Guidance with making high quality renders

DustyShinigami

Hi

I figured this would be better under the Unreal section rather than Technical Talk as it does concern Unreal.

One thing I'm still not 100% confident with is creating high quality renders, a bit like these examples:

Again, I may just be overthinking things and discover that I knew how to go about it all along, but I feel I could use some guidance on how best to approach these sorts of presentation renders. My current approach is rendering out assets in Unreal with either a gradient background/scene or by using a Custom Depth Mask so I can remove the black background and composite some images together in Photoshop.

Apart from setting up a good (CAT) rig in Max, and making an interesting dynamic pose, the only main thing I can think of for approaching this is by downloading some free environment from the Unreal Marketplace to use. When it comes to lighting, I'm only familiar/comfortable with the three point lighting setup where I have a white light on one side, a subtle orange light on the other, and a subtle blue light behind. Those renders above don't appear to have that? With Kratos, the lighting in the environment looks to be doing all the work and it looks to be warm/orange.

If anyone's aware of any solid courses/videos that delve into the process with a bit more depth, I'm completely down for following them. Otherwise, I'm eager to read/hear other people's experiences, tips, and advice.

Thanks

Alex_J

their is a channel on youtube I think name is william fauchner that introduces lighting in unreal pretty well.

i think there is just a lot of time and attention given to these characters, from the shaders to the modeling, and then quite a bit of post process touch ups done for promo images like these.

there is a free sample project on unreal marketplace called "rural australia" that includes an .ini file with notes about a lot of the rendering settings.

DustyShinigami

Cool. Thanks for the heads-up. I'll be sure to check out his videos.

And I'll have to check out that render environment and its notes.

Firebert

I've been using Sequencer for exactly this.  With UE5 there are significant improvements with Sequencer and ControlRig.  If you're limited to using UE4, you can still pull off results like this even without setting up raytracing project settings.  Feel free to check out my portfolio link below.  The most recent posts (Cyberfury and Navigation assets) were all rendered in UE4.26 using those aforementioned features.  I do agree with your assesment of finding assets on the UE Marketplace to build an environment to showcase your characters in.  I had the benefit of working on a project with built lighting and a massive 3d asset library, so it did make beauty shots a lot easier.  The benefit of using UE5 in your case will be the lack of lightmap building, saving you a ton of time because of Lumen.  You could still pull it off with a full raytracing setup in UE4 and a chunko 3090+ GPU, or throw on Pathtracing (UE4.27 plus), but UE5's Lumen is absolutely perfect for building a nice character showcase of your work without as much heat radiating from your GPU (the nice face melting variety).  

The path I took was first and foremost understanding how to use Control Rig.  You can download the Control Rig Mannequin from the Learning Tab in the Epic Games Launcher in the Unreal Section.  Alternatively, with UE5, you can download the Lyra Sample Project that includes an improved code base for the Control Rig, IK/FK switching similar to MetaHumans, and much more.  You will need to understand how to retarget skeletons in UE if your skeleton is not based off the UE Mannequin.  The following videos are a bit dated now, but still apply in both engine versions.

https://youtu.be/SIp4vFoU_d8?si=koG1zqvtiXs3AE86

https://www.youtube.com/live/UyCziUcnqxM?si=Jyyfg-yFnAO-BCqL

The next step would be to very comfortable in Sequencer.  It's quite powerful and allows for tremendous flexibility.  This is where you can do turntables and any camera anims, material swaps, character anims, lighting changes, etc. all while spitting out a format that works for your presentation. 

https://youtu.be/Af_6TKJlehQ?si=z4zM5mVuGA2nsifg

The rest of it is all about lighting.  For this I can only suggest practice.  Become comfortable with setting up a skylight using a nice HDR cubemap.  HDRiHaven https://hdri-haven.com/ is a perfect resource for finding wonderful HDR images that can be used just for lighting or included in the background.  Some things I've learned and stuck to along my journey:

• Create lighting for your environment and create a lighting setup for focusing on just the character.  It helps a TON to treat lighting in stages and layer it slowly.  Light the whole scene globally and then focus on your showcase with it's own set of special lights. 
• Avoid using PointLights.  They have their use, but if you want shadows, they're a resource hog and you'll get cut off on how many you can use.  Spotlights are your absolute friend and offer a wide versatility for creating different FX and shadowing.  Best part in Unreal, RMB the SpotLight and Pilot it so you can aim it directly where you want it. 
  
