I used to exclusively use Cycles and Octane in Blender until I made the move to UE in 2020. I do a lot of large animation projects for heavy industrial clients with HUGE meshes and found that being able to use datasmith within Unreal was a massive advantage vs my previous pipeline. I still do use Octane / path tracer for certain client images (static shots mostly), but i would say that 8.5/10 they are more than happy with Lumen + a bit of Davinci post prod work. I have come to absolutely love Unreal, it is awesome to have the versatility to choose multiple rendering methods on the fly to see which one really suits your specific project. It's also really hard to beat a 4200 frame 1080p animation coming out of the pipeline in less than an hour! And its free! Keep up the good work!
Totally agree…speed is key and the quality you get with Lumen is more than enough for 90% of my projects. And when it’s not we have alternatives, incredible tools we have access to these days.
Hi, what do you advice me for my rendering ? my problem is that I am on a Mac M1 and when i'm rendering, the images are blurred . How can I slow down the process to increase the quality ?
as an avid Octane user (with Cinema 4D) who's literally starting with Unreal Engine, it's great to have this kind of input and comparison, huge thanks for the amazing content, keep it up!
Just a tip on wigglies in the back of your octane render. When you see 4x4 squares of missing information (they'll always be a dark square) that's caused by the min adaptive samples being set too low. Essentially those squares were black when adaptive sampling engaged and we're immediately turned off.
Oh absolutely. However its a toss up between that and increased render time. Its all down to what youre happy to accept in your work. I dont mind a little noise sometimes as long as I know how to fix it.
This video is good. I no longer struggle with lumen rendering or path tracing rendering. Because I'm the one who works in the conceptual design phase. So, I think I should go for lumen. Thanks for making this video, it saves me experimenting time.😁
Hello there! Thanks for commenting! Your texture repetition tutorial is legendary. Fyi, I did try this but it didnt fix it unfortunately. I have found some cvars that make it a bit better...but no complete fix yet.
Hey Joshua. OTOY now released Octane 2022.1 for Unreal Engine in version 0.62 and it now comes with OctaneLightmass, a first version of the octane lightmapper for Unreal (experimental). This GPU path tracer is free for a single GPU but the plugin can use multi-card setups. Using Lightmass to bake those textures with Octane you could get the Octane look in a real-time engine and combine it with Lumen etc. Would be very interested in your take!
I did see this get launched and yes, very interesting for sure! I have a content plan as long as Andre the Giant's arms but I'll certainly pop that on the list of stuff to try out.
Hi. I had this trouble quite a bit in lumen and it went away when i used ONLY area lights. Point lights cause the problem and went away when i converted them.
I’m trying to add octane to my UE5 pipeline, because I’m interested in all the AOV options it gives. I’ve tried it with simple scenes and it worked, but now I’m trying with a more complex scene like the Matrix city, and after loading my scene and UE5 working perfectly, I click on"load octane", then it takes like 30 minutes preparing textures, and then it crashes. I think that it crashes when it tries to load the materials. I tried several times already, never been able to view anything in the renderer yet. Not sure if the matrix city is too complex for octane.
Yes, this is because Octane doesn't utilise things like nanite and virtual textures. Matrix City Sample would be too geometry and texture heavy to render.
Thanks for making this vid... confused what the issue is with Octane motion blur? Also, another pro for octane is multi-GPU support vs UE (single-GPU support only at this time)
The motion blur problem is that with the unreal plugin Octane doesn't calculate the motion vectors. There is an Octane 'integrated mode' that uses unreals viewport motion blur...but it really does look like garbage haha. Good point about multi GPU although I believe that's a paid for option
great comparison, I really like using both Lumen and Octane for stills and video, I think it's great that unreal offers a diverse render pipeline, reminds me of blender but better
in the new version, the path tracer supports new things like decals , volumetrics and nanite, and also if you crank up the sample to have to wait the same time as octane wouldn't you get a better result with the path tracer? in my opinion, it would be great if in the upcoming versions you can choose which portion of the scene should be path traced and which portion be lumen.
That would be a good feature. I liek the path tracer in Unreal a lot more now than when I published this video and have been using it a lot more recently. It still has a few things it can't handle (hidden shadow is one of them) but it's only a matter of time. Octane still has a lovely texture and overall result so I would have to do another test to see how they compare now.
I've used Ue5 when it first came out and loved the speed compared to Arnold and marmoset slows down my scene when using big disp maps. Is it safe to try Ue5 for final still shots of my creatures and characters now? I don't mind waiting an hour for the output. I just need accurate lighting and good looking images for my portfolio.
