I’m working on a scene in UE5.3 with ray tracing support enabled. I’m using an RTX 3060 12 GB GPU. When I add a post-process volume to the scene and set the Global illumination and reflection methods to default (Lumen), everything looks good. But when they are changed to the standalone raytraced method, the scene goes quite weird except for the parts where the lights directly hit (I only added a few point lights besides the primary light sources like directional and skylights).
The screenshot of the scene with different GI and reflection methods, and the screenshot of the project settings are below. The default RHI is set to DirectX12 as well. Please help me fix this. Thanks!
Standalone raytraced reflections/gi are both deprecated and shouldn’t be used.
To answer more specifically, standalone reflections can’t reflect any GI or skylight shadowing except lightmaps, and Lumen reflections can only reflect lightmaps and lumen GI. Neither can reflect standalone raytraced GI, so reflections will never match the scene.
Most likely I suspect what is happening here is that because neither reflection method can reflect a shadowed skylight, it’s just leaking skylighting into the interior.
Thanks for your comment. So what else should I do in order to use ray tracing for my projects, besides just ticking the ray tracing checkbox while creating a new project?
Lumen has its own hardware raytracing methods, which you’ve already enabled (“Use Hardware Raytracing if available”) but in addition to that usually you will want to set “Ray Lighting Mode” to “Hit Lighting for Reflections”
Translucency type in your post process should be set to Raster, not Raytracing. This is confusing, I know, but Raster is what Lumen uses.
They will greatly improve the quality of indirect lighting in reflections (with the tradeoff that Lumen will be slower to adjust to dynamic lighting changes.)
Those are the settings you should be using to utilize hardware raytracing. Optionally, you can also use raytraced shadows, though I would not recommend it in 5.3 as it has self-shadowing artifacts with Nanite. This is mostly fixed in 5.5 with Megalights.
Thank you so much for all the info you shared. I tried using the raytraced shadows after watching a video by William Faucher and yeah I’ve noticed the self-shadowing artifacts with Nanite.
