I am currently working in a property company that uses Path Tracing in Unreal Engine to render architectural projects. Although we often encounter challenges with using Unreal Engine for property rendering, we consistently achieve excellent results compared to other companies in our region.
One of our biggest hurdles is the time required for rendering with Path Tracing. After a lot of trial and error, we found that traditional render engines like Octane or Redshift might sometimes be more efficient and faster than Unreal Engine for certain tasks.
We would like to continue using Unreal Engine as our primary tool, particularly because we plan to transition into virtual production in the future. We have considered integrating Octane within Unreal Engine but have limited time for extensive experimentation. Currently, we estimate that we have about a 50% understanding of Path Tracing in Unreal Engine, and we often struggle with optimization beyond using LODs and Nanite, as we need to maintain the highest possible quality in every output.
It would be amazing if anyone could provide any insights or recommend specific settings that might help us speed up Path Tracing without sacrificing sample rate and overall quality? We find that a significant portion of our time is spent troubleshooting Unreal Engine rather than advancing our projects, so any tips on optimization would be greatly appreciated.
Hi im also rendering using unreal engine making resorts and lodges and mainly use pathtracer…heres what i do to get high quality renders …when you bring in your assets datasmith or fbx…enable nanite support on mesh…preserve area …fallback target set to relative error…fallback relative error set to 0…apply on all mesh except for mesh that has glass on…make sire all materials have 4k textures…use uds for sky…enable pathtrace support on uds…your foilage assers in background will be blurry mess when hight fog is behind it…reference atmosphere…use cloud decals or fog decals as clouds…and dissable hight fog for pathtracer in uds …use a plane with a fog material make is same colour as atmosphere to fix blurry foilage…use better water material that supports pathtracer…for castics use projector lamp that points down on water and use castics materials that moves…for oceans use waterline pro…you can pause ocean for good quality oceans…if you want supper fast renders use high res screenshot…set your pathtraced samples in camera to 1024…then input console command…high res scrreenshotdelay 1024…then you can get better screenshots using high res screenshot set to 2x…set screen persentage to 120 …sometimes higher but it will crash …when using movie render q…set screen percentage to 200…flush grass screening…set warm up frames to 256 min i usaully jave it at 1000…make.resolution 4k…it takes my pc average 10 to 20 min per pic to render…get rtx 4090…get more ram …use 2 x sticks instead of 4 so your ram runs at max speed…use ssd…i have so many console commands i use…for different scenes…allow landscape grass for raytacing…increase streaming pool size to your gpu vram size…hope these tips help you…i couldnt find any help.for magority of my problems but learned myself through 4 years of struggling…now i can get perfect pathtraced renders everytime with minimul crashes…
This single paragraph is packed with so much information—I can tell you’ve put in a lot of hard work and effort. Thanks to you, I’ve learned a few new tricks!
for MRQ use game overide I set mine to cinematic…High Res options I dont use never needed anything above 4k to be honest…denoise I never use For MRQ and highres screenshots.
I use both usaully 64 spatial and 32 temporal that gives 2048 samples plenty good for my needs and good render time aswell…When I do highres screenshots I changed setting in my camera go to pathtracer options and make samples per pixel 1024…Then enter r.highresscreenshotdelay and make it 1024…Then when you finished pathtracing your render in viewport go to the take highres screenshot tab and set muliplier to 2 or 3 then capture…my screenpercentage is 200 or 150 and the monitor I use is 1080p so output of the highresscreenshot is 4k and looks pretty good still…
If you have dark shadows and random black anomalies…then input r.raytracing.shadows.enabletwoside geometry make it 1…and if that dont work try r.raytracing.normalbias and make it 5 or 10
Thank you for the feedback and info! I will test it again.
It’s so strange to me, no matter what settings I go with, if I dont use denoise my renders are useless with the amount of noise in the image. I ended up moving over to Blender & Vray to do my client rendering because of the massive difference in pure crispness I can achieve there
send me your ue scene and i will look at what you are missing and give you a brief of all the settings to make it as good as possible…what is your hardware specs
Hey man, sorry for the super late reply. I finally got some time to do more testing. I went through your first post and tested the high res screenshot…it works, but yeah not the look and quality I was going for.
Then tested the MRQ settings, and oh my soul something worked! I think the 64x32 samples really did the thing, even rendering without denoise enabled, I get a image that is a lot crisper and very low noise - I always thought for path tracing you have to max out the Spatial samples and only use 1 Temporal sample…hence why the noise was always a problem and always had to use denoise, which gave a blurry image
my test settings were : 4K resolution, 64 Spatial count + 32 Temporal. 32 bounces, max exposure slightly higher than the scene exposure, reference atmosphere checked and denoise disabled
Raising the screen percentage is too much for my 12gb vram, so I keep it at 100% so i am testing with slightly higher Spatial counts
But I think the 32 Temporal did the trick to reduce noise even for the still images
Oh and I don’t know if this could have had an impact, but in my plugin settings, I had Open Image denoise AND NNE denoise enabled by default. I only left Open image denoise on, but at the end I didn’t even have denoise enabled in my renders because it came out without any bad noise by using more temporal samples
The information about Path Tracing samples out there is shocking to say the least, no clear indication on the documents, the general info I could gather was max out spatial and leave temporal on 1
You were the first person to recommend these settings and it really works, so thank you
Im glad the information helped you…its frustrating that their isnt real good information out their…
what works for one might not work for another, as pc specs ect ect and everyones scenes are different…cesium google earth was crashing my mrq for still render settings…client wanted very high res…so thats why i use highres screenshot…it saved me…when its done just upscale image to higher res…and you should get good results…Cant upload full res pic on here but attached image should give you a good idea of the quality including upscalling…