@@TimV777 nothing can go wrong with still images by the way you can freely use ai denoiser to get silky noise free images in seconds but it has an issue with animation
What is the best way to get green screen footage into unreal engine? I am hitting roadblock, I think you posted a video on this a while ago but I was wondering if you have discovered any newer methods
@@JoshuaMKerr so when I create a new plane and use a media player within unreal 5 I overlay both the original video and alpha channel video to achieve a clean key. The problem is that this method is prone to crashing and generally not being very stable. this is the only way that I am aware of, to get my video into unreal engine. I have a valve index system and I’m kicking around the idea of getting a vive tracker 3.0 and doing a live green screen composite.
You certainly could do that. Maybe try an exr sequence first so you have a single video track with embedded alpha. You can also go into project settings and increase the amound of GB to allocate to playing media. look for the IMG Media tab. Also...under the preferences in your media track in sequencer there is the option to specify pre roll and post roll frames. This is worth fiddling with.
"8 hours is very long time for 9 seconds", dude when I got into 3D I was rendering 1 frame of PAL for 12 hours! That is really fast render time for 270 frames of FHD size.
If you mess with the console commands you can get some cleaner results with Lumen, there's a unique command called ReferenceMode that brings it closer to the pathtracer, at the cost of much more noise
As being a beginner the fast render times of unreal are really godsent. getting tired of optimizing every part of my scene just to shave off a couple of seconds. Understand that scene optimization is key... but all that fiddling with setting takes away from creation.
Thank you for the comparision. I don´t think the scene you tested it on does it justice though. We´ve used Unreal extensively with only Lumen (when necessary) on a documentary and it more than exceeded our expectations. While there were SOME artefacts (shadows mostly), I´d much rather troubleshoot these on a 20 minute render vs an 8 hour render and if need be render in layers/fix stuff in comp... We have only tested it on a narrow scope of projects yet, so my opinion might change still...:)
Cant say Im a big fan of Lumen but glad its working for you. The scene didnt take 8 hours with lumen though, that was octane. Some of these things can certainly be fixed in post or in layersm Davinci has excellent features for flicker and noise for instance. But sometimes thats extra time spent on what should be working already. Bear in mind I am focussing largely on doing as much in engine as possible and rendering beauty passes for editing and grading (maybe not even that)
@Joshua M Kerr Oh yeah, I got that octane took 8 hours. I think th scene itself looks rather gamey and I've seen and produced Lumem scenes that looked way more realistic. I also still think pathtracing or offline rendering GI and reflections look better, but in most cases I'd rather spend more time on improving the scene through lighting and shading and composition rather than better GI... I also had those fireflies with pathtracing and I know some of them came from using the hdri wrong. Really depends on what client you work with, if uts someone who notices every flickering pixel, you might be out of luck sometimes with Lumen. Just saying that I both had completely fine 4k renders AND most of the times it's not noticeable enough if I DO get issues...
I'm only using Unreal for my own films so I guess Im the one who gets fussy over flickering pixels haha. Youre absolutely right that the scene doesnt look very realistic, it was part of a 1hr challenge (thats my excuse). But the realism of the scene isnt what I made the video for, its to see what results you can get from a set of render options and the difference it makes. Id love to see some of your work by the way. Anything online?
@@JoshuaMKerr Oh, no offense, I thought it was some marketplace scene...:) I only have one test online on my channel, but I got some stuff on TV, if you can access german public Television, just look for "TerraX Unsere Kontinente"...
Interesting comparison video, thank you for the analysis. However I feel that lumen's potential isn't quite brought to "light" here... is there any chance or way you could probably send this project to me or make it even public? I'd love to try myself on it, since I am trying to get the most out of lumen since it was first released in the Early Access version or Unreal 5. I'd love to see your opinion on my potential results with Lumen within this scene. Hope to hearing from you, thanks in advance!
At least we can still use octane if we choose to but since 5.1 Unreal's Pathtracer has improved so much. I can see it over taking in the not too distant future. I'd love to see it with adaptive sampling.
I don't do any kind of rendering, but I was curious what the results would be if you did a time-normalized comparison. If Octane is going to take 8 hours, what is the quality off results the other two can give if they were set up to run for 8 hours. I'm not sure if there would be other constraints that would prevent this, just curious
Certainly an interesting thought. Although in practice it would be tricky to set up the render to make sure it took that amount of time. My guess is that beyond a certain point it would be a case of deminishing returns.
This is one of the advantages of Unreal... today, many of us who work freelance with our own equipment, making an 8-hour shot for a client is terrifying, no matter how good quality it is, today everyone bets on the fast, the immediate with a good quality and in that Lumen and Pathtracer are superior to octane, vray, arnold, redshift and etc etc... one of the strongest points of unreal is undoubtedly the speed of realtime.
