LogInWilliam Faucher is Canadian born and raised, and has been doing 3D Art for games, archviz, commercials, and film for over a decade. His professional work includes Marvel's Black Panther, HBO's Watchmen. He currently makes educational content on YouTube, is a Mentor at CGSpectrum, and consults with studios to develop Unreal-based pipelines for production.
This tutorial covers the basics of the Path Tracer, what it is, how it works, how to enable it correctly in your project.
With the release of the Unreal Engine 4.27 update, artists working in virtual production have been excited to try it out. While Unreal Engine 5 is the hot new thing right now, people working on larger productions will still be working in UE4 for the next year or so at the very least. One of the new features is the major update to the Path Tracer.
This is a hardware-accelerated rendering mode that continuously, and progressively samples pixels of an image. It provides results that are faithful to reality, and is completely physically accurate because it calculates lighting the same way light behaves in real life. Those of you who are familiar with Arnold, V-Ray, or Blender’s Cycles, will know exactly what the Path Tracer is.
William told us why it is crucial to have a look at the updated Path Tracer: "Path Tracer was available in previous versions, but was so limited in its feature set that most people never gave it a second glance. But now, most of those missing features are completely supported, and suddenly makes Unreal even more powerful than before".
William starts the video discussing the basics of Path Tracer, then continues to explain each and every one of its settings, followed by changes to how some lights and new materials work, its limitations, render comparisons, and finally, setting up the Movie Render Queue to output extremely high-quality renders with the Path Tracer.
You can check out more videos and tutorials of William Faucher here. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
Winter Environment is a Unity package ready to be used with Unity Engine. Contains additional shaders with which you can adjust the snow amount on trees, grass and props.