I just came across the slides from EUE2017.
https://www.facebook.com/cgarchitect…78559248912450
Let me first express my excitment.
FUCK YEAHHHH !!! Thank You so much. This is so fantastic.
Yeah, I saw that as well … very very exciting indeed !!!
Somehow half of my previous post didn’ t get through. How high is the chance that baking will be a feature ? from the slides it looks like it’ s not supported at the moment. What esactly is the use at the moment ? Is it just a preview in the editor or will it also be included in a compiled project ? Can you render out frames like in traditional offline rendering ?
I think it’s rather early to answer most of these questions yet 
However, can you tell me why you would want to be able to render animations out? It’s certainly doable, I’m just wondering.
For the moment V-Ray is only available in the Unreal Editor - it is not included in the compiled project. But if it was, what would you use it for?
Best regards,
Vlado
edit. this new forum sometimes just deletes most of my text after pressing post. So my beatifull wall of text is gone. I’ coming back to this later.
next try.
I know it’ s probabely to early for all of my questions I’ m sorry . I didn’t attend the presentation so I’ m just trying to understand how the final result will look in the future. There are several ways I can image a raytracer interacting with a Game Engine. For example Otoy’s Brigade claims! to bring realtime pathtracing for game engines. Traditionally raytracers are used for static light baking within an engine for a long time now. What will be the primaty purpose of Vray for Unreal ? It’ s not that clear just from the slides.
Regarding writing out frames. There is one point in the presentation that says. “Or generally just looking to use the realtime editor as a DCC. Complete replacement for 3dsmax or Maya workflows”. That made me think it might be able to render out frames like traditional offline rendering. Btw. Artur Leao wrote a tool to render out frames from Unity.
http://www.ycdivfx.com/product/offline-render-for-unity/ It might get interesting at some point.
Anyway I’ m really looking forward to it. We currently use Vray to pre-bake many objects where Lightmass fails. It fails pretty often btw. I mean for a game Engine Baking solution it’ s ok. But compared to a modern renderer it lacks so many features, optimisations and speed. The Distributed rendering is terrible just like the memory managment. Thinking of having Vray inside Unreal really gives me thrills
Will check it out, but can you tell me what browser you are using? Have you tried a different one?
Best regards,
Vlado
I figured it out. It’ s not the browser. It ’ s a char on a german keyboard that seem not to be supported by the forum. It’ s bad habit of me not to use the intended " ’ " char but another one that probabely only exists on a german keyboard. The key left to the backspace key.
http://www.kachold.de/images/tast\_d.gif
Everything after that is just deleted after hitting post reply.
lol @ “For whatever reasons, Unreal seemed the preferred choice”
Everyone chooses Unreal thinking it looks more realistic. But if you’re using Vray for the lighting/gi it isn’t really going to matter…
Happy to hear Vray is moving into real time engines. I think the lighting/gi in both packages is horrible at the moment.
Hah, good to know. Will see if there is something that we can do about it.
Best regards,
Vlado
Well, this page (The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda's Troubled Five-Year Development - Kotaku) offers the following opinion which most people seem to agree with:
While describing Frostbite, one top developer on Mass Effect: Andromeda used the analogy of an automobile. Epic’s Unreal Engine, that developer said, is like an SUV, capable of doing lots of things but unable to go at crazy high speeds. The Unity Engine would be a compact car: small, weak, and easy to fit anyplace you’d like. Frostbite, the developer said, is a sports car. Not even a sports car, a Formula 1. When it does something well, it does it extremely well. When it doesn’t do something, it really doesn’t do something.
Of course, things may have changed since then. But the fact still remains that the guys at Epic are a lot more proactive in this area (real-time engines for non-gaming applications).
(There is also an interesting part where is says that Autodesk advised game customers to switch from 3ds Max to Maya??)
Best regards,
Vlado
Well the quote is coming from a dev whose company owns Frostbite…
Interesting that Autodesk would recommend Maya over 3dsmax for game design. Wonder if it was because Maya had some tools that the devs were requesting from Autodesk, or Autodesk really is/was pushing folks off 3dsmax. The article isn’t very clear about it and doesn’t seem to know exactly what was going on.
That dev in particular didn’t seem to have a lot of love for Frostbite
Interesting that Autodesk would recommend Maya over 3dsmax for game design. Wonder if it was because Maya had some tools that the devs were requesting from Autodesk, or Autodesk really is/was pushing folks off 3dsmax. The article isn’t very clear about it and doesn’t seem to know exactly what was going on.Well, in the ideal world, game companies should be able to choose themselves what tools to use
Best regards,
Vlado
According to the numbers, I would say Unity is the top dog (by far), not Unreal.