@@JoshuaMKerr You can connect with blender, unreal, 3dsmax, maya... Vehicle Dynamics, particles, Blast Destruction, Force Fields, fluid dinamics, nanoVBD... Switch between render engines with one click; Ray tracing - Path tracing - Iray. No displacement yet and It´s in beta several things. It´s not mature as UE but very promising... for me it´s more easy than unreal and It´s free.
As for denoising, I'd love to SOMEHOW get Intel's OpenImageDenoise running on GPU and Unreal. I love the result of it in Blender, but it running on the CPU can slow down renders. Also, what do you think about the Lumen/PT changes with 5.1.x? Were some of your issues fixed or at least reduced? Because I think Lumen tends to look great (then again, I don't make films), if you don't have high contrast highlights like in your test scene
Hi Chris, yes I did give it a go. It's a good tool and had a few limitations at the time I used it (not sure about now)...plus it's not free to use after the initial trial.
Interesting that you use Octane for green screen and DoF work. I'm new to UE5 but see a future in trying to use it with green screen work. Would love to know what the downfalls of Lumen are in this area and if there are any ways to improve it! Thanks!
I suppose its really just a personal preference bit I don't find lumen convincing. It does depend on the subject though. it deals with some things better than others. I did use it on my last short film becuase it was faster to render.
Bro I recommend you to use another scene. Because scene that you are using is like game scene and doesn't make sense of reality. It is better use interior scene for comparing render engines. Btw it is just my recommendation, if you want you can follow it.
Interesting, I dont think I talk much about the scene 'realism' except to say that unbiased path tracing inherrently makes the scene look more physical. I mainly discuss artifacts and limitations/advantages of the render engine options in UE5. Would you be able to expand a bit here so me and others can learn from your point of view. What did/do you want to see compared that an interior scene would give you a better example of? Oh and yes it deffinitely looks like a game scene, I put it together in an hour for a previous video.
@@JoshuaMKerr Thanks for respond. I meant using Interior scenes with perfect lighting and with objects that require high quality and real reflections and transcluency would be great deal for comparing the render engines. The scene that you used is a bit darker and lacks of lighting as well as relflection surfaces in my opinion. Recently I watched this tutorial and if you also watch it you will notice that an author of this video used great interior scene in UE5. ruclips.net/video/gm76lvL7aMw/видео.html. Moreover I found this video that helpful for comparing render engines ruclips.net/video/i3lcLHRusYk/видео.html.
Thanks for this. I've seen both of these videos before, but they aren't really what I'm discussing, which is and image stability issues in renders, which are easily visible in the scene I'm using as well as in the two videos you have linked. You're right though, if I decided to compare things like realistic lighting, material handling, reflections and traslucency then I would certainly design something more realistic and useful to highlight these things.
I tested alot and now i have a little night architecture set with 30+ lights and 10 sec (240 frames) renders around 8-10 hours with Path Tracer, i have 1024 samples, RT shadows, no translucency and little reflections. Definitely I'm doing something wrong
Not necessarily. That's a lot of lights for the Pathtracer to calculate and 1024 samples is quite a lot too. Also RT shadows and other Ray tracing settings won't matter when path tracing.
i think u don't used the right settings on path tracing, coz the fireflies can be fixed just by tweak the super exposure to 1 from his default 32 (!), but yeah... lumen rocks. anyway, great video, i used redshift in the past in my speed render increase path until i found UE, was a game change.
Why on earth would you use neat video instead of the renderers own denoiser? The built in denoiser usually has data passes to help with the noise, you're giving up all that extra info just rendering and denoising it in post.
Simply put, I'm not keen on the result. Best case scenario of course is just to sample until the noise is gone. But failing that (maybe due to the render time) especially in the case of Unreal the internal denoiser is way too heavy and gives you no control so denoising in post can be a good option if needs be. It is less necessary in the case of octane because there are deeper options. Having said that I just cant bring myself to use a denoised video render from Octane. Sometimes its all down to your personal aethetic. For instance I tend to add grain to my films...call me old fashioned ;)
Lumens can work for a lot of things like comedy shows or other things where realism isn't important. At that point Lumens is (to quote David F Sanberg / Ponysmasher) "Good enough". :) If I'm doing an explainer video or a training video, I don;t care if it's amazingly realistic but for a proper film or an advert for a serious client ... then yeah, Lumens is kind of poop. :)
A big strength of lumen is that it works in real time pipelines too. Great for led walls. I've managed to get some good renders from lumen recently but if a project can be offline rendered with a path tracer then I'd definitely go for that.
So lumen is the best for games until we do not have fast enought hardware like realy fast, becouse of its not so demanding and scales realy well with other current technologies? I have to admit octane just blows my eyes right from the first shot of your scene, path tracing not so much to be honnest. Which is hilarous to see the diference so fast thus I watched your video on my mobile Phone :-).
