My Unreal Engine 5.3 Commercial Render Settings

so with all the updates happening in Unreal Engine as of 2023 I felt it was wise to do a follow-up video on my render settings that I use for all of my commercial projects as a freelance motion designer one little caveat that is worth mentioning before we get into the meat and potatoes of my render settings is render settings will never ever fix a bad shot you need good lighting good textures good models good animation all those things will make a shot better and trying to add more samples or do something to your render settings to try and get it to look better is often a Fool's erand spend more time designing your shot if the shot is not telling the story you need it to with that out of the way let's go into unreal so I have this very basic shot of a Halo helmet in a forest right now and if I hit play super simple I want to render this so in any of my commercial projects this is my workflow I would take whatever shot I have and then I would hit the clapboard right here this window pops up if you're familiar with this standard movie render Q stuff we get rid of the jpeg the jpeg will never give us as much color information as we need so we're going to set it to exrs in 16bit using the dwaa or dwab I found no difference between them so we're going to use dwab because it sounds better go up to your settings we're going to add anti-aliasing we're going to set the spatial count to one for now and for most of my commercial projects I keep the spatial at one for my temporal account I will keep it at 16 I will override anti-aliasing I will set the anti-aliasing method to none I will render my warm-up frames here and then in the advanced tab right here I'm going to set the render warm-up count to 240 and 240 basically what's happening is it's triggering the engine to turn on and start the engine to run before it actually starts making frames you're actually not creating additional frames for your video sequence but it's basically like preloading the scene so that it can hopefully get as many samples as we need for the previous frames so when we get into our first frame it doesn't have any weird Jitters or bumps or anything like that so with the anti-aliasing done we can go to our settings and we're going to add a color output now Mr William foucher will say you can disable your tone curve I prefer using the Ocio workflow and Aces and we're not going to get into the details of aces in this video but long story short it's trying to generate a universal color system for motion graphics artist VFX film making whatever I recommend using the Asus workflow it's just good practice in my opinion at the end of the day art is practice and like training we should just get into the habit of good technique so I am going to use an Ocio configuration I'm going to enable that and that means we have to create an Ocio thing inside our project so we're going to go to this little drop down and we have create new Ocio open color iio asset I already was making one for the demo of this but we're going to make a new one so you can figure out what's going on we're going to put it wherever we want I'm just going to put it in this Ocio folder that I have made in my project and I'll call this _ save that we're going to double click on that and it's going to open up this window now very conveniently in Unreal Engine 5.3 it will already have an Ocio configuration set so we don't need to do any extra downloading we don't need to go anywhere we can hit the plus sign of the desired Cod color spaces twice Uno do in the index zero we're going to set the first one to utility linear re 709 srgb under index one right here we're going to set this to AC's CG save done close that in the render settings now we have to set the transform space to linear re 79 srgb and then the output into to Aces CG so with that out of the way we have our color output we're going to add more settings next we're going to add our game overrides and this is basically saying hey render with the maximum game settings possible so when you open up any game and you go into the video settings and it's like hey what kind of Graphics presets do we want ultra high Etc this is basically forcing our render to be the highest settings possible so we add our game overrides and we don't have to change anything we can go back up to our settings up here and we are going to add some console variables now I'm going to confess for most of my commercial work I actually don't use console variables sometimes it just slows down my render sometimes I just think whatever unreal spits out looks great and most of the quality that you're going to get from your render is going to be from your anti-aliasing especially if you have a fast mov scene 16 samples is a good starting point you might bump this up to 64 maybe 128 but most of the time that is not necessary so console variables I don't always add them but when I do I will use these console variables now I'm no master I'm going to say that I still have to use a text file and remember all this stuff because I'm just dumb and can't remember everything so I have this text document where I have all of these console variables that I will consider using on occasion but the ones I use most of all are these these ones right here depth of field quality screen percentage motion blur quality is the stuff I'll use I've picked these up from different motion designers and unreal artists all over the place and some of them do a lot some of them I can barely tell the difference and it just makes me feel good inside to use them but I will generally use these for the most part so let's go ahead and add those console variables and that means we can go to the console variable settings right here plus plus plus plus We'll add four we're going to copy copy them from the text file and drop them into the corresponding and very conveniently with Unreal Engine 5.3 if you want to remember them it will give you a reminder of what the console variable is so I'm just copying in the data and now I have to plug in the numbers separately so the first one depth the field quality I'll set this to four if I'm going to do a 4K render I will keep this at around 150 because if I set this to 200 and I'm rendering out something in 4k it's going to create an 8K render and even with a giant computer the difference is so marginal and it takes so much longer to render I'd rather just render it and design my scene better so 150% for a 4K render is often perfectly fine motion blur quality I will also set this to four and My Shadow quality I will set this to five so with all that done I can hit accept but I'm actually going to go back and take a step back I highly recommend saving this as a preset put it somewhere on your computer where you can always have access to it so we're going to save preset as I don't know we'll put put it in the sequences folder call this my render settings Tut 001 now I always add some extra information to help identify what my render settings are there's no right or wrong way to do this but I will say 1 by 16 and that is my anti-aliasing samples I will underscore this 4K I'll underscore this exr dwab just label some property so then I know what is happening now one thing I did forget to change is my output resolution I will typically set this to 4K so 3840 by 2160 and then I don't ever change any of these settings inside my render settings make sure I save it somewhere on my computer so I'll go to my output directory hit the three dots call this Halo helmet Tut exrs 4K sure after I set my output directory then I am good to go I'm going to render this hit accept go and it's going