Path Tracing in Unreal: A Guide to High-Quality Rendering
Learn how to enable and configure Path Tracing in Unreal for high-quality panoramas. This guide covers key settings, file naming, quality adjustments, and denoising options.
Video Guide
Path tracing
As great as Lumen and Ray Tracing in Unreal is, there are times where Path Tracing might be the preferred option. Our automated rendering process allows users to render using Unreal’s built in Path Tracing solution with ease.
It is important to note that this is currently an experimental feature due to high specification hardware being required to render this way.
To enable Path Tracing in your panoramas, simply head to the config file in the path shown below.
Once this has been clicked on there a few settings that will need to be adjusted, you will need to disable ’NDisplay Rendering’ and press the ‘+Settings’ button to add in ‘nDisplay Path Tracer’, once this has been done simply click on ‘disable multisample effects’
The next step is to adjust the output file name, this will ensure your panoramas get stitched correctly, head to ‘Output’ in the config file and path the following text into the ‘File Name Format’ field.
Image.nDisplayLit.{frame_number}
The final step is to adjust the quality of your panoramas, you can do this in the ‘Anti-Aliasing’ field, we found settings ‘Spatial Sample Count’ to 1 and increasing the ‘Temporal Sample Count’ resulted in less crashes and faster render times.
The more samples you have, the higher quality the output you will achieve but the render time can greatly increase.
Denoising
Unreal has a built in Denoiser but it can be quite intensive, depending on your scene you might want to toggle this on or off. You can do this by accessing the postprocess volume and clicking on the toggle in the image below. We found at around 4000+ samples there was little to no noise in the panoramas.
Examples
Aside from the obvious lighting changes, the biggest benefit for Path Tracing is how Unreal deals with reflective / transparent surfaces, path tracing allows the user to get highly realistic results in both lighting, reflections and transparency compared to Lumen.