Raytracing & Baking?

[bernhard]

I see a lot of tutorials people talking about Lightmass, and also baking their scene files.
I am confused when it comes to the new Raytracing feature inside the Unreal Engine.

When using RTX and DX12, why would I need to bake?
I am going to use Raytraycing for GI, Reflections, AO, and Refraction.

My workflow thoughts on this for Vray:
3dsmax & Vray --> import .vrscene into Unreal to have the advantage to have three options.

3dsmax & Vray offline Render
Unreal & Vray offline Render
Unreal & Realtime Raytracing Engine

and what I love about Vray.. I get similar results, shaders, etc.

But heck.. if I am going to raytrace everything.. why would I still need to consider Lightmass & Baking?
Heeeeeelpppppp... lol;

time for a beer!
cheers!

[jasonhuang1115]

the RTRT features introduced in 4.22 is a hybrid approach AFAIK where you can use the post-process volume to specify what is raytraced (ex. refl, gi, shadwos, etc) and what remains the traditional approach (like baked lighting with lightmass). If your hardware and scene and afford raytrace everything and be performant, then heck yeah raytrace everything . But most likely you would need a hybrid approach to be performant at the moment.

[bernhard]

Hmm.. so I am raytracing everything at the moment. And in terms of performance, I am not really concerned about real time performance and super high Frame Rates.
Why? Because I am more interested in rendering animations - and for this, I don't need to have the super high performance.

I would like to have a nice animation, with no noise and really nice and smooth reflections, gi, etc.

What you think about this?
Just go full steam all raytraced, right?

And in that case, I don't need to worry about Lightmass, Baking, etc.?

Or am I wrong?
need another beer... hehe..

cheers & till later,
Bernhard

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, Bernhard

What jasonhuang1115 said is true and you will need to bake your projects so that you can have a reasonable frame rate in the viewport and take the load of the computing and calculations from the GPU. You will require baking if you plan to make a standalone application, e.g. VR app for the client or an interactive walkthrough, you will have to be sure that your client can run your app without problem with his hardware. This means that you cannot rely on the fact that your client will have a powerful enough pc to run the real time raytracing. But if you only want to make still images and animation sequences from unreal you can do without the baking.

Best regards,
Alexander

[bernhard]

Yes, right. The last sentence was the key.

as for now.. my focus is to create stills and animations. But what’s confusing .. how the heck do you tell Unreal to not ask me for building the lights all the time?

or the geometry.. is there a way to turn off this stuff?

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, Bernhard

Try to set all the Unreal lights to Movable. For the V-Ray light you have to make sure that they do not have "Set for Light Bake" enabled.



Tell me if this solves it.

Best regards,
Alexander