Unreal Engine for renders?

#1

Greetings All,
I plan to learn rendering outside of mental ray and this came into my mind.
Can Unreal Engine bear the fight against industry standard engines like vray, renderman or arnold? (I understand an engine worths as much as the artist behind it, I’m asking if it is possible now). If so, how do I use it to render only instead of developing a game (currenty I can use it for only that).
Lastly, UE renders using GPU as far as I reckon? I have a medium end laptop that takes forever to render with mental ray.
Thanks in advance.

#2

UE4(Unity/Cryengine/etc) and Vray/Arnold/MR/etc are completely different beasts.

The former being real-time render engines, the latter being ‘offline’ or pre-calculated rendererers.

UE4/etc is rendering 60-odd frames per second whereas Vray/etc can take anywhere from a minute to a week for a single frame.

A CPU-based offline renderer could be using dozens of render threads(cores) and over 100 gigs of ram, whilst the real-time engine relies on the power of the GPU. Although there are many, many options available these days for non ‘game engine’ GPU renderers.

Everything in a real-time renderer is highly geared towards optimisation to increase(or not decrease) frame count whereas the offline renderers are optimised to decrease render-time.

This is obviously a simplification as to the actual nuts and bolts of what’s happening behind the scenes of the renderer, but both disciplines can potentially have vastly different pipelines/workflow. For example: you could throw a multi-million poly asset with a 50 tile UDIM material/map at Vray and render it, but in UE4 you never could. You would be limited by triangle/vertex count and texture resolution.

Everything from how you model assets to how you lay out UVs to the materials/shaders/maps you use is affected. If you intend to use UE4 to render from, you really need to learn all the latest game-related workflows/tech in order to squeeze the best from it.

It really depends what you intend to render. There is no ‘render’ button, so to speak, in a real-time engine; you compile the scene(level) and the engine runs.

Having said all that, modern engines like UE4 are pretty incredible in what they can now achieve as the tech has really come along in the last few years. UE4 is now free and a pretty amazing piece of software. It’s capable of stunning results for a real-time engine. And is also a lot more user-friendly compared to its predecessor UDK

#3

Thanks for you time, mate.
This cleared up a lot of dark spots. In UE I compile the scene and be happy with what I got so to speak then. And it is free and fast, that is why I asked :smiley:
As for others, I downloaded RenderMan because it is made free for educational purposes. It remains to be seen if I can muster my GPU to render but as you said, mainly CPU :confused:
All the help appreciated.