…
Also, with regards to the whole opaque shadow thing, like I said, this seems to be a usual phenomenon in render engines. I have seen the Octane Render developers in the past handle these type issues. As it so happens I am trialing the Octane Render plugin for Unreal now, and low and behold, look at what happened in a scene as it was converted to Octane (look at lashes and eyes, even hair!)-
(see image “Octane _01”)
Now, I know what will happen when I ask the developer about it, he will say it has to be fixed so that the alpha map displays properly for the translucent materials, and he will fix that and the shadows. Which brings me to this point - if your developers could instantly fix, they would, right?..
So let me offer this - I can tell the Octane developer that Unreal’s development is having difficulty with the translucent materials and shadows, and that it could be to both of your benefits to work together to come to a solution, as it would improve both the products, which would in turn be great for any users of wither product. I know with these things there would be restrictions and limits to release of proprietary details, but an exchange of general knowledge could speed this up for everyone involved. What do you think, would you want me to ask?
THX!
-Daffrendo