@@JoshuaMKerr exactly :), like to be honest when i saw Octane,i just losed the point/reason why Nvidia and gaming industry even works and focusing fully they marketing in last 4 years on ray tracing in gaming. Lumen is enought until we will be able too get enought of power to work with Octane, (two decades whatever, when its better then its better) in gaming you can get much better visuals when there is space for using more other technologies at once as Nanite, Realistic physics etc + Lumen+ better textures (vram), models this all will give you better visuals then only pretty ray tracing itself which realy costs still a too much of a performance . for the sake of lighting only, especialy physics is even downgraded from the comparison with past generations and it feels afwull as hell as gaming expyrience. Octane is much more demanding of course but its probably worth to put down Ray-Tracing and Path tracing completely for the sake off overall balanced visuals and interactive expyrience (the most important thing for games, not for movies) and during that time working on tools optimized directly for Octane. Its just better, to be honnest it looks "real" to me, while ray tracing does not it does realy weird over the top things realy often and its forcing you to even downscale your resolutions for sake of actualy playable frame even with GPUs for more then 1000 usd in one case for 1600usd + . which is ridiculous waste of power.
I used to exclusively use Cycles and Octane in Blender until I made the move to UE in 2020. I do a lot of large animation projects for heavy industrial clients with HUGE meshes and found that being able to use datasmith within Unreal was a massive advantage vs my previous pipeline. I still do use Octane / path tracer for certain client images (static shots mostly), but i would say that 8.5/10 they are more than happy with Lumen + a bit of Davinci post prod work. I have come to absolutely love Unreal, it is awesome to have the versatility to choose multiple rendering methods on the fly to see which one really suits your specific project. It's also really hard to beat a 4200 frame 1080p animation coming out of the pipeline in less than an hour! And its free! Keep up the good work!
Youre absolutely right, theres a tool for every job and we really do have a vast array of choice now plus speed! Thanks for the awesome comment.
Totally agree…speed is key and the quality you get with Lumen is more than enough for 90% of my projects. And when it’s not we have alternatives, incredible tools we have access to these days.
Hi, what do you advice me for my rendering ? my problem is that I am on a Mac M1 and when i'm rendering, the images are blurred . How can I slow down the process to increase the quality ?
as an avid Octane user (with Cinema 4D) who's literally starting with Unreal Engine, it's great to have this kind of input and comparison, huge thanks for the amazing content, keep it up!
Awesome. Glad that its useful. Good to have you on the journey with me.
Excellent, honest, and thorough video. Spoke directly to my interests and concerns. Much obliged!
Just a tip on wigglies in the back of your octane render. When you see 4x4 squares of missing information (they'll always be a dark square) that's caused by the min adaptive samples being set too low. Essentially those squares were black when adaptive sampling engaged and we're immediately turned off.
Oh absolutely. However its a toss up between that and increased render time. Its all down to what youre happy to accept in your work. I dont mind a little noise sometimes as long as I know how to fix it.
This video is good. I no longer struggle with lumen rendering or path tracing rendering.
Because I'm the one who works in the conceptual design phase.
So, I think I should go for lumen.
Thanks for making this video, it saves me experimenting time.😁
Really glad it was helpful. Sounds like you have an interesting job.
Great video! Thanks for taking the time to do this, always wondered how lumen stacked up against octane
It was a fun experiment. I'm very keen on making sure that we get the best possible renders from the engine without making huge sacrifices on quality.
I think you can fix lumens jagged edges by rendering at 200% the real resolution and then downscaling
Hello there! Thanks for commenting! Your texture repetition tutorial is legendary.
Fyi, I did try this but it didnt fix it unfortunately. I have found some cvars that make it a bit better...but no complete fix yet.
Hey Joshua. OTOY now released Octane 2022.1 for Unreal Engine in version 0.62 and it now comes with OctaneLightmass, a first version of the octane lightmapper for Unreal (experimental). This GPU path tracer is free for a single GPU but the plugin can use multi-card setups.
Using Lightmass to bake those textures with Octane you could get the Octane look in a real-time engine and combine it with Lumen etc. Would be very interested in your take!
I did see this get launched and yes, very interesting for sure! I have a content plan as long as Andre the Giant's arms but I'll certainly pop that on the list of stuff to try out.
You sorted out the thoughts in my mind!!
Awesome. It's good to do a bit of a pros and cons list
Brilliant summary. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks man
PS good show and ty for taking the time to tell us about this issue. Jaggies r drivin me batty
No worries. Hoping for a fix soon
Hi. I had this trouble quite a bit in lumen and it went away when i used ONLY area lights. Point lights cause the problem and went away when i converted them.
