I’m not a fan of V-ray they look good but all the same, Carona looks great to me. Looking forward to seeing your results then some tutorials! 
By the way Blender and Cycles you can preview your scene before rendering. I thought V-ray/Max had preview like Modo and Blender/Cycles now?
Vray has an activeshade mode and corona an interactive mode but it’s not as nice as working real-time. With offline rendering the preview is always noisy and slow even with decent specs. With Unreal, what you see is what you get right from the moment you drop something in the scene.
- things like DoF, Fog, etc. are even tougher to render really quickly. I think the best interactive render I’ve used was Octane Render actually.
Yeah but you have to build lighting in Unreal don’t you? I don’t understand because once I have built lighting and drop say a chair into the room I have to rebuild the lighting to see it correctly.
Yes but you don’t always need the highest settings to get a good idea of what the scene is going to look like. Post process, VFX and materials change does not require a re-bake. Once your geometry is set in stone your good to go!
Here’s an example of a quick exterior render i’m working on for fun (the Chai Ballande). The goal is to do it fast. From 3d modelling to rendering in a couple of hours. it’s w.i.p and I have a 12 000 pixel wide version of this screenshot on my pc. It’s only a skylight + ultra dynamic sky, fog, DoF, orange LEDS. Tonight I’ll add the 2d forest background, water plane with SSR. The building is pretty much 1 face for each wall, without thickness. Kept it basic basic basic. It takes 10-15 mins to bake the lighting in this scene! Of course it’s not a very complex project.
That looks really cool!
What is SSR? All these acronyms confuse me. LOL
Screenspace reflections. There are 2 ways to have reflections in Unreal. Reflection capture probes and SSR. They can complement each other. But SSR on translucent surfaces is a recent addition.
I took the water plane demo’s translucent material and enabled 2 new features here :
It’s more expensive but looks very good. In that particular scene (chai ballande) I don’t really need reflection capture probes because most mats are rough and it’s very foggy. SSR is enough!
Oh, thanks. I’ve been busy doing stills lately in Blender, no time to learn more in Unreal at the moment.
Nice! 
Is that new ssr on translucent feature already available outside of the master branch? cheers! FG
Yes it’s in the launcher version. 4.9+ (since 4.8 I think)
Fantastic work .
I’m the engineer at Epic that made the Lightmass solver, among other things. I can answer any technical questions you guys have about lightmass settings, BaseLightmass.ini, photon mapping, etc. I’m not an artist though and I didn’t work on the Unreal Paris demo.
Sorry for the sparse documentation, hopefully it’s something we can improve in the future.
Short summary on BaseLightmass.ini: these are all values for various internal algorithms that Lightmass uses. We tried to make it possible to get the best quality with just UI settings, specifically IndirectLightingQuality, IndirectLightingSmoothness and disabling lightmap compression. We never intended for artists to set these directly hence the documentation is in SceneExport.h in the Lightmass source code. However, we’re not going to stop you from setting them if you want, so BaseLightmass.ini remains.
I would love to know what you have to modify BaseLightmass.ini for, so we can incorporate those changes into UI settings. Basically, help us identify what could be improved. When I investigate lightmass quality for a level in depth (as I have done in Realistic Rendering, SunTemple, Berlin Flat and others) I just stick to the Lightmass WorldSettings and have not found the need to change anything else.
Right now I’m aware that quality in area shadows is limited on Production and I intend to increase the number of rays used in penumbras when you increase IndirectLightingQuality. (NumPenumbraShadowRays in BaseLightmass.ini)
Also I’ve noticed that many of the best UE4 ArchVis scenes use an IndirectLightingScale of .1 or so. This is not something we anticipated at all, that setting is meant to be used for speeding up lighting builds in huge levels by using a value of 4 or so. So there are probably a number of bugs that become exposed when using a scale of .1, and I would like to investigate.
Cool finally the real dirt on the .ini.
My experience is that I only used the interface no .ini tweaks. I feel everything is there that I need to adjust but I do find it, like Modo, a tweakers dream or nightmare. So, the test scene I did that I felt pretty good about had artifacts where a mullion joined a wall, the wall surface was blotchy like it wasn’t getting enough samples (Modo term). I also find that getting good contact shadows is difficult but I increased my lightmap rez to 2048 and it was acceptable. My only complaint is that after learning Modo and Cycles/Blender I don’t know where to go in UE4 to clean up things such as the mentioned blotchiness.
Hi .
For me the hardest part now is getting good contact shadows without having blotches all over. The only way to get them is by lowering the indirect lighting smoothness but when you do that blotches appear all over where the lighting doesn’t reach as much. Unfortunately I do not understand how the settings lightmass.ini work, but I think it would be a great step further if we could remove the trade between smoothness and " at the cost of indirect shadows losing details". Some other features would help greatly help our workflow ( not sure if it’s possible):
More volumes like lightmass importance - there is the option where we can increase the volume lighting samples, what if we could place more volumes in different areas where we would want the lightmass to have better quality ( do more calculations for a better result) and other areas where the normal settings are enough. Would it be possible to have a lightmass settings different per each volume ? Just like post process volume?
If there is no way to get rid of the trade between contact shadows and smoothness how about having the possibility to find an actor’s lightmap, be able to export it for manually edit and be able to import it back after the final production built? Shouldn’t this be possible?
Thank you very much for the kind words. I am more then happy to see the developer himself taking interest in meager matters, hoping for the things to change for good now. Have created a separate thread for resolving the issues concerning lightmass.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?88952-Lets-make-Lightmass-EPIC-%28and-understandable%29&p=405671#post405671
Nice scene you have here !
From a documentation standpoint, would more technical information about each setting be useful, or would you guys rather see scene breakdowns and practical examples? They are not mutually exclusive but each person has their own image of what documentation means to them, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how we could best lower the barrier to achieving the fidelity you all want to see.
