I’m just angry because now we are left without ANY solution for unbaked GI. And I’m angry because Epic IS still using it in Fortnite and Paragon, so tell me why they ditched it from UE4? It worked fine until 4.16, now it doesn’t, and doesn’t seem like they will bring it back… So I cannot make animated TV light, animated lamps, or any animated sci-fi glowing materials, no help to light interiors without HOURS or even DAYS of baking lightmaps. Not to mention that making lightmap UVs for UE is a nightmare, since it’s one lighmap per mesh and not per material or UV set, so i have to split meshes to tiny pieces. Also, seams are visible on lightmaps, so it’s yet another obstacle to keep in mind…
Unity did a massive improvements in regards of lighting. They are atlasing the lightmap UV islands into separated lightmap textures, so you can make bigger meshes without splitting it to small pieces. They added the progressive rendering, which is fantastic! The light probes are very cool too, since you can tweak the GI density/precision manually in the scene if you spot some GI bugs. And then finally they implemented the emissive dynamic area lighting I mentioned before.
It has screen space and planar reflections, has HBAO, volumetric lights and shadows are now much better than ever. So it doesn’t miss anything that UE4 doesn’t have. Actually there are things that I wish to have in UE4, like proper root motion and humanoid system, fbx objects hierarchy with proper pivot points, non skinned mesh animation, or reusable between scenes curve/key animation system for any kind of object.
The reason I’m using UE4 are blueprints, integrated AI, best material editor I’ve ever seen and Terrain tolls. There are obviously many many more reasons, like fantastic community, great support and so on, but as an artist, for me bringing the assets to UE4, animating and lighting is a nightmare. Epic should seriously think more about it.