"Kitty in Hot Cocoa" Unreal 5.1 Lumen Render in 4K HDR (REC. 2100 PQ)
4NOTE: This version uploaded to YouTube using HEVC Rec. 2100 PQ. (10 bits) 1000 nits maximum.
Since 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 as an EXR (Linear 16 bits per color) image sequence with 3:2 Temporal Super Resolution anti-aliasing. This image sequence was brought into Adobe Premiere using the EXR Pro plugin and and set the project up for (203 58% PQ), then adjusted white and black levels to the HDR PQ levels of 1000 nits. For export I chose HEVC at 40 mps Rec. 2100 PQ
Even though this was more of a study in using Lumen & HDR, 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 7K images using specially designed capture cinema camera.
You can download the file used for upload to YouTube to view directly on your HDR monitor: https://1drv.ms/v/s!AjCOOLquXxqngvcdjzwXSieV2DeriA?e=oI6THn