ART DIRECTION: 

Night scene on a wild planet in which we follow a spaceship in exploration. Creation of a calm mood. This project highlights the composition of clouds (volumetric clouds, Vdb, EasyFog fake clouds, heightfield fog) and work on camera movements. The scene uses nanite, lumen and hardware raytracing (not for shadows). The video editing aims to reveal the first plan created, the "pack shot" of the ruined space station that crashed on this planet a very long time ago.

TECH - DEV:

- Fog and clouds (Vdb, volumetric cloud, easyfog): None optimized choice (to improve)
- Cine camera path (BP_Spline)
- Niagara (spaceship reactors)
- Lumen
- Raytracing
- Nanite (mesh and foliage)
- Spatialized sound
- Legacy Render VS MRQ
- Final color grading: Davinci Resolve

RENDER (Deferred Rendering):

The scene runs in real time at 24fps. I still had problems with MRQ which crashes at the end of the warm up. So I did a real-time rendering with the normal (legacy) rendering engine in UHD (2:35), but this project is also an opportunity for me to see what MRQ can offer. After many tests, crashes and searches on the internet, I understood that MRQ was currently unable to render foliage on a landscape that was too large, which is the case here. The only solution I found is to uncheck "flush foliage" and "flush texture" in the game override. Problem, this generates texture popping (not visible in my renderings) and especially foliage popping at the beginning of each shot. To overcome this other problem, I had to put 120 frames of warm up in the anti-aliasing.

Regarding Niagara, MRQ does not render the effect on the first and last frame of each camera cut, so I had to render the whole project again by checking the "use cameracut for warm up" parameter. However, I had to render two cameras separately by setting them 2 frames of offset (at the beginning and at the end). Also, with Legacy Render, if there are frame drops, my Niagara effects lose their rendering velocity.

Finally, for the audio record (spatialized sounds of the spaceship reactors), in Legacy Render only half of the audio was rendered, and with MRQ the audio track is... Empty. MRQ does not seem to take into account the sounds placed in the scene which are not managed by the sequencer (which therefore only play when you click on "play"). So I had to manually capture the audio of the application with OBS, without timecode of course, what a waste of time and quality!

To conclude, I think MRQ is not currently reliable for a clean pipeline. I hope Epic Games will update it soon.

BEFORE RENDER VARIABLES: t.maxfps = 24, r.Streaming.PoolSize 12000

Difference between rendering in real time (legacy) and movie render queue (not real time, 15s rendering per frame) with my settings:

- Distant mountains crenellated in real time (legacy)
- More lights captured in MRQ, but sometimes the Legacy Render seems more faithful to the basic composition
- I prefer the rendering of Niagara particles with real time Legacy Render!
- Rendering time of MRQ 15s/frame VS ... Real time

ASSETS: Quixel, Mawi, EU markeplace, cgpeer, sketchfab