Goals

We all know the real-time ray tracing is coming soon. Therefore, I wanted to create real-time ray tracing standard assets for experimenting with this feature. But the newest version (4.22.0) of Unreal Engine is still in the preview build. Without help manual, I played a little bit around the ray tracing but got some issues. So these images are still from rasterization rendering.

Real-Time Hard-Surface Assets: Methods

There are mainly 3 methods for making current generation hard-surface assets (real-time). All these methods below can be used with the layered-material pipeline to improve shading qualities (though I didn’t deploy layered-material pipeline in this scene.

Traditional High to Low baking method

Advantages:

Very Stable Suitable for sculpted curvy mesh + industrial software exported mesh

Disadvantages:

Need high poly and topologized low poly mesh Low detail quality when zooming in

Face-weighted normal mesh+normal map painting method

Advantages:

Very Efficient No need for high-poly mesh Detail flexibility (Normal/Height mapping flexibility)

Disadvantages:

Low detail quality when zooming in

Face-weighted normal mesh+advanced decal+POM (Parallax Occlusion Mapping)

Advantages:

No need high-poly mesh Detail flexibility (Normal/Height mapping flexibility) Very high detail quality when zooming in

Disadvantages:

Requires high-end pipeline experience.

In this case, my main aim is real-time ray tracing, and I heard that in the early build, the decals and translucent materials may not be supported, so I took the second method to build this scene.

Working on Geometry

I usually design and create geometry in 3 steps. This is quite normal.