#How to Peter McKinnon in Unreal Engine 5: Antique Product Animation

Real-time product photography/videography rendered and animated in Unreal Engine 5!
This was a fully RTX scene, with ray-tracing Global Illumination and RTX reflections used instead of Lumen and Nanite. Rendered on an RTX 3060.

Inspired by Peter Mckinnon’s product photography videos: https://youtu.be/brm9psWyPes

Loved the vibe of those and wondered if I could try it out in UE5 – turns out – you can! As a side note, I am an industrial designer by training – so product renders and animations are pretty familiar territory – but standard product rendering can often have a tendency to be a little bland – orbit shots and exploded views on plain grey/white backgrounds … it can get quite dull. So it’s always nice to throw a bit of spice and style on those when you can…

As a bonus – this was a chance to fine-tune my RTX skills – it’s shocking how close real-time ray tracing has gotten to actual path-traced lighting. Check out the more detailed comparisons of this scene in both Unreal’s path tracer and with RTX lighting - in some places the differences between the realtime scene and the path-tracer were very difficult to spot.

(Do note that the stills are in 4k, while the path-tracer references were simply screenshots - Unreal's path tracer is very, very slow to render out shots).