Here are some screens of a conversion I’m working on for study purposes. It’s an Evermotion Archinterior (29). You can find and buy it here: http://www.evermotion.org/
Next step is to manually adjust the Unwrap UVW on the walls to get rid of some lightmap leaks.
I’m also testing Nvidia VXGI on this scene to have an idea on how it performs with interior archviz. It’s a pretty heavy tech, but I see it as a great dynamic GI option in the near future.
Lightmaps: No geometry optimization, most of the work here is to get the materials right. Lightmass quality is set to 10, 100 bounces, scale 0.7 and smoothness 0.7
VXGI tests: This is a quick test with almost no optimizations. VXGI is on for almost all the lights (just one of the table group has it) and cones amount is 16. Performance is something like 10fps on a GTX780. Resolution is the same of the screenshots. Just the sunlight, two kitchen balcony lamps and one table lamp has shadows on. No voxel reflections, just SSR.
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I’ll keep testing and updating this thread with new results.
Comments, suggestions, critics and questions are all welcome
Very nice quality conversion man! I’m converting Evermotion’s Salk Institute myself. Big exterior project. With vxgi I’m at 30-40 fps with the completed scene. VXGI is hardware accelerated on my gtx 980 tho, I guess it helps. Still tweaking it. Your results are encouraging, keep up the good work.
Yeah, I’m following your VXGI thread. I think exteriors maybe less demanding because distant meshes activates voxelization lods and you also don’t get all the scene surrounded by meshes reflecting light (since there is an open sky). I can get nice performance in simple interiors like those classic square rooms with red and blue walls to test GI effect, but things get slow pretty quickly when you start populating the interior with a lot of evermotion-like models. It would be nice though if someone with a 9xx card could test an interior scene like this one, so we can get an idea on how much the hardware acceleration really helps with VXGI. Let us know if you get the change to test something like this!
Awesome work! First really useful interior comparison between Lightmass and VXGI right?
Are you able to animate the camera in the VXGI version without glitches?
I always get glitches while moving the camera. There is a kind of “banding”, most visible on wall surfaces (plane colors), that changes with camera position. GI also changes depending on camera position due to stuff not being rendered when not in sight (so walls and large objects behind you stop generating GI and it looks like if there was a light being turned off behind you). Is there a specific glitch you are talking about? Just when animating cameras or moving them over viewport also triggers the glitch?
how long does it take to uvw unwrap a whole appartment like that?
I have an exterior wip scene with lightmass and most of my lightmaps are 1024-2048 res, what res are yours? I went lazy mode tho, it’s all flatten mapping in 3ds max.
Well, it took me a weekend at home to convert this scene, something like 16h maybe… Probably half of that time was just to bring the meshes from 3DS to UE4 what includes attaching little models into the same mesh (eg. those books, I like to attach a bunch of them so it’s easier to manage it and also faster to map). A lot of the evermotion models are formed by tinny individual meshes grouped into a single object in 3DS, so there is also the pain of attaching those parts into a single mesh. For the mapping I’m also going for the lazy mode, “flatten by angle” for everything in the scene :p. Then, if something gets too many lightmap artifacts, I return to 3DS to adjust the unwrap manually.
There is only one mesh in that scene with a 2048 res lightmap and that is the floor. It’s not enough yet, It’s a single mesh and I need to subdivide that into three pieces at least to get better lightmap resolution without exploding my rig’s RAM
I don’t use the same lightmap res for everything. I try to maintain everything in the scene with the same lightmap density. To give you an idea, the furniture gets 128-512 and walls get 512-1024.
Seems pretty promising. Does volumetric uv baking mean no uwrapping? Sending a scene off to the cloud and getting movie quality raytraced lightmaps back for production would make for some amazing looking games. I wonder if high quality dynamic GI can be used sparingly on dynamic assets while sampling baked lighting and get the best of both.
Right now (even though it’s a beta) I find it pretty challenging to render flicker-free fly-troughs with VXGI. Even in a completely static scene. There are lots of small glitches with AO, Colorbleed etc. occurring when animating the camera. Moving geometry (trees, curtains etc.) is a total no-go. Really hope to see improvements here. Even if it’s just one bounce, it’s already pretty good so really looking forward to NVIDIA integrating a 2nd bounce and support for reflection probes. Anyways, again my compliments for your work!
I agree with you, it’s not usable for archviz yet… It’s nice to test and play around, have an idea on its potential, then shut it down and go back to lightmap for serious works Maybe for a specific case where realtime lighting is extremely important and has too many variables to be viable with lightmass. But in the stage it is right now, I think we’ll be able to get solid results in less then a year. Lats hope so
The only thing at odds, at least for me, are that all lights are turned on, in a room which is very bright already, and gets a lot daylight. And the lights all look like 60 watt.
The problem is that I didn’t give too much attention to the light intensities, I’ve just applied the same bright material on every single lamp :D. Ambient light is also brighter in my scene than in the original one. I’ll work on that later.
1- how you find and install VXGI? impossible to find or explaination about what to do install on UE4 (474)
2- I need to make exactly same as you, take a scene already made in 3dsmax (evermotion or other, with vray or other rendreing engine) and would like to export for UE4, how to do to import properly the scene with material like you made.
You’ll find all the information you need about how to install and use VXGI here: NVIDIA GameWorks Integration - Asset Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums
The topic is kinda messy, but I really recommend you to take your time to read everything about VXGI after page 6. There is a lot of tricks and bugs you need to be aware of if you want to get some results with this tech right now (it’s not final version).
You need to export your scene to UE4 via FBX files. But there is no way to export the materials, just the textures (diffuse, normal, etc…). I exported just the meshes, then I recreated every single material inside UE4 trying to get similar visuals to the Vray version. There is no easy way for that, unfortunately.
It’s not a material. The fur is made of geometry. A bunch of planes with fur texture spread over the surface with foliage tool, just like grass technique.
Maybe for a specific case where realtime lighting is extremely important and has too many variables to be viable with lightmass. But in the stage it is right now, I think we’ll be able to get solid results in less then a year. Lats hope so 