I know about the current prototype implementation, but it’s terrible atm
Any news on an official realtime global illumination?
I want ue4 to blow that unity 5 thing away since I don’t like how unity does business (something missing from unity? Buy it on the asset store woo-hoo!), but I’m afraid if ue4 doesn’t have realtime GI by the time unity 5 is out it’ll generate bad press and push more people over to that nickel and diming unity, as opposed to ue4 which gets very frequent updates with major features and developer support.
Enligthen that will be in Unity 5 is far from “real-time”.
Asset setup is complex, GI works only on static objects (only static objects can contribute to GI solver).
LPV is coming along nicely, I would just wait till it get out of experimental phase and is fully implemented.
LPV is lower quality certainly (for now), but doesn’t need any special setup. You just place light and tell it to contribute to GI, and it just works.
Okey just hear me out on this one. We have full source control right? Would it be impossible for someone that knew graphics programming to imploment it by themselves?
As Iniside mentioned LPV is in the expirimental phase at the moment. It is being worked on but as it stands right now it’s going to have bugs and things that need to be addressed. If you look at our UE4 Roadmap you will see that it’s is on there to be iterated and improved monthly. There are some features that may stick around and some that may fall to the way side.
You can also check out the Wiki for more information if you have not done so already. (Link Here)
I’ve seen enlighten implemented in UE4, actually XCom the Beurau, has it. If you want to see UE3 with enlighten, check it out. But it’s not easy, a lot of thinks broke like lighting layers, and you had to work toward it’s strengths, and away from its weaknesses. Which is true with any real-time lighting situation.
But it’s far from “The Answer”. And who knows if it’ll be fully implemented into Unity or Gimped…
Awesome someone mentioned this game
Yes I wish we got UE4 public release w/ Enlighten support or something similar with extra fee or free until you ship kind of deal.
Enlighten is not perfect, but for it’s quality and result it’s incomparable as it’s CHEAP on performance and it is a complete suite of Real-Time GI solution.
It can even be cheaper than lightmass depending on how you set it up (Performance and Memory cost).
You can do a low rez HDR image based environment light on the fly after a precompute while Lightmass can only do a single color that require tons of hours to bake everytime you want to change it.
To top it off, you’ll save tons of memory compared to using baked lightmass lightmaps and most likely save electric bill in building lighting iteration
The lighting result is also very stable as it is a lightmap based system, unlike LPV or VCT at reasonable performance trade.
(I’m going to try UE4 LPV eventually, but I can already guess based on past experience that it’s not going to match proper indirect lighting stability)
Great for outdoor terrain sunlight and perfect for flashlight, but unstable result artifact, bleeding and performance cost will be your worse enemy here.
Enlighten setup isn’t a matter of difficulties, but it takes some understanding of the system paradigm to get used to. It’s less tedious than lightmapping, but has it’s own other problems and require you to rethink the way to prep some mesh which can be problematic.
They’re making a lot of those to be automatic and what hurts me more is that Unity 5 is making all those effort to make it happened even more so with their integration. (Auto Target mesh, Auto Systeming and Progressive precompute).
To be clear, I’m not Geomerics personel.
Having baked indirect lighting is not necessarily a bad thing either, but EPIC should implement GPU based renderer, like Octane render or something for their baked solution. Fast iteration and high quality and cheap for perf since it’s baked.
