NVIDIA GameWorks Integration

[Netrve]

I ran this by the VXGI guys, and they said that the main issue delaying the support of reflection captures with VXGI is deciding how to combine the effects. "The way the engine does it for SSR & reflection captures is by lerping the SSR & captures like this: SpecularLighting.rgb = SpecularLighting.rgb * (1 - SSR.a) + SSR.rgb; where SSR.a is roughly the % of SSR samples that were valid. In the case of VXGI specular tracing, we could try and lerp the original SSR/probe solution with the VXGI Specular solution based on the material roughness."

So the plan as I see it is to get a patch pushed out with support along those lines, then people can try other techniques in the shaders and find ways to improve it. No ETA yet, I'm afraid.

--Mike

Thanks for the information Mike, didn't expected that ^^ Nice to get some insight.
I thought VXGI's specular solution was going to replace reflection captures, since I were under the impression that reflection captures only properly work with pre-calculated light of some kind, since the objects within the reflection seemed to lack the dynamic light the actual object received.

[Mike.Skolones]

Thanks for the information Mike, didn't expected that ^^ Nice to get some insight.
I thought VXGI's specular solution was going to replace reflection captures, since I were under the impression that reflection captures only properly work with pre-calculated light of some kind, since the objects within the reflection seemed to lack the dynamic light the actual object received.

It would be great when GI someday replaces reflection captures altogether, but for the near term I think we need to keep options open for combining VXGI will all the tricks we've come to know and love. I think that reflection captures can produce finer resolution reflections than VXGI will be capable of doing on current hardware. That is, VXGI produces reasonable diffuse reflections and decent specular highlights, but if you are looking for a mirror effect, with VXGI you would have to crank up the number of voxels, increasing the cone tracing load dramatically, etc. I might be misinformed on that, but I think that's the case. So I would look to VXGI to replace reflection captures in many circumstances, but not necessarily for mirror-like surfaces.

[Mike.Skolones]

@Mike

How can i change the VxgiMapSize & the VxgiStackLevels to above default values in BaseEngine.ini without getting errors & crashes?

Which graphics card are you using? You might be running out of memory.

[Mike.Skolones]

deliberately ... i use very weak gpu ... the Nvidia Geforce GT 525m ... with 1G ram!

My laptop still has a 330M, but I admit I don't try to run VXGI on it. I think you've found the limit of your hardware.

[Mike.Skolones]

i change the VxgiMapSize to 1024 & VxgiStackLevels to 16 & get this ...

[ATTACH=CONFIG]33011[/ATTACH]

Well, it says right in the message that map size has to be <=256. Beyond that is not supported yet.

[gboxentertainment]

i change the VxgiMapSize to 1024 & VxgiStackLevels to 16 & get this ...

[ATTACH=CONFIG]33011[/ATTACH]

You're already getting 1fps on your gtx525m - isn't that enough to show you've reached your limits?

I don't get what you're trying to prove.
Are you trying to light your gpu on fire?

Also, it clearly shows in the error log that you have set the mapsize outside of the permitted range.

[Graute]

It crashes even with a GTX Titan if try 256 mapsize.

[Netrve]

i change the VxgiMapSize to 256 & VxgiStackLevels to 8 & get this ...

StackSize 7 is the highest I can go so far with my GTX970, but I don't really see any changes. Maybe someone can point out what the stack size does?

PS:But if you really want to set your GPU on fire, try Afterburner and set your clock speed as high as possible and turn off the fan (don't take this sentence serious please ^^)

[Netrve]

what's the functional of r.vxgi.range command exactly ?

It controls the range of VXGI, so a higher range means a bigger area will be indirectly lit.
But it seems to mess up the voxel scaling/cascades (dunno what it's really called) up when you set it too high.

[Semaphore]

Hi Mike,

Flex cloth seems really good from what I have seen in videos and tried in the executable demo. Do you think it can be used for character clothing specially that it seems to handle multiple layers and self collision very well (Imagine a character wearing a jacket, robe or a cape), can we maybe get authoring tools to change existing cloth geometry to flex at some point?

[GalaxyMan2015]

At the moment, special authoring tools are not required. The FLEX cloth assets are just normal static meshes, with a cloth FLEX data asset applied to it. The more finer the geometry, the nicer looking cloth you'll get, the vertex colors are used to define the rigidness of the cloth. all other properties are contained in the FLEX data asset within UE4.

[Chesire]

Perhaps already known issue but I can't get GPU Particles to run stable with VXGI turned on.
The moment I flip the switch off they behave fine.

[Number47]

Hi Mike, I have just compiled the new version of Flex, and I am getting a strange error, where the flex balls do not collide with anything, when opening the Flex Test maps. Are the maps included outdated or am I doing something wrong, I compiled the Substance plugin at the same time, but I don't think that should interfere.

[Mike.Skolones]

Hi Mike, I have just compiled the new version of Flex, and I am getting a strange error, where the flex balls do not collide with anything, when opening the Flex Test maps. Are the maps included outdated or am I doing something wrong, I compiled the Substance plugin at the same time, but I don't think that should interfere.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]33097[/ATTACH]

You need the latest NVIDIA driver, I just updated to 347.88. The new FleX uses CUDA-7, which requires the most recent driver.

[Mike.Skolones]

Hi Mike,

Flex cloth seems really good from what I have seen in videos and tried in the executable demo. Do you think it can be used for character clothing specially that it seems to handle multiple layers and self collision very well (Imagine a character wearing a jacket, robe or a cape), can we maybe get authoring tools to change existing cloth geometry to flex at some point?

For serious character clothing I would choose the clothing pipeline that is native to UE4, which is based on PxCloth (we used to call it 'APEX Clothing'). We are doing some more work on the pipeline and tools now to make the process cleaner and more reliable. The clothing feature offers better control over the cloth material than you would achieve with FleX (animation blending for example), and also runs fast enough on CPU to make console and mobile use practical. FleX cloth would probably work fine for simple cloaks, 'zombie shreds', etc., but it is a GPU-only feature.