Unreal lightmaps done with Vray?

[3LP]

Hi guys,
We are working more and more with Unreal and it really sucks compared to Vray for all the GI phase.

Is there any ways to not calculate the lightmaps with Unreal but do them with Vray?
Would that means I need to bake the VrayTotalLight passe?
Does anyone know how to re-incorporate those lightmaps from vray into unreal?

Thanks
Stan

[vlado]

Technically it should be possible; either the total lighting pass or the GI pass should work (depending on whether you want to include direct lighting or not). However we need to do a bit of research to figure out the exact workflow.

I thought unreal had a pretty good GI baker though, what's wrong with it?

Best regards,
Vlado

[AlexP]

Im very interested in figuring this out.
So far, I have just been trying to render to texture, but seems to be pretty useless for complex scenes. Most likely doing something wrong.

[3LP]

Technically it should be possible; either the total lighting pass or the GI pass should work (depending on whether you want to include direct lighting or not). However we need to do a bit of research to figure out the exact workflow.

I thought unreal had a pretty good GI baker though, what's wrong with it?

Best regards,
Vlado

Well it does have a pretty good GI baker, but it's hell if you want to manage more than a teapot and two planes.

1) Basically you can't distribute ANY calculation (period). So you're stuck on one computer for the whole light calculation. When you have a 50+ node renderfarm, it sounds like going back to stone age...
2) It's not possible at all, to calculate lightmaps for anything other than the WHOLE scene at once. You move two forks on a table, boum, 15h of lightmap to re-calculate.

Both combined, and you quickly get why in production, we are all relying on Vray, it's not only because it produce good results, it's also because it's versatile, fast, manageable, scalable and productive!

I'd really appreciate if you guys could have a look into this because we are on our way to get more and more jobs in VR and we really want to keep VRay in the pipe as long as possible.

Stan

[AlexP]

You can actually distribute the calculation using Swarm.
I set this up on our renderfarm, think it was pretty straightforward but cant quite remember.....

[bardo]

*deleted*
I didn't read well your request

[3LP]

Ok Swarm is one solution already, but it doesn't let you bake selected objects isn't it? It's still the whole level at once.
Beside that, I like to manage those things in max and Vray, and have unreal just as a player, so it would still be really useful to have a way to integrate VRay with Unreal.

Stan

[AlexP]

Ok Swarm is one solution already, but it doesn't let you bake selected objects isn't it? It's still the whole level at once.
Beside that, I like to manage those things in max and Vray, and have unreal just as a player, so it would still be really useful to have a way to integrate VRay with Unreal.

Stan

Indeed, but it does at least make the lightmass *slightly* less painful
Would much prefer to just do everything in Vray and then export to UE or whatever. Nevermind the lightmass, its a complete pain having to relight everything.

[3LP]

Yes, my ideal workflow would be to make everything in max/vray and export that to unreal avec have unreal "only" compute the real-time reflection/refraction of top of the backed diffuse/GI/direct/light to use unreal as a "visualizer".
I guess it's possible, just need to figure out how, and maybe have a hand of epic on that one, but would they like to go down that path?

Anyways, any info from chaosgroup on that matter would be highly appreciated!
Stan

[bardo]

I haven't used Unreal Engine yet but I'm using Unity and I supposed it's possible to do in the same way.

What I'm thinking is:
- bake total lighting with render to texture
- don't use lights in your Unreal Scene. Disable all GI calculations and any lights informations in Unreal
- use diffuse/albedo as you wnat and use your total lighting as emission channel.

Do you think it's possible?

[Deflaminis]

What about highlights then, though?

[3LP]

I think the best is still keeping direct light from unreal, but bake the GI from Vray, basically just replace the lightmaps from Unreal to vray.
Trying to avoid lights at all in unreal will lead to too much issues and workflow changes, doesn't make much sense to go to unreal anyways in that case.

What you describe is how I do thing in Unity, but there is a massive quality break when dealing with that workflow

Stan

[WilleViz]

Once somebody figures a solid workflow out on how to convert a visual high quality scene with shaders, maps, light and GI all done into an interactive scene engine, they will have a game changing killer app.

If Chaos Group could somehow find a way to handle and export a Vray scene into the Unreal Engine with baked light maps and properly converted shaders, it would be insane. It would open up a whole new world of interactive visualization, but it is a massive project. But also an extremely interesting project, that I would love to be a part of somehow.

[werticus]

vray 4.0 :P

[Oleg_Budeanu]

I always wondered why nobody tried bruteforce rendering baking and blending result with unreal direct lighting, matching lights position and etc. Of course if you will move object you will need to re-bake almost everything , but for archviz i think it should work. if you go interactive than yeah - UE lightmaps only.
Also quite interesting to see unreal implementation of GrantWarwick shaders , though that is quite different topic to discuss imo