• Lighting Channels FTW.  This will allow you to highlight specific assets in a pinch.  The spot lights only light up assets utilizing lighting channel 1, the environment only responds to lights in lighting channel 0 and the character responds to lights in channels 0 & 1. Programs like Maya have the same feature as Light Linking and I honestly can't remember what the method is called in 3DsMax, but I know it's there.  It's an old method but still widely used today. 
• Exponential Height Fog and Cinematic Cameras.  Utilizing these two features will allow for more photographic control and heightened realism.  You can add a global fog and then specifically adjust individual lighting contributions in the Volumetric Intensity of each light. Focus on learning the cinematic camera controls for Aperture and FOV as these both aid in the final output in different yet intertwined ways.  
• Use Temperature for Color 90% of the time.  If the light needs to be a special color for mood or asset driven purpose (Bright Green Exit Sign), use it, otherwise, stick to temp.  This aids in the realism of your image as we are all subconsciously aware of the color temp from a light source.

Bear in mind, the examples you have shown were all done after all the heavy work had been done.  Be patient with yourself, approach it methodically, and you'll hit your target all while growing in your skillset within Unreal.  Best of luck to you!

DustyShinigami

Firebert said:

I've been using Sequencer for exactly this.  With UE5 there are significant improvements with Sequencer and ControlRig.  If you're limited to using UE4, you can still pull off results like this even without setting up raytracing project settings.  Feel free to check out my portfolio link below.  The most recent posts (Cyberfury and Navigation assets) were all rendered in UE4.26 using those aforementioned features.  I do agree with your assesment of finding assets on the UE Marketplace to build an environment to showcase your characters in.  I had the benefit of working on a project with built lighting and a massive 3d asset library, so it did make beauty shots a lot easier.  The benefit of using UE5 in your case will be the lack of lightmap building, saving you a ton of time because of Lumen.  You could still pull it off with a full raytracing setup in UE4 and a chunko 3090+ GPU, or throw on Pathtracing (UE4.27 plus), but UE5's Lumen is absolutely perfect for building a nice character showcase of your work without as much heat radiating from your GPU (the nice face melting variety).  

The path I took was first and foremost understanding how to use Control Rig.  You can download the Control Rig Mannequin from the Learning Tab in the Epic Games Launcher in the Unreal Section.  Alternatively, with UE5, you can download the Lyra Sample Project that includes an improved code base for the Control Rig, IK/FK switching similar to MetaHumans, and much more.  You will need to understand how to retarget skeletons in UE if your skeleton is not based off the UE Mannequin.  The following videos are a bit dated now, but still apply in both engine versions.

https://youtu.be/SIp4vFoU_d8?si=koG1zqvtiXs3AE86

https://www.youtube.com/live/UyCziUcnqxM?si=Jyyfg-yFnAO-BCqL

The next step would be to very comfortable in Sequencer.  It's quite powerful and allows for tremendous flexibility.  This is where you can do turntables and any camera anims, material swaps, character anims, lighting changes, etc. all while spitting out a format that works for your presentation. 

https://youtu.be/Af_6TKJlehQ?si=z4zM5mVuGA2nsifg

The rest of it is all about lighting.  For this I can only suggest practice.  Become comfortable with setting up a skylight using a nice HDR cubemap.  HDRiHaven https://hdri-haven.com/ is a perfect resource for finding wonderful HDR images that can be used just for lighting or included in the background.  Some things I've learned and stuck to along my journey:

• Create lighting for your environment and create a lighting setup for focusing on just the character.  It helps a TON to treat lighting in stages and layer it slowly.  Light the whole scene globally and then focus on your showcase with it's own set of special lights. 
• Avoid using PointLights.  They have their use, but if you want shadows, they're a resource hog and you'll get cut off on how many you can use.  Spotlights are your absolute friend and offer a wide versatility for creating different FX and shadowing.  Best part in Unreal, RMB the SpotLight and Pilot it so you can aim it directly where you want it. 
  
• Lighting Channels FTW.  This will allow you to highlight specific assets in a pinch.  The spot lights only light up assets utilizing lighting channel 1, the environment only responds to lights in lighting channel 0 and the character responds to lights in channels 0 & 1. Programs like Maya have the same feature as Light Linking and I honestly can't remember what the method is called in 3DsMax, but I know it's there.  It's an old method but still widely used today. 
• Exponential Height Fog and Cinematic Cameras.  Utilizing these two features will allow for more photographic control and heightened realism.  You can add a global fog and then specifically adjust individual lighting contributions in the Volumetric Intensity of each light. Focus on learning the cinematic camera controls for Aperture and FOV as these both aid in the final output in different yet intertwined ways.  
• Use Temperature for Color 90% of the time.  If the light needs to be a special color for mood or asset driven purpose (Bright Green Exit Sign), use it, otherwise, stick to temp.  This aids in the realism of your image as we are all subconsciously aware of the color temp from a light source.

Bear in mind, the examples you have shown were all done after all the heavy work had been done.  Be patient with yourself, approach it methodically, and you'll hit your target all while growing in your skillset within Unreal.  Best of luck to you!

Awesome. Thank you so much for the insights and advice. I'll come back to this and go over it again when the time comes. I'll probably have some additional questions by that point, too. I'm familiar with HDRIHaven, too. And I've used Sequencer a bit, though not much. I tend to rig my own characters first in Max as well.