FASTEST Way to Optimize Unreal Engine 5.3 for Cinematic Renders - Path Tracer Pro (NOW FREE!)

what's going on guys Sam here for boundless entertainment and I have a couple of exciting announcements for you guys today first we've just launched the new Unreal Engine for filmmakers course this course is brand new and fully updated in Unreal Engine 5.2 with over 25 hours of content the course is designed to take you from beginner to Pro in just 10 days using industry standard techniques so you're ready to work in any professional setting it covers everything from planning and blocking out your scene to building complex scenes in Unreal Engine Advanced lighting character animation creating Dynamic fluid and gas simulations compositing live action footage with your CGI scene inside of Unreal Engine and rendering your scene at maximum quality for cinematic results we already have over 6 000 students enrolled on the site including artists from industrial Light and magic lucasfilm and also Blizzard Entertainment who is using this exact course to train artists in creating cinematics in Unreal Engine the other exciting announcement and main topic of this video is the release of our first plug-in path Tracer Pro pass Tracer Pro is an absolute must-have plug-in for Unreal Engine 5.2 it allows you to optimize nanite meshes for use with the path Tracer or Ray Trace shadows in any Unreal Engine scene with just two clicks saving you from hours of tedious work modifying individual meshes manually now if you don't really know what I'm talking about here I'm going to get into that in a minute when we jump into Unreal Engine but first it's important to understand why you should be using Unreal engine's path Tracer and Ray Trace shadows in the first place the pass Tracer is unreal engines physically accurate lighting model which Brute Force calculates the balanced and indirect Lighting in your scene providing the most realistic and accurate lighting results possible because the path Tracer spares little expense in achieving the highest Fidelity image it's what we call an offline renderer meaning it can't render images in real time like Lumen does this makes it pretty much useless for interactive purposes like gaming or VR but that doesn't matter for creating films visual effects game cinematics archviz or any other linear content and it allows us to take advantage of the path Tracer to achieve a higher quality result than what's possible with Lumen Ray Trace Shadows on the other hand produce far more realistic shadows and Lighting in real-time scenes and they're the best option for rendering shadows in the lit mode which is to say with Lumen so neither of these options work out of the box with nanite meshes and require a tedious process of modifying each individual nanite mesh in order to be compatible with raytrace shadows and path tracing mode the path Tracer Pro plugin streamlines this process for you allowing you to optimize the nanite meshes in your scene for use with the path Tracer and Ray tray Shadows with just two clicks allowing you to achieve the most realistic lighting possible with ease and saving you hours of time in the process so let's jump into Unreal Engine and get into a bit more detail about how and why this plugin works so to really explain what this plugin does let me show you the original process that we had to do in order to optimize our scene for path tracing so I'll show you what happens if I switch into pass tracing mode here okay you can see that suddenly we have a huge reduction in the detail quality of these meshes so actually if I go over to this mesh for example it's really obvious so if I go into lit mode you can see we have a ton of detail we have these little rocks that are sitting on top of the surface here now if I go into path tracing mode suddenly all that detail is completely gone and we're left with this Jagged poorly rendered Rock and the reason that happens is because the path Tracer is not compatible with nanite well what is nanite so when you're dealing with video games you have to keep in mind that we're trying to render our scenes in real time here so in order to do so we have to take a few shortcuts otherwise we're not going to be able to actually render this much detail and quality in real time so the way that this is done is through level of detail optimization and what this means is that objects that are farther away from the camera are rendered at a slightly lower quality level and detail level than objects that are really close to the camera and this used to be done through what's called lods or levels of detail it wasn't an ideal solution because as you would move closer to objects they would kind of pop and change change to different levels of detail based on the distance that you were from them and if you played any video games you've probably noticed this in older games what's amazing about nanite is that it actually allows us to make those level of detail changes as we move through our scene but it's completely seamless and it does this through a way of processing the triangles and polygons on each mesh in the scene and it's pretty complex but what's important to understand is that nanite is not compatible with every feature inside of unreal specifically it's not compatible with the path Tracer and so when you switch to path tracing mode you lose all of that detail that has been imported with your nanite meshes because unreal isn't utilizing nanite in order to render these things because it can't it's not compatible with the path Tracer it's also not compatible with raytrace shadows and if you've ever noticed you get some kind of weird funky artifacts on your geometry sometimes when you're using Ray Trace shadows in your scene so how can can we fix this problem so I want to show you the way that we used to fix this and I want to show you the way