Good tip. That could be to do with the light radius. Although I was having issues with directional lights too.
I’m trying to add octane to my UE5 pipeline, because I’m interested in all the AOV options it gives. I’ve tried it with simple scenes and it worked, but now I’m trying with a more complex scene like the Matrix city, and after loading my scene and UE5 working perfectly, I click on"load octane", then it takes like 30 minutes preparing textures, and then it crashes. I think that it crashes when it tries to load the materials. I tried several times already, never been able to view anything in the renderer yet. Not sure if the matrix city is too complex for octane.
Yes, this is because Octane doesn't utilise things like nanite and virtual textures. Matrix City Sample would be too geometry and texture heavy to render.
Awesome video. Subscribed!
Glad to have you with me for the journey
Thanks for making this vid... confused what the issue is with Octane motion blur? Also, another pro for octane is multi-GPU support vs UE (single-GPU support only at this time)
The motion blur problem is that with the unreal plugin Octane doesn't calculate the motion vectors. There is an Octane 'integrated mode' that uses unreals viewport motion blur...but it really does look like garbage haha.
Good point about multi GPU although I believe that's a paid for option
would be nice to know what kind of system specs youre running for the speed section (or maybe i just missed it?)
I didnt include them but if youre interested the gpu is a 3080. Im not sure about the cpu specs.
@@JoshuaMKerr that's very good to know, im running a 3080 as well. Cheers!
great comparison, I really like using both Lumen and Octane for stills and video, I think it's great that unreal offers a diverse render pipeline, reminds me of blender but better
Thats kindof my thinking too. The big advantage of Unreal is the amount of polys it can handle too. Blender isnt very well optimised in that way.
@@JoshuaMKerr Unreal engine runs crazy well on my old i5, I do a lot of photogrammetry and nanite is an absolute god send
@@kettlechippys2668 Lumen is used in Twinmotion? Needs a RTX card or AMD is good too? Thanks
As far as I know lumen can be used without rtx. Not sure if it is used in twinmotion
What GPU are you using mate? I didn't hear you say. I have a dual 3060 ti workstation just wondering how long it'd take to render the same scene
Im using a 3080. Im not sure on the exact performance difference between that and yours.
Interesting that pathtracer doesn't disregard attenuation. Great video!
cheers man
for lumen did you have overide Anti alisiing checked and then Anti-aliasing set to NONE ? becasue thats what you need to do .
in your MRQ settings im talking about
I did indeed. Thats not the solution to this issue.
@@JoshuaMKerr oh right jsut those results looks way more antialiased than normal ? , after using such settings in MRQ anyway can’t wait for 5.1 🤝😎
in the new version, the path tracer supports new things like decals , volumetrics and nanite, and also if you crank up the sample to have to wait the same time as octane wouldn't you get a better result with the path tracer? in my opinion, it would be great if in the upcoming versions you can choose which portion of the scene should be path traced and which portion be lumen.
That would be a good feature. I liek the path tracer in Unreal a lot more now than when I published this video and have been using it a lot more recently. It still has a few things it can't handle (hidden shadow is one of them) but it's only a matter of time. Octane still has a lovely texture and overall result so I would have to do another test to see how they compare now.
I've used Ue5 when it first came out and loved the speed compared to Arnold and marmoset slows down my scene when using big disp maps. Is it safe to try Ue5 for final still shots of my creatures and characters now? I don't mind waiting an hour for the output. I just need accurate lighting and good looking images for my portfolio.
@@TimV777 nothing can go wrong with still images by the way you can freely use ai denoiser to get silky noise free images in seconds but it has an issue with animation
Good explanations,
Thanks for sharing.
Glad it was helpful!
What is the best way to get green screen footage into unreal engine? I am hitting roadblock, I think you posted a video on this a while ago but I was wondering if you have discovered any newer methods
Tell me about the roadblock youre hitting. I dont have any new methods but maybe I can still help
@@JoshuaMKerr so when I create a new plane and use a media player within unreal 5 I overlay both the original video and alpha channel video to achieve a clean key. The problem is that this method is prone to crashing and generally not being very stable. this is the only way that I am aware of, to get my video into unreal engine. I have a valve index system and I’m kicking around the idea of getting a vive tracker 3.0 and doing a live green screen composite.
You certainly could do that. Maybe try an exr sequence first so you have a single video track with embedded alpha.
You can also go into project settings and increase the amound of GB to allocate to playing media. look for the IMG Media tab.
Also...under the preferences in your media track in sequencer there is the option to specify pre roll and post roll frames. This is worth fiddling with.
can i use a hybrid of both lumen & pathtracer proj settings enabled for shot render?
