Path Tracer Explained - Unreal Engine's Underrated Tool

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) provides a companion tool to the Ray Tracer that includes a full Path Tracer. This tool is useful to generate reference images called a Ground Truth. The Path Tracer is similar to other offline renderers in how it is used, like V-Ray and Arnold. It works by casting many rays into the scene to gather information about light and color to shade a given pixel. Where ray tracing is great for real-time graphics, path tracing techniques are better for generating an unbiased target result because it's not limited by the number of samples it can use, making it good for comparing against real-time ray tracing features.