For games, yes. However V-Ray for Unreal is not about games.
Best regards,
Vlado
This is the never ending feud, unreal vs unity!
I’ve been using Unity for arch viz previz since the first Oculus headset came out…
But I think people choose Unreal because they think the lighting/gi looks more realistic. I’ve been baking my lighting from Vray from the beginning so it never appealed to me. At least for me, Unity was easier to drop an FBX in and then drop into a Unity scene - and also easy to update/replace FBX files automatically. Maybe Unreal has improved - and if Vray is coming to Unreal first, I’ll have to switch over and check it out.
Any chance you can slip in a quick chat to Epic about how to do support like chaosgroup, because frankly unreals is awful. I’ve just started using it, and the most frustrating part is having to rely on ‘unreal answers’ which is just the worst way to go about it.
It’s really a rude way to answer, but I guess you get what you pay for Jokes aside though, I suppose Unreal has so many more users that it’s not practically possible to pay attention to everyone.
Best regards,
Vlado
Is there any way we can get in on testing this? We’re using Unreal every day now for viz and would love to integrate VRay.
Just talking about baking. It’s probabely a similar discussion like the “Corona magically makes better renderings than Vray” discussion. I don’t know Unity good enough to judge. About the Unreal baking i can say. You can get pretty good results. But the way to get there is simply a pain. I spend days of tweaking non exposed parameters in the ini files to get a decent GI quality. Attached is an image that shows, for a game engine, reasonable sharp indirect shadows. But light calculations in Unreal also do more than just baking a texture. For some reason it also bakes some sort of light direction normal map. Not yet sure what they are beeing used for. Also an light volume is created that is used to ambient light dynamic objects so they fit visually into a baked scene. This is pretty nice.
In my opinion Vray should aim to become a baking replacement for lightmass. It’s great and important to get a quick preview in the editor. But after that you want to have this quality in your final project as well. Going the Otoy Brigade way is probabely to early or just interesting for a very few companies who can provide the neccessary render power.
Why lightmass sucks. As I said you can get decent results but the way to get there is the problem. You can compare the engine itself a bit to Mental Ray or even Vray. It consists of two steps (secondary primary GI). A traditional photon mapping. And some sort of final gathering or irradiance mapping. Unlike lightcache the photon mapping is not very optimised. It doesn’t support skylight and the resolution is very low without tweaking the ini. It causes a lot of light bleeding but it’s pretty fast to calculate. On top of that comes the final gathering wich is not that bad but very very slow to calculate. Lightmaps are not accessible per object. At least not for a normal user. Several objects may be merged into one lightmap. So there is no way to bring in your own lightmap.You’ll need to bring them in by material. The calculation is the biggest problem. Distributed rendering exists but it calculates one lightmap per thread. So no matter how many threads you have, in the end you will always have a handfull of threads running forever while all the other machine are idle. You can’t calculate single objects or just parts of the scene. This makes Lightmass very unflexible. Memory mangement: You are limited to a certain lightmap size that may differ depending on the Memory but also on the size of lightmaps each thread grabs to render. I often had to hard restart my workstation. On a second attempt it worked. But in general this problem often prevents lightmap sizes your GPU could easily handle because the calculation process crashes your machine. Render times. the attached images are from a scene with three rooms. With my lightmass settings on all our machines it took roughly 24 hours. Vray would have done this in a fracture of time and better quality.
This is why I think Vray as baking engine for Unreal would not only attract archvis, automotive or product people. It’ s also very interesting for game companies. Why not rely on a render engine that is affordable, faster, more flexible an produces a better quality while it doesn’t affect ingame performance.
I didn’t mean to say I was using Unity to bake the lighting. I’ve been using Vray all this time for my light baking. I find Unity to be easier than Unreal to simply drop the 3d model and baked texture into a project and get it up and running quickly. And also iterate off the initial model quickly as well.
Honestly if Vray replaced Lightmass and/or whatever Unity uses - I’m not sure if I’d like it. I much prefer doing my baking in 3dsmax/Maya where I can use DR and network rendering and also preview each baked map as it renders to watch for any issues. I really don’t like how the game engines do it where you’re sitting there for a half hour or longer just to find issues and need to tweak again. But I welcome any advancements in baking lighting into geometry. I’ve always really really hated 360 rendering. I see companies trying to capitalize on it and it looks like a huge gimmick. There’s no sense of scale or presence in a 360 rendering.