that we can fix this now with the path Tracer Pro plugin so if we click on this mesh and we double click on the static mesh down here if we look now we can see that we have the full level of detail because we're in lit mode in this preview window what we would have to do in the past is go down here and change this setting called fallback relative error down to zero and then we'd have to click apply changes and then we have to wait for it to actually load the mesh and apply those changes now that loaded very quickly for me but this is not the case when you are first doing this process so I already had changed the fallback relative error in my project so it was already pre-loaded and it allowed it to make this conversion very quickly however it normally takes between 30 and 45 seconds for me on this computer which is very good machine and runs unreal extremely well usually takes about 30 to 40 seconds for it to actually load when you make that change and you can't do anything in the editor why while it's loading you know you have to click apply changes after you change the setting and then once it's done you can X out of this and now you can see that it's working but now we have to go into every other static mesh in our scene like this one for example and do the same thing so we have to click on this and we have to change the fallback relative error to zero and then we have to click apply changes now I'm not going to do this because I want to show you exactly how we can use this plugin that we've created to automate this process and just modify every mesh in our scene with one click so you can see how this process could take hours of your time to actually go through and modify each unique mesh in the scene because you could have hundreds of static meshes in your scene now the other alternative method is to just go into your content filter by Static mesh and then disable nanite for every mesh in your scene and you can just disable nanite however the problem with this is that then when you go into lit mode you are not going to be able to utilize the benefits of using nanite and your computer is going to suffer and it's going to be difficult for you to render your scene in real time and navigate smoothly through your engine if you don't have nanite enabled for your scene so nanite provides a ton of huge benefits and then also when you're rendering your scene if you choose to render using lit mode it's very nice to have the flexibility to switch back and forth between rendering with lit mode or rendering with path racing so if you disable nanite in your project it's not going to allow you nearly as much flexibility and you're not going to be able to take advantage of all of the great benefits that nanite has to offer so it's best if we can keep nanite enabled and also set up our meshes so that they work at the full level of detail in path tracing mode that's why setting the fallback relative error is actually the best way to optimize our scene for path Trace mode with that said I want to show you how we can actually automate this process using the path Tracer Pro plugin and we can do that right now so I'm going to go down here so we can see this mesh and we can see that we have a really poor level of detail here all I have to do is click on this little button that says optimize nanite meshes and it's going to say optimize scene for path tracing slash raytrace Shadows it's going to give us a warning that the process may take a long time because it's going to go through each and every mesh in your scene and modify this setting for you we're just going to click on yes and it's going to take a moment and it's going to go through and automatically quickly modify every static mesh in your scene and now you can see that we have our full level of detail on every mesh in our scene without having to tediously go through find every mesh in our scene and convert it so that it is optimized for the path tracer so you can see this is a really convenient plug-in it's going to save you hours and hours and hours of time especially if you're working a lot in unreal and you're using the path Tracer it's great practice to optimize your scene for the path Tracer should you need it at any point to render out high quality visuals for clients or whatever you're doing and it allows you to switch between lit mode and path tracing mode and keep nanite enabled when you're working in lit mode so that you can build your scene very quickly and smoothly without having a bunch of lag and weighing down your computer and it's also going to allow full quality in path tracing mode so it's a great way to optimize your scene and it's just two clicks you click here and it's going to open the plugin and then you just click yes and it'll do its work so if you guys want to download the path Tracer Pro plugin I'll leave a link in the description below as well as a link to the Unreal Engine for filmmakers course I hope you guys enjoy both products and I'm really excited to see what you free with them so if you have any questions feel free to comment below or reach out through the website and also if you have any suggestions for future plugins or courses definitely comment them below we're looking to serve this community as much as we can and provide awesome tools and training at great prices so we want to hear from you so until next time I'm Sam from balance entertainment and thanks for watching

Channel: Boundless Entertainment

Views: 43,047

Keywords: path tracer, unreal engine 5.2, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, ue5.2, plugin, path tracer pro, pro, ray traced shadows, raytraced shadows, raytracing, ray tracing, ray, tracing, optimize, how to, tutorial, unreal engine for filmmakers, course, online course, shadow issues, ugly shadow

Id: BCWThDhzImI

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023