Benefits of VRay for Unreal

[NorthVisualStudio]

Hi

I'm thinking of getting into Unreal more and have tried VRay for Unreal but I'm struggling to understand the benefit of this plugin.

Does it create better lighting or does it speed up the workflow from 3ds max to unreal? There is also the texture & light baking, is this quicker with VRay?

Thanks and apologies for the novice questions.
N

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, Niall

Does it create better lighting or does it speed up the workflow from 3ds max to unreal?

With V-Ray for Unreal you get the following benefits:

1. Import:
   1. Import your scenes from a DCC that have other versions of V-Ray (eg Max, Maya, Sketchup, Revit, Rhino, etc) using a vrscene.
   2. Import vrmeshes(proxies) in Unreal and use their memory optimization benefits when rendering with V-Ray.
   3. Automatically converts your materials and lights into real-time equivalents for UE workflows.
2. Inside Unreal
   1. Rendering
      1. Render Unreal scenes with physically accurate, ray-traced lighting and materials.
      2. Render sequences from the Unreal Sequence Editor to create V-Ray-quality, ray-traced animated cinematics.
      3. Supports a wide range of render elements for better control in compositing.
      4. Compatible with Unreal's native foliage system for rendering large environments and landscapes. Currently supports static foliage.
   2. Baking
      1. Bake your ray-traced lighting with V-Ray to lightmaps for the highest quality illumination.
      2. Export and then load lightmaps giving the possibility to:
         1. Resume lightbaking.
         2. Re-bake single objects instead of the whole scene.
         3. Modify lightmaps in image editing software (eg Nuke, Photoshop) for artistic reasons.
      3. VFB shows you progress of your bake giving you visual feedback on how the lightbake is going.
   3. Utilize all your hardware — with support for CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs and Distributed rendering for both rendering and lightmaps baking.

A note here - for a lightbake without problems, however, the scene needs preparation in the terms of setting proper UVs for each object. This is essential as lightmaps are unique for each object. You can check our quick start tutorial about scene preparation here:Preparing a project for Lightbaking

There is also the texture & light baking, is this quicker with VRay?

In most cases yes and that is because V-Ray utilizes all your hardware unlike Lightmass(Unreal's lightbaking engine) which uses only CPU.

You can also check this tread here about 3D work flow

Best regards,
Alexander

[Nicinus]

Aleksander, I understand Datasmith is more advanced in handling overlapping UVs and UVs in the wrong channel. Is this something you guys are working on?

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi Nicinus,

Datasmith generates new UVs for lightmaps on export from the DCC (Max, Sketchup, Revit). Currently we are not in development of an unwrapping solution but that may change in the future.

Best regards,
Alexander

[Nicinus]

Can you elaborate a little on the reasons for this? Is it considered better to do unwrap yourself in Max or why is it lower priority? This to me seems to be the main reason to use Datasmith over Vray for Unreal.

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi Nicinus,

The typical game engine workflow for light baking requires good UV unwrap for optimal texture space usage.There is no automated algorithm to generate such result and the manual approach is required in the industry. Datasmith in most cases generate UVs for light baking but there are also cases where they are suboptimal and will not produce good lightbake. You could use Datasmith to generate the lightmaps and for import and then use V-Ray for the light bake. Have you tried the max script for auto unwrap that is posted here in the forums?- Batch Auto Unwrapper.

Best regards,
Alexander

[Nicinus]

Thanks Aleksander, I have not. Will take a look at the script. I'm doing this for architecture so models are typically simple and I am trying to automate as much as possible.