Why Rendering your Blender Project in Unreal Engine 5 is a Game-Changer!

do you enjoy using blender for your projects but find rendering times to be a bit headache no matter what you try it feels like a never ending struggle well this video is for you I've been working in CG project with blender for some time now and I have to say I'm loving it blender offers an awesome structure and workflow tons of cool features and you can pretty much bring all your ideas to life but here's the catch ring times can be a real pain especially for those realistic ones whether you are using EV or Cycles so I decided to give unhee engine 5.3 a TR and let me tell you it's mind-blowing how fast it runas while maintaining high quality almost on PA with Cycles we don't need to talk about Eevee anymore it's basically left in the dust and unwi got it all speed and quality but before you jump into unreal with your blender project there are a few things things you should know let's dive into it so you can start right now without wasting your time open up your blender project because it's time to make some tweaks first forgot about exporting procedural materials or nodes except texture notes you will need to bake your procedural materials into textures or simply use PBR textures for example if you've only adjusted texture properties with notes contrast roughness or whatever there's no need to bake them you can fix fix this in unhe easily check your UV maps and unw your measures if you haven't already and don't forget to bake your animations into key frames make sure to apply the scale and modifiers for all your objects non-mesh elements like lamps and cameras or Curves might not transfer correctly so you have to convert as much as possible to measures there's a way to export the full camera animation to unre but it involves a lot of settings and it can get messy easily I recommend recomend setting up your camera and unreal from scratch it's as straightforward as in blender and if you have a smooth workflow to avoid this issue please share it in the comments below now let's export the project as an fpx file select the object types you have and check bake animation if you have got animation key frames now we can switch over to anal Engine 5 when you first open unhee you will see your project browser I would recommend selecting the film in video section with a blank scene and don't forget to enable weight tracing once your project is open the first thing you want to do is tweak some project settings so search for renewing and make sure the reflection mode is set to Lumen Hardware weight tracing is checked when available and set way lighting mode to hit lighting for reflection if your GPU can handle it enable high quality translucency Reflections and and virtual Shadow Maps also support Hardware we tracing we Trac shadows and path tracing finally search for Direct X and make sure you using direct X12 these are the most crucial project settings and now we just need to enable some plugins you will need the movie wender que plugin for more control and better animation quality and also check if HR backdrop is enabled the same goes for the level sequence editor if you opened a different template it might not be enabled so better save than sorry now your engine needs to restart after that we can import our blender project just drag and drop the fbx file into your content browser leave everything as default you can check build Nite but I personally don't recommend it as it can sometimes cause weird Shadow issues and this can be fixed but in my case I don't need it now you have everything including texture Maps if not you can easily Direct and drop them later switch to unlit to view everything without Shadows it makes the next steps much easier take your time to organize your materials into separate folders to keep things tidy and start adding textures to the materials with control and space you can open the content browser again and you can also dock this to your layout and just drag and drop the texture Maps into the material graph just like in blender you will probably notice that glass and the missive materials behave differently compared to blender and if you set up mirrors like me they might look strange and maybe you are dealing with odd mesh visibilities let's fix all that for materials that have visibility issues check the two-sided option by default unreal Wenders only one side of a material and if your blender mesh has flipped normals it can lead to this problem for glass material set the blend mode to translucent lighting mode to surface translucent volume and refraction mode to index of refraction if your glass is just a plane you are all set but if it has some thickness like mine check two-sided set the color to Black and plug it into metallic create four simple constant nodes while pressing one and clicking with your left Mouse button connect the first one into the roughness with the very low value for clear glass and the higher one for frosted class and the second one to opacity with something between 0.3 and 0.5 create a lur node and add a frel node then plug the constant node into a and b the first one set to one and the second one to the index of refraction you need plug the frel output into Alpha and the lurb output into the refraction slot you might notice that the material still casts 100% Shadows to fix this enable Shadow indirect only for all your glass materials moving on to mirrors after setting up the material select your postprocess volume and under Lumen reflection change way lighting mode to hit lighting for reflection and