Art Gallery
I recently undertook a project to create an art gallery featuring a collection of artworks and historical items, all rendered in Unreal Engine using the relatively new path tracer feature. My goal was to achieve a look that was reminiscent of vintage, grainy photographs. Although I initially experimented with clean, grain-free renders, after some test renders, I found that I preferred the nostalgic, aged effect that the grain introduced.
This project was my first extensive use of Unreal Engine’s path tracing option, and it involved a fair amount of tweaking and fine-tuning of the settings. I’m very pleased with the final outcome though, and the path tracer allowed me to capture finer details and the subtle play of light and shadow, lending the scene a beautifully authentic and atmospheric quality.
For this gallery, I curated a selection of high-quality assets from Evermotion and Poly Haven, along with some custom elements I made in Blender. The combination of these resources and the rendering helped create a realistic and authenic atmosphere that helps to bring the gallery to life.
Tech Details:
The gallery was rendered in Unreal Engine, with color correction and additional effects applied in DaVinci Resolve. Setting up path tracing in Unreal Engine is straightforward, and it significantly goes towards the creation of realistic, high quality images, making it a valuable tool for projects where offline video and image stills are required.
Blurry Image Issues:
The path tracer does have some issues with generating blurry images, and you do have to work with it, adjusting settings, trying renders, before you get to a acceptable render. Although once I had found an optimal quality I was able to just focus on shot composition and rendering out the image. The core of these blurry issues are addressed in this post here on the Epic Games commonuity support website. So if you wish to read further about these and if you come up against such issues yourself this post will be of help!
Final Thought:
Whilst it goes without saying that path tracing produces more realistic, higher quality reflections and shadows adding to an overal higher quality. The difference between path tracing and real time rastered images was not that much in some cases when I tried the different rendering options. The qulity of rastered images with ray tracing has really improved over the last few years, and the time and effort it saves really is making it a viable competitor to using traditional path tracing.