Software:
Unreal Engine 4.25
This post is a summary of the tips given by Epic Games technical-artist Min Oh in his GDC 2017 lecture about improving photo-realism in product visualization, more specifically, how to render high quality surfaces.
I recommend watching the full lecture:
- Render sharper reflections by increasing the Cubemap resolution of reflection captures:
Project Settings > Engine > Rendering > Reflection > Reflection Capture Resolution
* use powers of 2 values i.e. 256, 512, 1024….
- Improve the accuracy of environment lighting by increasing the Cubemap resolution of the Skylight:
* use powers of 2 values i.e. 256, 512, 1024….
- Improve screen space effects accuracy like screen space reflections by setting the engine to compute high precision normals for the GBuffer:
Set Project Settings > Engine > Rendering > Optimizations > GBuffer Format to:
High Precision Normals
- Use a high degree of tessellation (subdivision) for the models pre-import.
Simpy put:
Use high quality models. - Improve the surfaces tangent space accuracy, and as a result also the shading/reflection accuracy by setting the model’s static mesh components to encode high precision tangent basis:
Static Mesh Editor > Details > LOD 0 > Build Settings > Use High Precision Tangent basis
- Creating materials with rich dual specular layers by enabling material clear coat separate normal input:
Project Settings > Engine > Rendering > Materials > Clear Coat Enable Second Normal
Set the material Shading Model to Clear Coat and use a ClearCoatBottomNormal input node to add a normal map for the underlying layer:
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