Rendering a Porsche 918 Spyder in Unreal Engine 5.5: Key Steps Breakdown

When it comes to 3D rendering, bringing a scene to life requires a blend of software expertise, lighting knowledge, and photography techniques. Recently, I embarked on a personal project to explore the rendering process in Unreal Engine 5.5 by creating a detailed scene featuring a car and its environment. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through my workflow and share some tips that might help you in your own 3D rendering journey.

Finding and Preparing a 3D Model. The foundation of any great render is a high-quality 3D model. After searching the internet for a suitable car model, I stumbled upon a stunning Porsche 918 Spyder on the Sketchfab website. The model’s level of detail and accuracy was perfect for my project. Once downloaded, I imported it into Maya to add the 3D brand name (“PORSCHE – 918 Spyder”). Finding the right fonts was a challenge. For “PORSCHE,” I found a font that matched perfectly, but for “918 Spyder,” I had to create an SVG file from a high-contrast black-and-white image in Photoshop and then model it in 3D using Maya. I also removed all parts that could be duplicated later in Unreal Engine to streamline the process.

Lighting the Scene with an HDRI Backdrop. Lighting and environment are crucial for creating realistic renders. For this project, I used an HDRI Cubemap from Poly Haven. The HDRI served as both the background and the skylight source, capturing the subtle nuances of real-world lighting and reflecting them on the car’s surface. I also added a bluish color to the skylight, giving the scene a silent atmosphere.

Experimenting with Substrate Materials. One of the most exciting aspects of this project was experimenting with Substrate materials in Unreal Engine 5.5. Although still an experimental feature, I found Substrate materials to be more flexible and powerful than the legacy material system. They allowed me to have greater control over the surface properties of the Porsche car paint, such as reflections, roughness, and flake effects. For those interested in learning about substrate materials, I highly recommend the YouTube channel PolyJam, which provides excellent tutorials on the subject and from which I have learned a lot.

Fine-Tuning Render Settings. To achieve the highest quality output, I used the Path Tracer rendering mode and adjusted several settings in the Movie Render Queue and Cine Camera Actor. Here’s what I did:

• Spatial Sample Count in Anti-Aliasing: I increased this to 4096, which significantly improved the sharpness and clarity of the render while reducing noise.
• Temporal Sample Count in Anti-Aliasing: Since the scene didn’t involve motion blur, I left this setting unchanged.
• Denoiser in Path Tracing of the Cine Camera Actor: I turned this off to preserve as much detail as possible, as denoising can sometimes soften the image.

Unreal Engine 5.5 continues to impress with its capabilities, and I can’t wait to see what future updates will bring to the table. Until then, happy rendering!