I don't think so. Path tracer is an unbiased renderer and lumen is a very different technology.
Thank you so much for this Video!!! 👍
Youre very welcome. Thanks for watching.
You Rocks! thanks for explanation!
Hey no problem. I'd wanted to make that video for ages.
"8 hours is very long time for 9 seconds", dude when I got into 3D I was rendering 1 frame of PAL for 12 hours!
That is really fast render time for 270 frames of FHD size.
Good content! Thank you very much
Glad you liked it!
good review!
so now we need lumen to be "more like" octane. Btw why don't you do a tutorial based on render setting tricks for video maker in UE5?
Ill have a look into it and see what I can do.
If you mess with the console commands you can get some cleaner results with Lumen, there's a unique command called ReferenceMode that brings it closer to the pathtracer, at the cost of much more noise
Very interesting. I hope to do a lumen video that adresses cvars. I imagine this tip would be super useful.
when using PathTracer you can enable r.raytracing.nanite.mode 1 to make pathtracer use nanite mesh to trace rays.
Good tip
good review!, and small question: i'm newbie in UE5, can you show me how to enable the pathtracer inside UE5? Thanks
Have you already enabled raytracing?
As being a beginner the fast render times of unreal are really godsent.
getting tired of optimizing every part of my scene just to shave off a couple of seconds. Understand that scene optimization is key...
but all that fiddling with setting takes away from creation.
Thank you for the comparision. I don´t think the scene you tested it on does it justice though. We´ve used Unreal extensively with only Lumen (when necessary) on a documentary and it more than exceeded our expectations. While there were SOME artefacts (shadows mostly), I´d much rather troubleshoot these on a 20 minute render vs an 8 hour render and if need be render in layers/fix stuff in comp...
We have only tested it on a narrow scope of projects yet, so my opinion might change still...:)
Cant say Im a big fan of Lumen but glad its working for you. The scene didnt take 8 hours with lumen though, that was octane.
Some of these things can certainly be fixed in post or in layersm Davinci has excellent features for flicker and noise for instance. But sometimes thats extra time spent on what should be working already.
Bear in mind I am focussing largely on doing as much in engine as possible and rendering beauty passes for editing and grading (maybe not even that)
@Joshua M Kerr Oh yeah, I got that octane took 8 hours. I think th scene itself looks rather gamey and I've seen and produced Lumem scenes that looked way more realistic. I also still think pathtracing or offline rendering GI and reflections look better, but in most cases I'd rather spend more time on improving the scene through lighting and shading and composition rather than better GI...
I also had those fireflies with pathtracing and I know some of them came from using the hdri wrong.
Really depends on what client you work with, if uts someone who notices every flickering pixel, you might be out of luck sometimes with Lumen.
Just saying that I both had completely fine 4k renders AND most of the times it's not noticeable enough if I DO get issues...
I'm only using Unreal for my own films so I guess Im the one who gets fussy over flickering pixels haha.
Youre absolutely right that the scene doesnt look very realistic, it was part of a 1hr challenge (thats my excuse). But the realism of the scene isnt what I made the video for, its to see what results you can get from a set of render options and the difference it makes.
Id love to see some of your work by the way. Anything online?
@@JoshuaMKerr Oh, no offense, I thought it was some marketplace scene...:)
I only have one test online on my channel, but I got some stuff on TV, if you can access german public Television, just look for "TerraX Unsere Kontinente"...
I didn't know that Octane had an Unreal Engine version. Pretty cool.
Pretty cool for sure.
Interesting comparison video, thank you for the analysis. However I feel that lumen's potential isn't quite brought to "light" here... is there any chance or way you could probably send this project to me or make it even public? I'd love to try myself on it, since I am trying to get the most out of lumen since it was first released in the Early Access version or Unreal 5. I'd love to see your opinion on my potential results with Lumen within this scene. Hope to hearing from you, thanks in advance!
Fun fact... I watched your lumen video from a year ago. Super interesting stuff! Could you drop me a message on my facebook page?
Thanks for your comparison, now that redshift and octane are only subscription now i have moved fully to unreal. Nice to see the difference!
At least we can still use octane if we choose to but since 5.1 Unreal's Pathtracer has improved so much. I can see it over taking in the not too distant future. I'd love to see it with adaptive sampling.
I am new to octane renderer in unreal engine. can you please show that how to render sequence .
I'll make a video when I can.
the fire fly's are mainly high emission lights i think try lowering them right down
Since this video it has become much easier to control fireflies in Unreal's postprocess volume
I don't do any kind of rendering, but I was curious what the results would be if you did a time-normalized comparison. If Octane is going to take 8 hours, what is the quality off results the other two can give if they were set up to run for 8 hours. I'm not sure if there would be other constraints that would prevent this, just curious
Certainly an interesting thought. Although in practice it would be tricky to set up the render to make sure it took that amount of time.
