Would love the Unreal Studio team to talk a bit about the future of an Unreal Studio workflow with the new Raytracing feature. Our quick-turnaround project deadlines are somewhat preventing us from adopting Unreal Studio, but raytracing seems like it might help a bit:
Will raytrace adoption in Unreal Studio help reduce bake times?
It seems like you have to go into each material and light on an individual basis and set whether or not raytracing is to be applied. Is that the case?
What happens when the machine that plays the .exe file isn’t equipped with an RTX card?
One of our primary interests with realtime/raytracing is the ability to produce renderings and animated frames instantly - no more renderfarm! While I understand that the more raytracing you incorporate the lower the FPS, but is there any negative affect to producing still and frames?
Will we see some tutorials or overview on Raytracing as it specifically relates to Unreal Studio/archviz work?
Does Epic not really have an opinion or position on this? Is my ignorance too great? Are my questions too stupid? Are the answers simply too obvious? Is the future just too bright and amazing and everyone but me understands things perfectly? lol.
*Will raytrace adoption in Unreal Studio help reduce bake times? *Not at the moment, since raytracing in the engine only deals with dynamic shadows and GI, reflections, and occlusion.
*It seems like you have to go into each material and light on an individual basis and set whether or not raytracing is to be applied. Is that the case? *No, you just enable/disable the specific raytracing features listed above(and a few extras)
*What happens when the machine that plays the .exe file isn’t equipped with an RTX card? *They don’t get the raytracing features and would likely fallback to something else.
*One of our primary interests with realtime/raytracing is the ability to produce renderings and animated frames instantly - no more renderfarm! While I understand that the more raytracing you incorporate the lower the FPS, but is there any negative affect to producing still and frames? *There’s no downside for the still frames, you can crank up everything until you’re at 1FPS just to grab a screenshot.
*Will we see some tutorials or overview on Raytracing as it specifically relates to Unreal Studio/archviz work? *I’m sure there will be tutorials on raytracing, but I doubt you’d see anything specifically for archviz. I don’t think there would ever be a need for anything specific, since the idea behind raytracing is that it “just works” - provided your materials and lights are set up correctly to get the desired/expected response.
I guess I’m a little confused as to why there wouldn’t be a reduction in bake times? Each light can be individually set to cast a raytraced shadow - which automatically means that it won’t be part of a bake. If I have 20 lights in a scene and half of them are set to raytracing and the other half are set to bake, how can my overall bake time not be reduced?
This great video talks about setting the lights at around the 3:40 mark:https://youtube.com/watch?v=EekCn4wed1E
Further, the document that Pierre-Felix posted says this:
Unwrapping, lightmap unpacking, and lightmap calculation become less and less necessary (depending on the
use case, typically exteriors), saving lots of time for design iterations.
The raytraced shadow is a dynamic shadow. If you have 20 lights and half of them are set to bake, then sure the bake time would be reduced but that has nothing to do with the shadow settings. That’s purely because the other half are dynamic, whether or not they cast raytraced shadows, cubemap shadows, or no shadows makes no difference to Lightmass at that point.
Eventually I think Epic plans on utilizing raytracing for Lightmaps, but at the moment the two are unrelated. The only way raytracing reduces unwrapping, lightmap unpacking, and lightmap calculations is that with raytracing, you can get better looking dynamic lighting. Unfortunately, the amount of lights in a scene contributes very little to lightmap baking times(when compared to lightmap resolution, size of level, bake quality, etc), and you can’t bake a single area, so regardless of where the dynamic lights are and how many you use, you still have to bake the entire level at the same quality.