to take some time so we're just going to let it go do its thing now what you're looking at here is a preview of the render but sometimes the preview won't be fully accurate of what your scene is actually doing so let's just trust that it's going to do the process cuz most of the time it does you can see that we're rendering the warm-up frames right down here it's rendering up 240 frames of the scene we can see this little Shadow coming on it's basically triggering all the foliage and the the winess of the plants and stuff so that's what's happening and you can just go make coffee or go play some video games not on your computer while you are rendering cuz that will cause an explosion but you should go do something else for however long you need so after about 30 minutes our render is done and we're going to do our postprocessing in After Effects today you can do this in DCI resolve and if you'd like to learn that let me know in the comment section down below and I will make a separate video on this workflow but I have other videos on that as well in case you need a refresher so let's import our files I'm going to go up to this pre- renders folder and I'm going to hit control I and find my sequence I just saved this folder I was doing some tests obviously so I'll show you how to import a PNG sequence as well in just a second because there's some extra things that we need to know especially if we're using the Ocio workflow so I found this render sequence this exr sequence make sure your exr sequence is checked import and we need to go up and look at our color settings but before we do that I'm going to take this sequence and drag it in and right now I'm in a HD comp so I'm going to hit contrl K on my keyboard and set this to 3840 by 2160 and we have our shot and it looks pretty good however I do want to be working with the aces workflow right now this is the Adobe managed workflow and we did render this with Aces and this is what I do for all of my commercial work again you could use pngs if you want but I like oci so we're going to set the Ocio color managed big scary warning thing comes up you can just hit okay not a big deal we're going to use Aces 1.2 you don't have to change any of these other settings so we'll hit okay and it's going to get a little bit darker what's happening well basically we have to say hey what color space was this footage created in so we can convert it to what we want so hit Control Alt G on our keyboard with our footage selected in our project and it's going to open up our interpret footage the default is aces but we want Aces CG right here click okay now basically what's happening is that it's saying hey our entire project is going to be in Aces and we need to say everything that we import needs to also be brought into the aces color space and then when we go to render it then it will be in the rec 709 color space which is what most monitors are so from here if I needed to do any post-processing effects and color grading that's where I would do this and the reason why I like this workflow is I don't need to do any additional like color space transform effects on my footage I can just start caking stuff on and it will look correct based on what technically things require I'm just looking for a good-looking image so I want to add maybe some Bloom so we'll add a deep glow which is one of my favorite plugins we'll set the input to let's say the threshold to be something much much higher like that threshold smooth bring it down by a lot we could add some extra little noise add grain and basically this is all I would end up doing to my footage to make it look more cinematic now for all of my other client work where I am rendering an unreal this is basically the workflow I would do I'd have my color grading I'd have my effects and postprocessing but overall the workflow and unreal is what you see is what you get so from here I'd finish my settings and then then after that I need to render this but before we do that I do want to show you one more thing and if we go up to our pre-render folder and H C control I on our keyboard we go to Unreal 5 and I did render out a PNG sequence and you could very well render out a PNG sequence for legitimate client work and be completely fine if you don't need to do any fancy color grading compositing whatever else if you like what you see in camera just use a PNG sequence but here's the problem if you are in the AC's Ocio color workpace and you this preview doesn't look right let's drop this into our sequence one let's size it up that looks gross that looks terrible what we need to do is we go back up to our footage and we hit controll alt G and it's saying hey this footage is aces right no it's not we need to scroll down to our output because the output of the footage was already in srgb that's unreal's default flavor of color spaces and we're just going to set that and now it looks like it should so with that said let's hit crl M on our keyboard and we're going to render this and get this ready for maybe client or posting on Instagram we have our default render settings here and and if we hit the render button it's going to render in Aces we don't want that it will not look as good it'll look contrasty and gross we're going to go back to our render settings we're going to set the output module to h.264 match render settings 40 megabits per second this is a good default starting place now if you're into more advanced rendering you can do whatever you need to do but we're going to select this and if we just select that and hit the render button it's still not right we need to go into those render settings now go into our color and right now it's going to say render this output space into Asus CG we don't want that we need to scroll down to rec 709 once that's done we can click okay and then we can hit the render button and then when we render it out we wait patiently until we have a shot that looks exactly like we wanted it has our Bloom it has our grain it has our color grading effects and this is what I do 90% of the time for most of my client work where my clients see a beautiful looking image it's beautifully lit it has cool shots it has their product in it client is Happy whether it's technically right or not sure if you're in a pipeline that requires that go ahead and do that but if it looks good to you and it doesn't raise any red flags to your artistic self or your artistic friends then it probably looks good and what you see is what you get out of unreal and out of After Effects is generally my motto and I hope this works for you like I said technically right and beautifully right are very different things with that said I hope you enjoyed this video If you learned something and you got some value out of this content let me know in the comment section down below or you can hit that thumbs up button or hit the Subscribe button to let me know that I'm making content that is valuable to you and I will leave you with a final tip and that is to eat 1 gr of protein per pound of body weight and you'll make some Gans goodbye my friends bye

Channel: Jon Jags Nee

Views: 57,190

Keywords: Unreal Engine 5.3, UE5 Rendering, Real-time Rendering, Unreal Engine Graphics, UE5 Graphics Settings, Unreal Engine 5.3 Tutorial, Rendering Techniques, UE5 Cinematics, Unreal Engine Visual Effects, Ray Tracing in UE5, UE5 Lighting, UE5 Materials, Unreal Engine 5.3 Showcase, UE5 Environment Rendering, UE5 Post-processing, Unreal Engine Photorealism, UE5 Performance Optimization, UE5 Engine Features, Unreal Engine Game Development, UE5 Demo Project

Id: SC0Tc_On67w

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023