My guess is that beyond a certain point it would be a case of deminishing returns.
This is one of the advantages of Unreal... today, many of us who work freelance with our own equipment, making an 8-hour shot for a client is terrifying, no matter how good quality it is, today everyone bets on the fast, the immediate with a good quality and in that Lumen and Pathtracer are superior to octane, vray, arnold, redshift and etc etc... one of the strongest points of unreal is undoubtedly the speed of realtime.
@@JoshuaMKerr great video very interesting.... thanks
@@starlingvfx Glad you enjoyed it
A review of nvidia omniverse will be nice. It's a nice path tracer render and now includes also iray.
Yes, this is on my radar. Do you know many of the supported features?
@@JoshuaMKerr You can connect with blender, unreal, 3dsmax, maya...
Vehicle Dynamics, particles, Blast Destruction, Force Fields, fluid dinamics, nanoVBD...
Switch between render engines with one click; Ray tracing - Path tracing - Iray.
No displacement yet and It´s in beta several things. It´s not mature as UE but very promising... for me it´s more easy than unreal and It´s free.
Ill be having a look to see if its a viable alternative to pathtracer or octane. Good that its free for sure.
@@JoshuaMKerr By the way, I think the best render for your workflow; big cities, textures, lights , polygons... it's Clarisse IFX, but it's not free.
Shame I dont have a spare 1k haha.
does pathtracer rendering have full if not near compatibility at this point? 5:55
I would say so yes. There are still a few things I think that it doesn't work like fluids and chaos destruction. but overall much better
As for denoising, I'd love to SOMEHOW get Intel's OpenImageDenoise running on GPU and Unreal. I love the result of it in Blender, but it running on the CPU can slow down renders.
Also, what do you think about the Lumen/PT changes with 5.1.x? Were some of your issues fixed or at least reduced? Because I think Lumen tends to look great (then again, I don't make films), if you don't have high contrast highlights like in your test scene
Two of my most recent videos are about open image denoiser and the lumen issues. Did you see those?
@@JoshuaMKerr nope, first time viewer, this was in my recommended. I'll check those out
Let me know if you have any questions
there used to be a Vray plugin for unreal have you tried that? I've been using vray for over twenty years now with 3dsmax
Hi Chris, yes I did give it a go. It's a good tool and had a few limitations at the time I used it (not sure about now)...plus it's not free to use after the initial trial.
@@JoshuaMKerr yeah i tried it but not for a while not sure if theyre updating it
is octane free for unreal?
It is indeed
@@JoshuaMKerr thank you
No problem
I never really used UE before but it looks like you had the classic UE bloom effect enabled
Haha oh god no. I use convolution
Interesting that you use Octane for green screen and DoF work. I'm new to UE5 but see a future in trying to use it with green screen work. Would love to know what the downfalls of Lumen are in this area and if there are any ways to improve it! Thanks!
I suppose its really just a personal preference bit I don't find lumen convincing. It does depend on the subject though. it deals with some things better than others.
I did use it on my last short film becuase it was faster to render.
Do you know how to use Octane Proxy within UE5? How to load or import Octane Proxy within UE5?
You load ocatane in UE5 and the option to import orbx as proxy is in the main dropdown menu.
Bro I recommend you to use another scene. Because scene that you are using is like game scene and doesn't make sense of reality. It is better use interior scene for comparing render engines. Btw it is just my recommendation, if you want you can follow it.
Interesting, I dont think I talk much about the scene 'realism' except to say that unbiased path tracing inherrently makes the scene look more physical. I mainly discuss artifacts and limitations/advantages of the render engine options in UE5.
Would you be able to expand a bit here so me and others can learn from your point of view. What did/do you want to see compared that an interior scene would give you a better example of?
Oh and yes it deffinitely looks like a game scene, I put it together in an hour for a previous video.
@@JoshuaMKerr Thanks for respond. I meant using Interior scenes with perfect lighting and with objects that require high quality and real reflections and transcluency would be great deal for comparing the render engines. The scene that you used is a bit darker and lacks of lighting as well as relflection surfaces in my opinion. Recently I watched this tutorial and if you also watch it you will notice that an author of this video used great interior scene in UE5. ruclips.net/video/gm76lvL7aMw/видео.html. Moreover I found this video that helpful for comparing render engines ruclips.net/video/i3lcLHRusYk/видео.html.
Thanks for this. I've seen both of these videos before, but they aren't really what I'm discussing, which is and image stability issues in renders, which are easily visible in the scene I'm using as well as in the two videos you have linked.
