"Kitty in Hot Cocoa" (or UE 5.1 Testing of Lumen at 4K)
1Since most of my latest Unreal Engine project have already been converted over to 4.27.1 or 4.27.2, I was bummed to find out that unsurprisingly since UE 5 Early Access was release in July, 2021 with the last update coming in early September that levels created or modified in 4.27 would not show up. To alleviate that I went out to Unreal's Github and downloaded the latest source build (12/7) and created a new UE 5 that could open it. However, it also seems Lumen had some terrible glitches handling lights and particle occlusion that caused it flash-leak out of occluding box. So I went back and creating another build based a later date (12/16) and now I had a whole host of new problems since emissive textures were 10-100 times brighter, and sequencer file kept freezing, requiring me to kill the process. Soooo, I just created new sequencer, sequence, which I wanted to do anyway for a new "Hot Cocoa in VR" trailer video based on some new "friends" to keep you company in the long winter months.
In working with Lumen, I find it very easy but frustrating since even though everything is real-time, many of my material had to be tweaked to behave. It should also be noted that I wanted to do this without any NVIDIA RTX features so I remained on DX-11 so what you see is ALL Lumen and few Nanite meshes.
To render this out, I used both the legacy 'Movie Scene Capture' and 'Render Queue'. The former was used ONLY for rendering audio since sadly 'Movie Scene Capture' still does allow for submixes. The video was rendered using Apple ProRes LT, which is only a 4:2:2 encoder, but at 150Mbps, as well as 3:2 Temporal Super Resolution anti-aliasing to create a 5 GB MOV file that rendered 2 minutes in 45 minutes. I then used FFMPEG to mux the MOV with the stereo audio WAV to create the final MOV file that was used to create this 4K file. Sadly, Unreal has not upgraded Apple ProRes HDR, so this is still in REC-709. And since the goal was to do EVERYTHING in Unreal, exporting a 3700 EXR 4K image files into Adobe Premiere would not allow me to make that claim (I guess I could have brought the image sequence into FFMPG -- maybe next time), and I think it looks pretty good since I had control over all the lighting to prevent a blown out areas thanks to Unreal's new set of monitor tools.
So even though this was more of a study in using Lumen, most of it useless in VR since Lumen & Nanites do not work there. My next test is to see if they omni-capture tool can, that way I can capture 8K images using specially designed capture cinema camera.