Dear Epic,
Deferred rendering is nice. It allows to stay consistent with materials in the scene and have a clean shader pipeline.
However, it has its limits. It is bandwidth hungry, has limited shader support, and doesn’t allow for transparent surfaces (not without an additional forward pass), Sometimes I feel like making my own physically based shaders, with different layers of paint and stuffs, or ditch physical and go toon shading, or write an amazing and transparent ocean shader, but you can’t, because you’re bound to the pipeline.
As such, It would be nice to have some modern version of forward shading, such as Tiled Forward Shading (Forward+ etc), World XZ Forward Shading, or Clustered forward shading (Which really should be there instead of deferred). Either as a complete replacement, an additional pass, or as an option. Hell, even normal shading with access to light data from shaders would be awesome, as long as it is compatible with atmospheric scattering and post processing.
As such, I’d really like for you, guys, to consider a change in the rendering pipeline or at least an addition. Or, at least, give a few pointers on how to override correctly deferred shading in UE4 source code, since it is tightly bound to the engine.
Best Regards,