CINEMATIC RENDER RESOURCE

Since beginning my own cinematic projects in Unreal, I have struggled to find a simple and easy way to configure Unreal to give me the best possible images, regardless of frame rate. I wasn't interested in creating a game, so I wasn't interested in frame rates. I was more interested in how many seconds I could render a frame, not how many frames I could render in a single second.​The problem was, Unreal was created to be fast, efficient, and it is a constant balance of quality and speed; tipping the scales in favor of speed. I wanted to tip the scales the other way. ALL the way. It was very difficult, however, to figure out how to go about doing this. There are lots of settings in Unreal, all intended to optimize and increase performance. They all come at the expense of render quality. I needed to track them all down and kill them. But finding them was hard. ​I did many, many Google searches. I found several different reliable resources. Unreal's own documentation provides a lot of examples of how to increase quality. Part of the problem is Unreal is constantly coming out with new updates. This is awesome, but this also means sometimes information is out of date and not helpful or relevant anymore. So, I decided to create a compilation of all the tips and tricks I found. So, here it is. The cinematographers guide to Unreal...or...This isn't a game anymore.

GETTING STARTED IN UNREAL 5

GENERAL NOTE ON LUMEN: Lumen uses a number of caches to achieve real-time performance. While local lighting changes propagate quickly, global lighting changes, like disabling the sun, can take multiple seconds to propagate.


Limitations:

Lumen will not bounce light off landscape geometry!

Nanite does not support two-side geometry.

Nanite does not support transluscent or masked materials.

CONVERTING OLD PROJECTS:

In the Project Settings under Engine > Rendering in the Shadows section, you can set what Shadow Map Method your project supports, whether Virtual Shadow Maps or the conventional Shadow Maps that have been used in previous Unreal Engine releases.

Existing projects will need to opt-in using the project setting, or console variable:
r.Shadow.Virtual.Enable
New projects use Virtual Shadow Maps by default.

DOCUMENTATION

Project Settings also contain other default settings that affect Lumen:Software Ray Tracing Mode provides options for how traces are performed.

Detail Tracing traces against individual mesh's Distance Fields for the highest quality render at a higher performance cost.

Global Tracing traces against the Global Distance Field for the fastest tracing at reduced quality.

Use Hardware Ray Tracing when available uses supported hardware to trace rays against scene geometry and otherwise defaults to Lumen's Software Ray Tracing when those criteria are not met. Support Hardware Ray Tracing is required to update the Hardware Ray Tracing Scene. For Early Access, tens of thousands of instances are supported and performance largely depends on your system hardware, and platform limitations. For example, some platforms recommend fewer than 40k instances and no more than 100k animated vertices. Improvements will be made in future releases.

Support Hardware Ray Tracing enables supported video cards, RHI, and operating systems to trace rays against scene geometry for the highest quality using Ray Tracing features.

Generate Mesh Distance Fields generates a Distance Fields representation for individual Static Meshes, which is needed for Software Ray Tracing in Lumen. It's also used with other dynamic lighting and shadowing methods using distance fields with movable Sky Light and Directional Lights.

TURN it up to 11!

For really high quality, try using these tips:

Set Final Gather Quality and Lumen Reflection Quality to 4. This can be done in your post process volume, under the Global Illumination settings.

To increase texture streaming, use the following command:
r.Streaming.PoolSize = 35000
this will increase to 35000 MB

Increase Distance Field Voxel Density in the Project Settings under Engine>Rendering>Software Ray Tracing
Distance Field Voxel Density .3