Virtual Rain Garden (Moss Terrarium) | UNREAL ENGINE 5 [4K]

Back with these little forest in a bottle terrarium scenes! If you’ve been watching this channel for a while, and this realtime 3D art series in particular, you might have noticed something with the previous rain garden videos - they have no glass - something that, really a lot of terrariums tend to have.
And it’s not that Unreal Engine 5 didn’t have the capability for ray-traced translucency or reflections - its more that they didn’t work well with Nanite-enabled meshes. Ray tracing ends up tracing against the nanite proxy mesh, as opposed to the actual high-poly mesh, so you’d end up with this odd blotchy shadowing. And you can use the basic rasterised translucency, but it can struggle with complex refraction like in this scene.
But then 5.1 dropped this little gem:
“r.RayTracing.Nanite.Mode 1”
This console variable is the answer. It lets you use the full suite of ray tracing features with full resolution Nanite meshes - granted at a slight performance penalty (and with some caveats, like WPO offset not quite working right...).
I don’t know that you’ll be seeing this in next gen games - at least not for a generation or two of graphics cards, but the capability is certainly there!
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Rendered out of Unreal Engine 5.1.1. Using Lumen for global illumination and reflections, RTX ray tracing for translucency and RTX shadows for all the rect lights. Nanite for the meshes and foliage. Simulations were done in Blender using dynamic paint and Mantaflow, then bought into UE5 using Alembic geometry cache.
Some further observations with testing out this scene - Lumen GI doesn’t seem to work when viewed through RTX translucency (through the glass for example) - so for the shots where the camera is outside the tank, I’ve supplemented the GI with old-school point/rect lights to art direct approximate GI.
Hardware: RTX 3060ti and a Ryzen 5800x.
Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound.
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