You're right though, if I decided to compare things like realistic lighting, material handling, reflections and traslucency then I would certainly design something more realistic and useful to highlight these things.
I recommend instead using photorealistic assets when comparing the realism of renderers.
Fair comment. If it helps the closeup assets are photogrammetry.
word of the day: Wibbliness
Im going to make Wibblines official terminology.
Do you have a favourite of the three renders? Pop a comment below with your thoughts.
@@Greenrobotvp I'm loving unreals pathtracer in 5.1
😍✋tnx
no worries.
I tested alot and now i have a little night architecture set with 30+ lights and 10 sec (240 frames) renders around 8-10 hours with Path Tracer, i have 1024 samples, RT shadows, no translucency and little reflections. Definitely I'm doing something wrong
Not necessarily. That's a lot of lights for the Pathtracer to calculate and 1024 samples is quite a lot too.
Also RT shadows and other Ray tracing settings won't matter when path tracing.
You gotta do a new version of this once UE 5.2 drops
I have a few videos that address the lumen flickering issue directly. Also a pathtracer denoising video if you're interested.
i think u don't used the right settings on path tracing, coz the fireflies can be fixed just by tweak the super exposure to 1 from his default 32 (!), but yeah... lumen rocks. anyway, great video, i used redshift in the past in my speed render increase path until i found UE, was a game change.
Yeah, max bounces can fix the fireflies. Not always but mostly.
What about redshift
I know that Redshift can be used in Unreal now, but it wasn't when I made this video.
Why on earth would you use neat video instead of the renderers own denoiser? The built in denoiser usually has data passes to help with the noise, you're giving up all that extra info just rendering and denoising it in post.
Simply put, I'm not keen on the result. Best case scenario of course is just to sample until the noise is gone. But failing that (maybe due to the render time) especially in the case of Unreal the internal denoiser is way too heavy and gives you no control so denoising in post can be a good option if needs be.
It is less necessary in the case of octane because there are deeper options. Having said that I just cant bring myself to use a denoised video render from Octane.
Sometimes its all down to your personal aethetic. For instance I tend to add grain to my films...call me old fashioned ;)
Lumens can work for a lot of things like comedy shows or other things where realism isn't important. At that point Lumens is (to quote David F Sanberg / Ponysmasher) "Good enough". :)
If I'm doing an explainer video or a training video, I don;t care if it's amazingly realistic but for a proper film or an advert for a serious client ... then yeah, Lumens is kind of poop. :)
A big strength of lumen is that it works in real time pipelines too. Great for led walls. I've managed to get some good renders from lumen recently but if a project can be offline rendered with a path tracer then I'd definitely go for that.
PS 2 Wait r u any relation to Jim Kerr from Simple Minds?? You look kinda like his son
Haha...No relation :)
So lumen is the best for games until we do not have fast enought hardware like realy fast, becouse of its not so demanding and scales realy well with other current technologies? I have to admit octane just blows my eyes right from the first shot of your scene, path tracing not so much to be honnest. Which is hilarous to see the diference so fast thus I watched your video on my mobile Phone :-).
It's really just a question of choosing the right tool for the job. Octane does look gorgeous though.
@@JoshuaMKerr exactly :), like to be honest when i saw Octane,i just losed the point/reason why Nvidia and gaming industry even works and focusing fully they marketing in last 4 years on ray tracing in gaming. Lumen is enought until we will be able too get enought of power to work with Octane, (two decades whatever, when its better then its better) in gaming you can get much better visuals when there is space for using more other technologies at once as Nanite, Realistic physics etc + Lumen+ better textures (vram), models this all will give you better visuals then only pretty ray tracing itself which realy costs still a too much of a performance . for the sake of lighting only, especialy physics is even downgraded from the comparison with past generations and it feels afwull as hell as gaming expyrience. Octane is much more demanding of course but its probably worth to put down Ray-Tracing and Path tracing completely for the sake off overall balanced visuals and interactive expyrience (the most important thing for games, not for movies) and during that time working on tools optimized directly for Octane. Its just better, to be honnest it looks "real" to me, while ray tracing does not it does realy weird over the top things realy often and its forcing you to even downscale your resolutions for sake of actualy playable frame even with GPUs for more then 1000 usd in one case for 1600usd + . which is ridiculous waste of power.
when i heard 8 hours i deleted octane from my computer instantly 🤣
Although this was some time ago. I'm keen to try again.
why does his head move while talking omg thats so distracting lol
Im also moving my shoulders, knees and toes.
why does this dude look like a 3D render? lol
Maybe he is.
Pathtracer has noise until you figure out how to remove it) everything is simple
Simple is relative. If everything were simple there would be no need for educational youtube content.