Features:
This pack includes a fully functional ambient/bounce lighting system meant as a cheap replacement for point lights. It offers a good cheap way for designers/artists to light out their environments and add some good ambient/bounce lighting using a system that works very much like regular unshadowed point lights without some of the issues point lights bring with them.
Ambient Lights can overlap as many times as needed with zero additional performance costs.
Ambient Lights can be any size and effect extremely large areas or very heavily detailed areas with zero additional costs.
Ambient Lights are fully dynamic and can be updated in real time in game.
Unlike point lights, the ambient lights will not create bright points in reflections.
Built in tools allow designers to automatically replace point light actors with Ambient Lights, automatically copying all settings over.
Ambient Lights also support ambient occlusion and subsurface scattering.
Ambient lights properly occlude and only render while on screen.
Lights provide the ability to toggle to a lower quality light mode when far away making the lights cost around half as much while in the distance.
GI features dynamically capture environment around them as well as color hue settings for full customization.
This upcoming update to the lighting system is going to be a major one. Previously since these are being rendered through a post process material they would be rendered whether they were on screen or not, now only lights that are on screen will be rendered (Occluded lights will no longer be rendered either). With the new setup this also allowed me to increase the max light probe count per level to be basically infinite as its not a limit per level, just a max limit of probes on screen at any given time, which has also been increased to 64 nearby lights, and 64 far. Even though these lights are generally much cheaper than point lights in a lot of situations this update should bring a further massive performance boost!
Update 1.2 (Coming Soon)
Fixed Low Quality Lighting mode to closer match High Quality lighting mode.
No longer a max of 64 light probes per world. Updated system automatically switches in and out new lights only include ones that are both within render distance and on screen to allow for a max of 64 near and 64 far lights on screen at any given time.
Added ability to toggle lights on and off in editor and during gameplay.
Set Light Probe Actor billboards to now scale properly in editor.
Decreased the default AO influence to 1, down from 2.
Optimized High Quality Lighting shader by about 7 percent.
Optimizations:
Refactored entire system to vastly improve overall performance, includes the following changes
Lights only render when on screen.
Lights now have a maximum render distance that can be set by the designer.
Lights now have the ability to automatically toggle down to a lower quality light when a certain distance away from camera, distance can be set by designer. (This makes each distant light probe about half of the regular cost)
Lights now properly occlude and only render when actually visible.
Hoping to release this update sometime later this week/next weekend. Just needs a bit of testing then should be good to go!
Interesting system! Are those probes analyzing the nearby lights to represent the same color at the given location? Or is the color fixed only?
Another question just popped into my head… What about light bleeding? We use a lot of interior scenes with small rooms (some are dark and some are very bright).
The light actors work basically like unshadowed point lights, with the exception that they are much cheaper and don’t come with some of the same limitations. Like point lights you can still adjust the color during gameplay using sequencer or matinee and move them/scale them etc however you need but they will not adjust automatically. Also like unshadowed point lights these will cause light bleeding still
So are they actually probes in the sense that they capture the ambient lighting into a cubemap of some sort and project that for actors inside the influence range or are they just lights?
They are just lights. I understand there might be some confusion with the wording I used, I’ll be switching over the name of it to remove the word probe as they aren’t actually probes, but just very cheap replacements for point lights.
Just submitted Update 1.2 to Epic. This is easily the largest update I’ve made to this pack so far and is a vast improvement to how a lot of the systems render/work. Here are the final Patch Notes for this update!
Update 1.2
Fixed Low Quality Lighting mode to closer match High Quality lighting mode.
No longer a max of 64 light probes per world. Updated system automatically switches in and out new lights only include ones that are both within render distance and on screen to allow for a max of 64 near and 64 far lights on screen at any given time.
Added ability to toggle lights on and off in editor and during gameplay.
Set Light Probe Actor billboards to now scale properly in editor.
Decreased the default AO influence to 1, down from 2.
Set the default Light radius to 1000 (Down from 4000) to better match point lights.
Optimizations:
Refactored entire system to vastly improve overall performance, includes the following changes.
Lights only render when on screen.
Lights now have a maximum render distance that can be set by the designer.
Lights now have the ability to automatically toggle down to a lower quality light when a certain distance away from camera, distance can be set by designer. (This makes each distant light probe about half of the regular cost)
Lights now properly occlude and only render when actually visible.
Optimized High Quality Lighting shader by about 7 percent.
Optimized Low Quality Lighting shader by a small amount.
This is a huge update with a lot of major changes being made so if anyone runs into any issues please let me know and I’ll get them fixed asap!
If you notice the lighting has changed at all since the last update it may be due to the defaults changing for both AO Influence, and the light radius. This will not effect you if you had adjusted those values at all but it was a necessary change in the long run. Changing defaults is not something I plan to make a habit of so it should be a one time thing!
I have not yet tried this VR or android but I would assume as long as you are using the deferred renderer it should work. I do not have a way to test either of those myself atm so if you do end up testing it out let me know! It will work perfectly fine on both environments with fully dynamic, or fully static lighting.
Hi I just bought this pack and I am getting severe bleeding through the walls which on normal lights will happen if you turn off cast shadow. When I use a regular light with shadows the room is pitch black so there are no light leaks. In the below scene you can see a room and the lightprobe outside in the corridor. Can you tell me how I can fix this or what I am doing wrong because obviously others must be using this pack for indoor locations and are not having issues.
This is expected behavior. The lighting system does not handle shadows and effectively works exactly like a cheaper version of an unshadowed pointlight.
If you need lights that do not bleed through walls your only real choice is using point lights with cast shadows enabled or decreasing the light radius so it doesn’t extend past walls, this system does not support shadow casting.
You should really make it apparent on the store page that this can’t be used for indoor projects which would be about 50% of all projects that people are working on. Thanks just wasted 22 euro.
If this marketplace item isn’t what you needed/expected you should really request a refund from Epic, I wouldn’t want you to feel like your money has been wasted or taken by something that didn’t do what you expected it to do. It is mentioned several times in the documentation that this works like unshadowed point lights, I’ll be sure to also put a note on this forum page and on the store page that these lights work like unshadowed point lights. The last thing I want is to give people a false impression as to what this system is or isn’t.
New version has been uploaded and should be up on the store soon.
Update 1.4
Increased the in editor limit of light actors from 64 to 256. In game is still limited to 64 but this is not per world as it only counts ones that are being rendered at the time.
New options to disable/enable lighting system globally in game and in editor.
Included a simple testmap to show proper level streaming usage.