One other thing that would be nice to talk about is your expectations about workflow. and I were just chatting yesterday and there are definitely certain workflows that have built in inherent quality upsides, for instance directional lights have some inherent fidelity improvements that say lighting a scene from only an HDRI sky doesn’t necessarily have, simply due to the performance requirements of realtime rendering, however these are all things we can talk about both documenting better and improving in the solver or via learning resources.
Anyone with really high fidelity sample scenes who wants to share them with us for these purposes, we’re always happy to collaborate with people trying to push the fidelity bar in this space. So far we have people lighting their scenes with bounce cards, directional lights, HDRI skies, the lightmass environment color setting, changing project settings, editing baselightmass.ini, static bakes, stationary vs. static lights, any combination therein of different techniques, and each has their upside and potential downside.
Nice scene you have here !
From a documentation standpoint, would more technical information about each setting be useful, or would you guys rather see scene breakdowns and practical examples? They are not mutually exclusive but each person has their own image of what documentation means to them, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how we could best lower the barrier to achieving the fidelity you all want to see.
One other thing that would be nice to talk about is your expectations about workflow. and I were just chatting yesterday and there are definitely certain workflows that have built in inherent quality upsides, for instance directional lights have some inherent fidelity improvements that say lighting a scene from only an HDRI sky doesn’t necessarily have, simply due to the performance requirements of realtime rendering, however these are all things we can talk about both documenting better and improving in the solver or via learning resources.
Anyone with really high fidelity sample scenes who wants to share them with us for these purposes, we’re always happy to collaborate with people trying to push the fidelity bar in this space. So far we have people lighting their scenes with bounce cards, directional lights, HDRI skies, the lightmass environment color setting, changing project settings, editing baselightmass.ini, static bakes, stationary vs. static lights, any combination therein of different techniques, and each has their upside and potential downside.
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I can’t speak for others but when I light a scene in Modo or Blender/cycles I use an HDRI only if I can get away with it (with sun if needed), if additional lighting is needed emissive geometry is the first thing because of the speed in rendering and lastly area lights - I’m talking about environment lighting both interiors and exteriors. Then for interior scenes lights from lamps, downlights etc. are IES. This technique is fast for render times and provides good results. I would like to be able to translate these techniques over to Unreal.
The default Lightmass settings error on the side of reasonable build times, but relying on a fair amount of smoothing to hide noise. As you said, this destroys indirect shadows. We intend archvis users who want maximum quality to lower IndirectLightingSmoothness (.6 to .8) while simultaneously jacking up the quality with IndirectLightingQuality (4-10). This will increase build times a lot, but you get your indirect shadows back. Also make sure you disable lightmap compression and have sufficient resolution + good unwrap (generic requirements for anything lightmap quality related).
Unfortunately it’s quite difficult to implement variable quality in this way. There would be seams at the edges of the volumes. In general, we try to make algorithms that automatically detect where more work is needed instead of making it a manual process. Some examples of this are photon mapping (which tracks where photons successfully bounced and emits more there, instead of requiring you to setup ‘portals’), irradiance caching, and importance sampled final gathering.
Different lightmass settings per volume is also difficult to implement, you’d have to know where you were in the world before querying settings. The direction we want to go in is algorithms that ‘just work’, rather than overcoming flaws by giving you manual control.
The problem with supporting exporting is that the lightmaps are in a special format which can’t be directly modified. It stores directional color, as well as other attributes like sky shadowing. These are required to implement various features like directional lightmapping + stationary skylights (where you can swap the cubemap at runtime).
This is the C++ class to demonstrate. Primary lighting is in a spherical harmonic which has negative floats - you can’t edit that in a meaningful way.
class FGatheredLightSample
{
public:
/** World space incident lighting. */
FSHVectorRGB2 SHVector;
/** Incident lighting including dot(N, L) where N is the smoothed vertex normal. */
FLinearColor IncidentLighting;
/** Correction factor to force SH as applied to a flat normal map to be 1 to get purely directional data. */
float SHCorrection;
/** Sky bent normal, points toward the most unoccluded direction, and the length is the visibility amount (0 = occluded, 1 = visible). */
FVector SkyOcclusion;
float AOMaterialMask;
Thanks for the questions guys. Gonna move over to the thread created.
Nice scene you have here !
From a documentation standpoint, would more technical information about each setting be useful, or would you guys rather see scene breakdowns and practical examples? They are not mutually exclusive but each person has their own image of what documentation means to them, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how we could best lower the barrier to achieving the fidelity you all want to see.
One other thing that would be nice to talk about is your expectations about workflow. and I were just chatting yesterday and there are definitely certain workflows that have built in inherent quality upsides, for instance directional lights have some inherent fidelity improvements that say lighting a scene from only an HDRI sky doesn’t necessarily have, simply due to the performance requirements of realtime rendering, however these are all things we can talk about both documenting better and improving in the solver or via learning resources.
Anyone with really high fidelity sample scenes who wants to share them with us for these purposes, we’re always happy to collaborate with people trying to push the fidelity bar in this space. So far we have people lighting their scenes with bounce cards, directional lights, HDRI skies, the lightmass environment color setting, changing project settings, editing baselightmass.ini, static bakes, stationary vs. static lights, any combination therein of different techniques, and each has their upside and potential downside.
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@Wyeth - Scene Breakdowns with practical examples would be perfect with some technical information here and there to back them up (It’s my personal liking, want everybody to share there thoughts). Didn’t get fully what is meant by high fidelity scene, but I will be more then happy to share one of portfolio scenes for these purposes, if the scene qualify.
Wow yours looks better than the real thing!
Where can I download this?