How BeamNG Would Look Like With Ray Tracing
19,804I've never done anything like this on my channel, but if the reception is good, I might consider making more of these videos. I've been using Blender inconsistently for the last two years and I'm pretty familiar with the program, but I'm far from being exceptionally good.
Bear in mind that everything you see in this animation was not rendered in real time. I wanted to envision how BeamNG Drive could look like in the future if the developers decided to port the game to a more advanced game engine, such as Unreal Engine 5. I really hope the game looks this good one day, since it would add so much to the whole experience.
Process
Bringing to life an animation of this scale is a pretty complex process, especially with entry level hardware. I started by exporting the extended cab variant of Gavril D-Series using the in game mesh exporter.
In Blender I made all of the vehicle's materials from scratch by using procedural nodes, which gave me the possibility to add surface imperfections without using any image textures, drastically increasing the overall level of detail. I also had to remodel some parts of the vehicle, since their polygon count was too low.
The dunes were also procedurally generated, but I decided to use an image texture for the sand, which I then modified to reduce visible texture tiling. Most of the environment details, such as grass and rocks, were hand placed since Blender's particle engine failed to deliver pleasing results. As for the sky, I used a high resolution HDRI, which I had to modify to be entirely sky since half of the original image represented a quarry.
As for the animations, I used simply key-framed the camera's position and its values, as well as some parts of the vehicle, such as the tailgate and the doors.
Rendering
The animation is made up of twenty four different sequences, all rendered at thirty frames per second at 1080p and then up-scaled to 2160p. I opted for Blender's Physically Based Rendering Engine, called Cycles, for much higher realism. It's technically based on Path Tracing, but Ray Tracing sounds way cooler.
For each sequence, I fine-tuned sample counts and light bounces to render each frame as efficiently as possible. Thanks to de-noising, I was able to bring average single-frame render times down to around one and a half minutes, which is pretty fast considering my computer's specs.
Total render time was around 120 hours, but since I had to plan everything out by myself and create the scene from scratch, it took me around a month to complete. In this period, I also still had to keep making regular videos and study for school, so the conditions were far from optimal.
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