An art gallery of sculptures, paintings and historical pieces, rendered with Unreal Engine's path tracer and graded to feel like vintage, grainy photographs. I started with clean, grain-free renders, but after a few tests I preferred the nostalgic, aged look the grain gave.
This was my first extensive use of the path tracer, and it took a fair amount of tweaking to get right. It was worth it: it captures fine detail and the subtle play of light and shadow, giving the scene an authentic, atmospheric quality.
Assets: a curated selection from Evermotion and Poly Haven, along with custom pieces I made in Blender. Colour correction and additional effects were done in DaVinci Resolve.
Blurry renders: the path tracer can produce blurry images, and it takes some adjusting and test renders to reach an acceptable result. Once I found the right quality settings I could concentrate on composition and rendering — and Epic's community forums cover the causes well if you run into the same problem.
Final thought: path tracing gives more realistic reflections and shadows, but in some shots the difference from real-time rendering with ray tracing was smaller than I expected. Real-time quality has improved so much in recent years that, for the time it saves, it is becoming a real alternative to path tracing.