enable high quality translucency Reflections to get that mirror right now let's tackle emissive materials they are pretty straightforward to set up but you might notice some issues and yet we still need these materials select your color and plug it into a multiply node then connect that to the imiss of color increase the second value to something like 100 or as needed save it and switch to lid if you haven't already but you see pure emissive light even if you render it there's still some flickering but we need it later so leave it as is for now the best lighting can be achieved by adding lights to your light sources for ceiling lights I use spotlights and for my stair lights I opt for rectangle lights try to match the shape of your original light source and place them where the original lights were your lighting setup is almost complete if you need a sky and the sunlight here's a quick way to add it just add an hdri backdrop if you want to change it to a custom one make sure you have an HDR file exr won't work directag your custom hdri into the folder after this you can simply drag and drop it to make the change if your reflection doesn't match with the hdri backdrop select your Skylight change the source type to cube map and drag your hdri into it the Skylight is now set for sunlight it's essentially the directional light align its rotation to match your HD and you are good to go if you want to add light or God RS you will need the exponential height fork and enable volumetric fork with the scatter during distribution you can adjust the fog visibility based on your camera perspective to intensify the gway effect increase the volumetric scattering intensity of your directional light you might encounter the error message lighting needs to be rebuilt or if not you will probably run into it this means the lighting calculations aren't accurate anymore at least in some places to fix it click build and select build lighting only it will take a few seconds or maybe one or 2 minutes depending on your scene and another common error message you might see is texture streaming pool over budget type the following in the command line r. streaming. poool size space and a number for example 3,000 to get rid of this issue but this depends on your Hardware there's a way to change this permanently but I prefer to have control over it every time I open onwheel lastly let's look at the postprocess volume to get access to bloom lens flare death of field color correction and more we can also turn off auto exposure if you want to under exposure set the Min and max value to the same for instance 0.25 depending on your desired exposure start by selecting Bloom and increasing the intensity slightly adjust the threshold to affect only the light and not the environment this is also why creating an emissive material is crucial enable lens layer and death of field also consider motion blower for animations under Global enable contrast to achieve a similar effect to blenders contrast presets there's so much more you can do in unreel from lens Distortion camera shake a bunch of filters and other options it's just too much to cover in this video remember to add the level sequence to your scene if you are rendering an animation and drag your created C camera actor into it position the camera create key frames by clicking the dot like you used in blender set another point on the timeline move the camera and create another key frame now open the render queue and there you can add and tweak your render settings like resolution frame rate anti lasing console variables file format output directory and more just play around and if you're done save your settings to a preset and hit render and that's pretty much it if I missed something or you encounter issues let me know and I will do my best to help you for my testing so far unhe Engine 5 is definitely worth considering for rendering your projects especially for animations for still images it might not pay off unless you prefer unws look over blenders but for animations it's a game changer my three back room projects were R out with Cycles Eevee and un engine 5.3 the first one I had to render with Cycles with an average frame render time of about 20 seconds the quality is visibly lower and it's still took 5 days to render all 12,000 frames the second one rendered with EV had an average frame render time of 6 seconds along with one or 2 hours light and reflection baking the entire animation was done in single day and a few hours and the third one when at an unhee engine had less than one second per frame and the whole animation was completed in 2 hours with additional 3 hours spent figuring out how to set up my blender project in unreal and resolving all the issues I've covered in this video it's amazing how quickly unreal delivers while maintaining quality comparable to Cycles moreover it offers buil-in features that enhance your final render features you might need several add-ons or other software for in blender don't get me wrong blender is still fantastic and has its strength but to maximize quality and performance combining the power of both software is the way to go I mean why you should wait days or even weeks if you can get the equivalent result in few hours have you had experience with blender and unwe share your thoughts and experience in the comments below so we can all learn and grow together thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: David Kohlmann

Views: 293,614

Keywords: UE5, rendertime, improve, animations

Id: ehBaUqkPMOI

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023