Adding a vehicle to the desert environment I did last week. Again rendered with Unreal but this time I tried to marry Houdini with Unreal. Meaning I exported the vehicle that was simulated with the RBD Car Rig SOP in Houdini as an alembic. And imported into Unreal which was straighforward, fast and easy.
Then I cached my dust sim as vdbs and BAM! Unreal crashed when importing. Tried again, crashed again. Apparently the sim was too heavy for my PC and Unreal to handle. So I increased the voxel size and tried to import again. It worked but my PC was crying at the end with using all the RAM it has and it took around an hour to bring it into Unreal. However Houdini takes a few seconds to show this inside it. So still not that impressed with VDBs in Unreal. In addition you can see that it is still not looking that good. There are some settings and shader values to play around with but I couldn't make it look better. I am not expecting a ray tracer look on the vdbs but this still feels pretty bad to me. That flat look is so disturbing.
After that I imported RBD rocks which worked nice. Nothing heavy. But overall there is a slight motion blur issue in the final renders. Some frames do not have motion blur and sometimes some geos feel like they don't have the right velocity. Not sure why or how that is happening.
Nanite and Lumen are killing it. I rendered this in 4K in around 15 minutes and with all the high res Quixel models Unreal doesn't even struggle.
I know that there is also the option to bring things into Unreal as VATs but I am planning to dive into that at another time.
Next up; will try a similar Blender scene and try the latest updated Eevee realtime render engine that I've been hearing amazing things about. Let's see if it is easier, faster, more friendly than Unreal.
PC Specs:
i7 9700F 3.0GHz
32GB RAM
RTX 2060
A Drive Through the Desert